Bucking The Trend In Baton Rouge

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.…

HR Pickleball

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?  Today there’s a whole industry built around making that whole process way less painful — and my firs…

Down On The Fly Farm

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. I’ve been thinking abo…

Speed Food and Love

Miranda Albarez hosts this edition of Out to Lunch. If there’s one thing that has consistently evolved as society has progressed over the millennia, it’s the speed we do things. Every year, people’s patience grows thinner and attention spans, smaller. And with the invention of these tiny computers…

Bikes and Buses

There’s a particular kind of business story that you can really only tell about Louisiana. It usually starts with somebody who barely had two nickels to rub together, an idea that almost nobody else took seriously, and a lot of stubbornness. It almost never starts in a glass tower in a major metro…

Home Sweet Homes

How many companies do you think are involved in building a single house? Take a guess. Five? Ten? Maybe twenty? Fifty-three. On average, fifty-three different companies touch a single home before anyone moves in — foundation crews, electricians, plumbers, pest control, lighting specialists, insur…

The Don & Susan Show

In Hollywood, power couples from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, icons like  Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, exemplified glamour both on and off the screen. At the pinnacle of their careers, these romantic couples were closely follo…

My Original Plan Was...

There’s a line I keep hearing from people who run small businesses in Baton Rouge. It goes something like: I didn’t plan this. I was doing something else, I saw a gap, and I walked through it. Norisha Kirts Glover has a degree in mass communication and an MPA. She spent years in nonprofit fundrais…

Tech Never Sleeps

Think about the last time you showed your ID. Maybe at the airport, maybe at a bar, maybe somewhere you had to prove you were who you said you were. You pulled out a card. A piece of plastic. Maybe it was a little beat up. Maybe the photo was from ten years ago. There’s a decent chance that if you…

Apps Born In Baton Rouge

I’m Amy Irvin, host of Out to Lunch in Baton Rouge. I was a college student once. A long time ago. And like a lot of college students, I picked some of my classes based on the professor. Word of mouth, mostly. What my friends said. Whether the 8 a.m. course section was worth getting out of bed for …