OUT TO LUNCH finds Baton Rouge Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel combining her hard news journalist skills and food background: conducting business over lunch. Baton Rouge has long had a storied history of politics being conducted over meals, now the Capital Region has an equivalent culinary home for business: Mansur's. Each week Stephanie holds court over lunch at Mansur's and invites members of the Baton Rouge business community to join her. You can also hear the show on WRKF 89.3FM.
It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch
Claim This Podcastby ItsBatonRouge.la
4.7(10 reviews)
388 episodes
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Podcast Overview
OUT TO LUNCH finds Baton Rouge Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel combining her hard news journalist skills and food background: conducting business over lunch. Baton Rouge has long had a storied history of politics being conducted over meals, now the Capital Region has an equivalent culinary home for business: Mansur's. Each week Stephanie holds court over lunch at Mansur's and invites members of the Baton Rouge business community to join her. You can also hear the show on WRKF 89.3FM.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
8/21/2015
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Recent Episodes
June 21, 2026
Bucking The Trend In Baton Rouge
<p>The media industry is having a rough decade. Newspapers are closing and local TV stations are being consolidated by distant owners. The advertising dollars that used to fund local journalism have mostly migrated to platforms that have no particular interest in what’s happening in your neighborhood.</p> <p>But, along with a number of other trends you can probably name, Baton Rouge isn’t following the rules.</p> <p>Brandon Foreman is CEO of <a href="https://familyresourcegroupinc.com/">Family Resource Group</a>, a Baton Rouge company that has been connecting families to this community for over 30 years with its “Parents Magazine.” Today Family Resource Group publishes nine brands across seven markets — from Baton Rouge and New Orleans to Denver, Cincinnati, Birmingham and beyond — and has expanded well beyond print into digital campaigns, podcasts, and technology tools for advertisers.</p> <p>Brandon came to FRG through a somewhat unlikely route. His background is in technology — he ran a software company, a broadband internet provider in New Orleans, and launched several other ventures before arriving at the helm of a media company. He and his wife Amy, who is a publisher, received the 2024 Spaht Scholar Award from the East Baton Rouge Parish Library for their work championing literacy and education.</p> <p>When Brandon’s not running around taking care of business, he’s probably in the air. He’s a licensed pilot, and says the skies are where he does some of his best thinking. </p> <p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/amoreaunow/">André Moreau </a>literally needs no introduction. He's a celebrity. A Baton Rouge native and LSU graduate, Andre started his career as a fundraiser at a university, decided at 27 that wasn’t the right fit, walked into television, and spent the next 40-plus years anchoring the news.</p> <p>Andre was the lead sports anchor at WAFB for years, then left for Columbus, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Diego before coming home to Baton Rouge in 2008. He co-anchored the top-rated newscasts at WAFB with Donna Britt, then spent years as anchor and managing editor at Louisiana Public Broadcasting.</p> <p>Andre has an Emmy, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters, and a Special Achievement Award for his coverage of Louisiana’s coastal crisis. He’s covered hurricanes, earthquakes, Stanley Cup parades, NBA championship parades, presidents, and yes, a pope.</p> <p>He retired from LPB in June 2023. By March 2025 he was back on the air at <a href="https://www.louisianafirstnews.com/author/andre-moreau/">Louisiana First News</a>. He says he missed being plugged in. He missed the scoop. </p> <p>Local media is under real pressure right now. Stations are being bought by companies that have never set foot in Louisiana. Print advertising keeps shrinking. The economic model that paid for local journalism for a century is still being worked out.</p> <p>Yet, here we are in Baton Rouge, bucking the trend. Brandon is betting that if you build media around a community rather than just broadcasting at it — events, partnerships, publications people actually want in their homes — the business will follow. And André continues his 40 years of believing that local news matters to a community. </p> <p>Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at <a href="https://www.mansursontheboulevard.com/main/home">Mansurs on the Boulevard</a>. You can find photos from this show at <a href="https://pod.fo/e/4360c0">itsbatonrouge.com</a>.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p>
June 14, 2026
HR Pickleball
<p>When was the last time you started a new job? Do you remember what the onboarding was like? The paperwork, the benefits forms, the direct deposit setup, the login credentials that didn’t work yet? </p> <p>Today there’s a whole industry built around making that whole process way less painful — and my first guest today runs one of those companies, right here in Baton Rouge.</p> <p>Craig Broome is a Baton Rouge native who thought he was going to law school. He got interested in employment law at LSU and ended up in human resources instead — landing an HR role at a chemical plant during his senior year. That turned into a career, which eventually led him to a Baton Rouge HR and payroll company called ESS. And then in 2016, he partnered with the Sternberg family to launch <a href="https://www.highflyerhr.com/">Highflyer HR</a>.</p> <p>Along the way Craig served in the Marine Corps Reserve from 1994 to 2001 as a heavy machine gunner — which is not a detail you expect from someone who runs a payroll company, but there it is.</p> <p>Highflyer processes payroll for roughly 25,000 employees a week. It serves about 500 clients across 40 states, and has grown from Craig working alone to a 25-person team. The company works with businesses from five employees to over 5,000 — their range includes everything from restaurants and retailers to fire departments and industrial operations. Craig says the goal was never to just sell payroll software. It was to figure out where a business’s people systems were breaking down and fix theme.</p> <p>Another way people connect and gather is over their love of sports. I'm thinking of pickleball. If you haven’t played it yet, you probably know someone who can’t stop talking about it. </p> <p>Xander Triay is the Founder of Baton Rouge’s only pickleball facility - it’s called<a href="https://www.electricpicklebr.com/"> Electric Pickle</a>. </p> <p>Electric Pickle opened in late 2025 with six outdoor pickleball courts. Open play sessions regularly draw 30 to 40 people. The venue welcomes about a thousand visitors a month. The restaurant and bar menu is built around a few signature items, including a roast beef po-boy based on a family recipe and, yes, house-made pickles. </p> <p>Xander grew up on the Northshore, near Fontainebleau State Park, and spent almost ten years with Chick-fil-A — in leadership roles, working on corporate initiatives, traveling the country to help open new locations. His plan was to eventually run his own store. But that path required a lot of travel, and Xander wanted to stay closer to family.</p> <p>His sister is in Baton Rouge, and when developer Dyke Nelson reached out about a new concept coming to Electric Depot in Mid City, Xander was in. </p> <p>Xander will tell you he’s not really a pickleball person — he’s an operations person. But he’s pretty clear about what Electric Pickle is actually for: it’s a neighborhood place that happens to have courts, not a sports facility that happens to have a bar.</p> <p>Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at <a href="https://www.mansursontheboulevard.com/main/home">Mansurs on the Boulevard</a>. You can find photos from this show by<a href="http://albaledomedia.com/"> Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez</a> at <a href="https://pod.fo/e/4306bf">itsbatonrouge.com</a>.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p>
June 7, 2026
Down On The Fly Farm
<p>Here’s a number that I keep coming back to. American restaurants throw away somewhere between 22 and 33 billion pounds of food every year. To put a price tag on it, that’s about $162 billion in food costs that just disappear. That’s before the restaurant makes a single dime.</p> <p>I’ve been thinking about that number since I started putting today’s show together, because both of my guests have something to say about it — just from very different places.</p> <p>My first guest is Kristen Smith. She and her husband Tre started a food truck in the middle of a pandemic, and they’ve been figuring out the food business ever since. Kristen runs the operations side — the compliance, the systems, the strategy. She’s not someone who wastes much. Resources or time.</p> <p>Kristen was born right here in Baton Rouge, grew up partly in Illinois when her dad’s job took the family north for a stretch, and came back to Louisiana through Teach For America in 2014, working in East Feliciana Parish schools. Her husband Tre was in the kitchen — working as executive chef at Little Village Downtown.</p> <p>When the pandemic hit, Tre got laid off. Around that same time, family came through with $20,000 to help them take a shot at the thing they’d always talked about. They drove up to Ohio, bought a food truck, and came home and launched <a href="https://www.tresstreetkitchen.com/">Tre’s Street Kitchen</a> in late 2020. Two weeks in, state restrictions changed again and they had to pivot almost immediately. For months they worked out of grocery store parking lots.</p> <p>Things have changed a lot since then. <a href="https://itsbatonrouge.la/2023/03/01/blitz/">Tre was actually a guest on this show in 2023</a> — so much has happened since, we thought it was worth having Kristen come in and bring us up to date. They’ve done concessions at LSU, a Garth Brooks concert, a sauce line that went from their website to airport retail. And they’re now working toward a brick-and-mortar restaurant and grocery distribution by the end of the year.</p> <p>David Fluker grew up in the insect business — his family runs <a href="https://flukerfarms.com/">Fluker Farms in Port Allen</a>, which has been supplying live insects to the reptile and research markets for decades. So he’s not someone who needed to be talked into bugs. What he needed was the right idea.</p> <p>That came from a friend who showed him fish waste being broken down by black soldier flies. The concept stuck with him for years while he kept working. Eventually, with researchers at Texas A&M and a grad student from South Africa, he launched <a href="https://www.soldierfly.com/">Soldier Fly Technologies </a>in 2015. The company processes organic waste — manure, produce scraps, feed mill byproducts — using black soldier fly larvae that turn all that material into animal feed and agricultural products.</p> <p>What David learned — and a lot of his competitors didn’t — is that growing insects at scale is really an operations problem as much as a biology problem. So Soldier Fly Technologies built its own breeding systems and production software, and now licenses all of that internationally. He has active projects in Mexico, Panama, El Salvador and California. He also helped start the North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture, which works with regulators as the industry gets sorted out.</p> <p>Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at <a href="https://www.mansursontheboulevard.com/main/home">Mansurs on the Boulevard</a>. You can find photos from this show by<a href="http://albaledomedia.com/"> Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez</a> at <a href="https://pod.fo/e/42a49b">itsbatonrouge.com.</a></p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p>
388 total episodes available
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Albert Pellisier
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Meredith Waguespack
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NaQuellar "Nikki" Thompson
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Dr Lynn Duhe
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Chef Barret Meeks
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Abney Harper
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Tessa Holloway
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Levar Robinson
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JT Hackett
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Michael Hackett
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Fritz Embaugh
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Chloe Eick
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