Moderator
Joe Carbonara
Editorial Director
Foodservice Equipment & Supplies

Panelist
Tarah Schroeder, FCSI, LEED AP
Vice President
Ricca Design Studios

Tarah brings over 20 years of experience in foodservice, design, visioning, and project oversight to Ricca Design Studios. Tarah promotes the client’s vision, proactively engaging all team members, building trust and consistency, to develop collaboration solutions and innovative designs. She is a good listener, able to elicit key information from the project and client team.

Tarah started her career at Whole Foods Market developing its Rocky Mountain presence and Green Mission program. Now at Ricca Design Studios for over 15 years, she has deep experience leading projects with colleges, universities, schools, hotels, resorts, healthcare, senior dining, and chef-inspired restaurants.

Tarah is a sought-after expert of sustainability in the foodservice industry. She is one of the main authors of the National Association of College and Universities Food Services (NACUFS) Sustainability Guide and has presented numerous speeches on sustainable foodservice design to engineers, architects, and others within the foodservice industry.

Panelist
Joe Schumaker, FCSI
President & CEO
FoodSpace

Joseph Schumaker, FCSI is the founder and CEO of FoodSpace, a foodservice design and management consulting firm with offices in Silicon Valley, CA, Huntsville, AL and headquarters in Eagle, ID. Joe is a chef turned consultant and has an extensive background in catering operations, workplace amenities and design. His guest-oriented and innovative approach delves into the inner workings of foodservice operations to develop solutions that deliver FoodSpaces that matter.

Panelist
Richard Young
Director of Outreach
Frontier Energy Food Service Technology Center

Richard is the Director of Outreach at the Frontier Energy Food Service Technology Center (FSTC), an unbiased, commercial foodservice, research-and-training facility.

Trained as an electrical engineer, Richard started his career in alternative energy, changing from energy-generation to energy-efficiency when he joined the FSTC research team over 35 years ago. He is a contributor to the USGBC’s LEED rating system and the EPA’s ENERGY STAR program. Richard has lectured at UC Berkeley and UC Davis and taught a food service sustainability class at Diablo Valley College. Richard is a former member of the National Restaurant Association’s Conserve Advisory Council and is a past Fellow of the Hobart Center for Foodservice Sustainability. Richard is currently an advisor to the Mission College culinary education program and the Worldchefs Sustainability Education for Culinary Professionals program.

Richard focuses his efforts on translating Frontier Energy’s 36 years of foodservice research into practical information. He has created and delivered over 1,500 presentations and classes during the last 30 years and authored numerous research reports and articles in magazines, newsletters, and on the web. He is also the creator and author of the online Foodservice Energy Efficiency Expert (Fe3) training and certification program.