It’s Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

Hosted ByStephanie Riegel

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.

High Performance – Out to Lunch – It’s Baton Rouge

In 2000, an LSU engineering professor named Kevin Kelly got an idea – to build compact, efficient heat exchangers that would help engines perform better. Today, Mezzo is one of the leading companies in the country in the area of micro tube heat exchanger technology, and the company’s products are used in dozens of applications and across industries – from aerospace to oil and gas to, believe it or not, high performance auto racing. It’s not the kind of technology you think of when you think of Louisiana, which is what makes the story of Mezzo such a great one.

kevin kelly

On this edition of Out to Lunch Mezzo co-founder and company President Kevin Kelly tells host Stephanie Riegel about the growth of Mezzo and the market for its products.

Mezzo got its start in the Bon Carre business incubator more than a decade ago. Another impressive Baton Rouge tech company that also started out in an incubator – the LSU business and technology center – is CAP Technologies. The company is providing an invaluable service to big industry and to the environment – it has created an environmentally friendly way of cleaning and coating metals, using electricity and benign electrolytes instead of harsh acids.

eddie daigle

CAP Technologies’ founder and President Eddie Daigle charts the rise of his company from its fascinating genesis during the 6 years he spent working with Russian scientists in what was then the Soviet Union.

As surprising as it might be that Baton Rouge is the home of world leaders in engine and metal performance, you may be equally surprised to discover that we’re also innovators in human performance, thanks to Adrian Cornish, Nathan Roy, and their startup company Apex Resistance and Conditioning. 

nathan roy

Apex co-founder Nathan tells Stephanie about the company’s revolutionary wearable gym: a workout suit that uses the same kind of all-over resistance you encounter in water, on dry land to increase effectiveness of a workout by up to 100% for some muscle groups. And that’s not just a wild claim, that’s the result of year’s study by the LSU Kineseology department.

kevin kelly, stephanie riegel, eddie daigle, nathan roy

Photos on this page taken at Mansur’s on the Boulevard by Katie Barnett.