In this Ignite podcast we are pleased to be joined by Tracy Stuckrath, the founder of thrive! meeting and events and the Eating in a Meeting podcast.

After being diagnosed with a food allergy, Tracy changed the trajectory of her career in 2009 to help clients establish best practices, mitigate risk, improve experiences, and increase profit with the food and beverage they serve.

She has produced 150+ podcast episodes, co-authored two books, published over 100 articles and is recognized as a meetings and event industry leader, including Top 25 Women in the Meetings Industry and a Top 500 Event Professionals in North America.

Listen to Tracy as she devolves into how to create safe, sustainable, and inclusive food and beverage events that deliver experiences where everyone feels valued. Every guest matters. Every meal matters.

Speaker 1: Welcome to Ignite, an original podcast from Designsensory Intelligence. This is a podcast for business pros like you. From sports and entertainment to travel and tourism, financial services to economic development and more, we uncover relevant, timely information that will help keep you at the four of consumer behavior understanding. Our host, Chris Wise, the brains behind Ignite, has been deeply committed to research, insights, and innovation for over 30 years. He knows the right questions to ask, and more importantly, what to do with the answers. Get ready for the engaging in-depth conversations with industry leaders that will inspire you to take action and connect with your audience on real human terms. This is Ignite, the spark to light your fire.

Chris Wise: Welcome to Ignite, where we have the opportunity to talk with subject matter experts about important and compelling marketing communications and brand equity issues. Specifically, we delve into incredible tools and disciplines for audience understanding, identification, behaviors, and ways to properly engage them at every touchpoint. Today we are pleased to be joined by Tracy Stuckrath, founder of thrive! meetings & events. Tracy, welcome.

Tracy Stuckrath: Hi Chris, how are you?

Chris Wise: Great. Great. Great. Sun is shining. Fall’s in the air. Yeah, it’s great.

Tracy Stuckrath: I know. I can’t wait to see what the windows open.

Chris Wise: Oh, this would be a good night to do that here. Maybe even a little chilly. Yeah, I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for joining us. While we haven’t known each other too long, we do share some common goals and drive for opening the minds and the hearts of the world toward true inclusivity. You bring a uniquely different perspective to the diversity, equity, and inclusion discussion, an area that is too often overlooked and even the most basic offerings. So first, tell us about yourself. Include what your day to day looks like and go from there.

Tracy Stuckrath: Yeah, so like you said, I’m the founder of thrive! meetings & events. And then I started that 12 years ago because I’m a person with food allergies and I’m also a meeting planner and I couldn’t eat at the 100 plus events that I was planning a year, nor are the events that I was attending. So I decided to start a company. At the time I said I wanted to feed everyone, make the world healthier one event at a time. And over the last 12 years, the backend is to kind of changed or that little thought has kind of changed to be safe, sustainable, and inclusive. And because dietary needs covers that as well, I’ve learned that over the 12 years that it really is about inclusion at the dinner table.
In 2020, when COVID hit and my industry tanked, I needed to do something with my time so I started a Facebook group called Eating at a Meeting. And with that I started doing Facebook Lives, which then turned into the Eating at a Meeting podcast. And so I’ve been doing that now for almost two and a half years now. I got 158 episodes published, which blows my mind.
But my day to day, well I got up and I got on a plane today and flew back to North Carolina, having attended a food allergy conference. But I’m constantly looking for speakers for my podcast. I’m looking for speaking opportunities and consulting opportunities with meeting planners and organizations that host meetings. It doesn’t have to be a convention. It can be your staff meeting, it could be your sales team meeting, it can be the CEO executives having lunch, right? Because when we sit down and break bread together, it’s really important to make sure that everybody feels comfortable and safe at the table.

Chris Wise: Wow. How much do you travel each year?

Tracy Stuckrath: Well, it started to pick up since COVID, but I’d say probably two weeks a month. That’s what I was doing beforehand. And it’s going to conferences, speaking and trying to get out there and spread the word.

Chris Wise: Awesome. Awesome. We do a lot of research with the American adult population, including our commitment to furthering the discipline of enlightened marketing, which captures true inclusivity. You’re passionate about and you champion the cultural shifts of enlightenment engagement, especially as social empathy grows. What do you see happening with venues and organizations on this front in relation to your specific focus?

Tracy Stuckrath: Well, I think it’s not as progressed as what the work that you do as getting individuals into the different venues, but I do see there’s a lot more vegan and vegetarian options at places. Some venues do have some food allergic friendly options for people to eat. So I think it’s starting to grow and get a lot more prevalent. I think the rise in the number of individuals who have different dietary restrictions like food allergies and celiac disease is actually really warranting a lot of venues, whether it’s a sports arena or a hotel convention center to actually add more options, but I think there’s still a lot more growth in that and a lot more opportunity.

Chris Wise: Our business, we do a lot of meetings and events and activations and there’s always food involved. I don’t know if we do a good job in really understanding everything you’re talking about. How do we go about not just at the food provider level, but those of us who are planning like you plan, how do we really instill that thought to be part of our day to day thought process when we are planning these events and making them happen?

Tracy Stuckrath: The first thing to do is just ask. And you’re saying, “Hey, we’re planning a meeting and we want to make sure that we’ve got options for everyone. So can you please share with us any dietary restrictions, dietary needs that you have?” And the way that I like to teach it to meeting organizers is the fact that eating actually as of yesterday or yesterday 14 years ago was the ADA was amended, The Americans with Disabilities Act was amended. And with that, the word eating and breathing and all of our bodily functions were added to the list of major life activities. So when you’re doing an event registration form, especially if you’re going to an offsite venue, you need to make sure that the venue is accessible to everyone that’s attending, whether that’s utilizing a wheelchair or if they have food allergies. So understanding what dietary needs that you have going into planning the menu can actually help you instead of just saying, “Hey Chris, here’s your plate that accommodates your need,” how can you plan the menu so that it is inclusive to everyone across the board?
So if say you have a wheat allergy or a shellfish allergy, can you make the entire event shellfish free? Right? And then that alleviates that accommodation for you while also making the event accessible for everyone. So first thing first is asking the question of your participants. And then the second one is asking the question of your venues and your catering teams of what are your capabilities and what do you know, and how many of your team members have been trained on food allergens, right? So asking that question. But I think the next step then is designing the menus to make sure that they’re free of some of these allergens to make it a moot point in having even to design the menu so that you’re not having to hand out specialty plates and worrying that “Chris, you’re only going to get a carrot because you’ve got a food allergy.”

Chris Wise: I’m only getting a carrot? Okay.

Tracy Stuckrath: You’re only getting a carrot. I know. That doesn’t sound… I mean if you are a rabbit, that would be really good, but…

Chris Wise: Really. What if it’s a situation where you can’t ask? Like for example, when we met, we saw buffet line upon buffet line of all kinds of different offerings, but we also know that we didn’t really necessarily know what any of the ingredients were in many of those cases. So if you’re not able to ask, do you have a best way to deal with that? And I’m thinking in events like that where it is just a lot of buffet offerings or, again, we have activations and we’re on site and people will have no idea who would show up, they just show up. So yeah, help me with that part.

Tracy Stuckrath: Where we met, I mean, I would’ve liked the organization to have asked us the questions in advance and then planned with the hotel to make those accommodations and to really provide better labeling on them. And in some instances, there wasn’t even enough food for everybody that was there. But actually this conference I just attended, I loved the fact that they worked with a hotel and all of the restaurants in the property to offer allergen-friendly options and labeled the different meals and actually provided a separate menu for each one of those hotels or for those restaurant hotels.
But also providing what’s around you in the community. The people don’t have to stay there for lunch. Give them some options to go offsite and find something. I went to Whole Foods and I went to Sweetgreens, I think, and found some meals that were good for me to do that. But on the fly, and as you know with the work that you do, providing accommodations especially under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they do have an obligation to provide a reasonable accommodation. So saying, “Hey, who is somebody in the hotel that you can work with to get a meal?” Giving them a point person and/or somebody that’s with the event to give them a point person to say, “Hey, this is not going to work for me. What can we do on the fly?”

Chris Wise: Uh-huh. Just a whole lot to think about. As you were talking, I was thinking about I was on a webinar panel on Friday and one of the participants is deaf. I’m just thinking if she was deaf and had food allergies, it was hard enough when she goes to hotel. She said the only way to order food is to pick up the phone, which can’t happen for her in a hotel if you want to order room service. So she’d have to go down in her jammies and order food. So if you think of that along with food allergies, the challenges are great. This is, I guess, where my head’s at for everyone to think about. As you look forward in your work, what breakthroughs have you seen? Where’s your hope?

Tracy Stuckrath: My hope is that venues start to label first and foremost. And then I think one of the parts is that they’re scared, right? This is an open environment. We’re cooking all of these different things. But can you create a separate kitchen that produces allergy free from food? And actually, again, at this conference the other day, this graduate student was talking about this school that she redesigned. A couple of questions from the audience is like, “Well, what about the kitchen?” And she didn’t have to do the actual kitchen, but a woman in the audience brought up a really good suggestion. She’s like, “Go to a synagogue and talk to them because they actually have to have two kitchens in the synagogue to make meals that keep the meat and the dairy separate and to look and see how they did that.” And I thought that was really a great way to look at it and to get some inspiration from that.
There are some hotels that have kosher kitchens and the regular non-kosher kitchen that you can do those things with, but I think breakthroughs is a lot of technology. There are a lot of people in the food allergy world and the vegan world that are creating apps to look at an ingredient or look a prepackaged food especially and be able to tell whether it’s got the food in it and to actually share your different dietary restrictions with someone else. My friend Kyle Dine has a company called Equal Eats. He has designed these… Basically, it’s a credit card size card plastic, and he will translate it for you in more than 80 different languages. So if you’re traveling around the world, you can actually show it to the waiter and he’s proof it and reproofed it with common language for the waiters to understand in their own native language.
So some of those breakthrough things I think are really good. I met a woman that’s designing a technology that you can actually put it on the food and it will tell you if your allergen is in it. There’s been a couple of those that have come out and they’re really progressing. But I think the biggest part is labeling. With the hospitality industry right now, we’re short staffed. They could probably say, “Hey, we don’t have the time to do this.” But on the front end, I think spend the time to do that so that it’s already labeled and your diners and your meeting planners can read it without having to go back and forth with lots of questions because you don’t have the time to finalize and customize all these venues.

Chris Wise: Are there lots of people like you that do what you do?

Tracy Stuckrath: No.

Chris Wise: No?

Tracy Stuckrath: No. I wish there were, There’s some companies out there that do some certifications in venues to make sure that they’re dedicated free from experiences. But really teaching the etiquette and the dignity around accommodating food allergies… Actually, I’m going to correct myself. There are a lot of parents that are humongous advocates for their kids and they are fighting for rights in schools. Daycare is my friend. Thomas, his son passed away. The daycare center knew he was allergic to milk and they fed him a, grill cheese sandwich. Now he’s started the Elijah Foundation and he’s actually instituted laws in a couple of states to make sure that daycare centers are trained in food allergies. So that’s progressing, but not in this corporate world.

Chris Wise: How do you multiply yourself?

Tracy Stuckrath: I think I need to talk to Elon Musk or somebody or people who are cloning pigs. I don’t think Elon Musk is doing that, but whoever’s cloning animals for future food. But I actually have an online course called Every Meal Matters and it’s going to relaunch, the next rendition will come out next month, in October 2022. And just educating planners on knowing, right? There’s a lot of behind the scenes. Like you mentioned, there’s behind the scenes with laws, there’s behind the scenes with just accessibility, getting to and from venues and things like that, because food has a humongous part in our world and no one should be excluded from an event because they have to eat a specific way so they don’t die. And we just need to train people.

Chris Wise: So look in the crystal ball of your career, what’s it look like down the road?

Tracy Stuckrath: That I am hired more and more to do DEI food and beverage training and that companies are instituting that into their organizations. I’ve got two clients that I’m working with on that. And that we’ve got more meeting planners, more event organizers. There’s a lot of event organizers that are administrative assistance, that’s a core of their job. And getting them more involved in that and understanding the needs of it. But I think it’s doing a lot more consulting and even more speaking than I do.

Chris Wise: Okay. What could, I’ll say just national chain restaurants or local chains, what could they do to help further the cause or the understanding, if anything? And then, oh, the other question I had, have you had any pushback as it relates to your evangelism?

Tracy Stuckrath: Oh, yeah. All right, we’ll go to the first one first. So every restaurant to be open, you have to get inspected by the health inspector and there have to be people in the back of the house that are ServSafe trained. There is a ServSafe certification that’s outside of that food handler card. Have your staff go through that, front of the house and the back of the house. And to me, get those two groups to together and chat. There’s a big disconnect in a lot of places that, “This is the kitchen and this is the front of the house.” You’re a full team. And to me, your back of the house is no better than the front of your house, because if your servers don’t understand what they’re serving and how… They’re your sales people. They’re your first impression, right? And if they don’t know your restaurant and how you do work, you’re going to lose business.
A couple of statistics on that is that 65% of restaurant owners, and this comes from Gluten-free and Allergic-free Passport, 65% of restaurant owners find that the allergy free and gluten-free market is a profitable market. But 83% of people with dietary restrictions will not go back to a restaurant if they have a bad experience, but 91% of them will come back if they have a great experience. So think about how much more revenue and seats and chairs that you can get especially if you have options for them, because they’re meals, they usually spend a lot less money. And if you have options that meet their needs, they’re going to spend more money and they’re going to come back more often. So that’s restaurant issue.
And then push back on what I do. Yes, is the answer to that. I have been recognized since I started almost every year for the work that I’m doing by the meetings industry and I so appreciate the kudos for that. But it is hard and it’s not an easy task to figure this out. I just want people to walk in people’s shoes. And as you do, understanding how to get into a building, can somebody hear the speaker, right? Or getting into a venue with a wheelchair, can they have early access to that? But it’s also is like the food and beverage.
And so to me, food and beverage is the number one expenditure of an event. And it’s also the thing that’s thought about the least amount because they can check off a box, “Hey, I’m going to order the deli sandwiches today, or I’m going to order the Italian tomorrow.” And that’s all they do and they wait till the last minute to do that because it’s easy, because we just think that it’s there. But there’s got to be so much more thought about food and beverage when you’re ordering, especially now. People want to know where their food comes from. They’re really concerned about their health and there’s a lot of people who could die from what you’re serving if you don’t pay attention.

Chris Wise: What level in organization do you get that pushback? Does it know any bounds? Is it any and all?

Tracy Stuckrath: It’s any and all. Yeah. I think actually chefs want the creativity. They want to have that option. So if you can get to the chef and that chef is willing to chat with you, I think they would love the challenge of creating something that’s free of. And actually this conference I just came back from the Food Allergy Summit from FARE, they made an entire buffet for 500 people that was free of all top nine allergens, which was wheat, soy, dairy, shellfish, fish, tree nuts, peanuts, sesame and egg. The 15 food items on that buffet were free of all of those things. And it was good. It was good. It was delicious food. So it can be done.

Chris Wise: Ah, creativity gets in the way.

Tracy Stuckrath: Exactly. Yes. Creativity. And I think fear does too, Chris.

Chris Wise: Ah, sure.

Tracy Stuckrath: I think fear, like, “I don’t want to harm somebody,” I get that. But just ask some questions. Pick up the telephone and ask some questions. “What can I do? How can I make you feel more comfortable? How can I help you feel safe?” And can you find a little space in your kitchen to do something in a different pot, in different knife, in a cutting board? Things like that.

Chris Wise: Yeah, fear and just lack of understanding is true across all of the inclusivity conversation. It’s people that just either don’t have a sense to open their minds and hearts because they just do what they’ve always done and don’t have to think about it, but it is that lack of openness that gets in the way so often around all of this discussion. Jessie, you were looking forward to this conversation. Do you have any specific questions?

Jessie: I was curious about holidays and getting together with family.

Tracy Stuckrath: Oh, my gosh.

Jessie: I don’t have any food allergies and I know very few people with food allergies just because my family doesn’t have any. How would people bring up that conversation? Thanksgiving comes to mind because there’s lots of nuts involved in the foods at Thanksgiving. Peanut butter is like a holiday flavor. How do you address that?

Tracy Stuckrath: I think, again, it’s just asking the questions because you don’t know. I mean, my friend Jill, she used to go home for Thanksgiving in the holidays and she had been a vegetarian for 25 years and her family put bacon bits on everything. It’s also, and I think this works in the workplace to Jesse, is that you can, “Hey, does anybody want to help plan this meeting? Plan the meals?” Talk to that person who has the food allergies and have them bring a dish or two that meets their needs, but everybody could also eat as well. Maybe put some of the things on the side if you can. I mean you can’t take the pecans out of pecan pie, but also making some labels for some of the things that say, “Hey, this contains nuts.” And also making sure that maybe some of those dishes are on a separate table so that cross contact, because you know, you pick up a spoon and you might put it in to two different dishes at the same time, which drives me bonkers in general, maybe figuring that out.
But also I think it really does come down to asking the questions. A lot of parents have these struggles when they go to grandparents’ house or they go to their cousin’s houses, right? It’s understanding and it’s just they need to share what they need and we need to be open to hearing it.

Jessie: Another question I have. Sensory issues with food. Do you do a lot of work with that? We have a coworker here whose son doesn’t need anything, and it’s all sensory issues.

Tracy Stuckrath: Really?

Jessie: I don’t even how you would address that like a sports stadium.

Chris Wise: So sensory like texture or the smell?

Jessie: Some of it’s texture. Other things is just he will only eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich most days.

Tracy Stuckrath: I mean you can go into stadiums if you’ve got food allergies. You can bring your own food in for that reason, for specific reasons. But it’s a really good question. It’s figuring out what they need and asking, and allowing them to bring in that food. And it’s even sensory of the spaces that you’re having meetings and events. If you’re having a huge banquet and you’ve got all these lights glowing up, what can we do to minimize that? But somebody needs to tell them in advance, right? “Hey, can you tell me about the room? What options do you have?” Or whatever. But that’s a really good question. I’ve not approached that.
But even this past week at this food allergy conference, this little girl… Well, two stories. One server told me this the other night, he’s like, “A kid walked through. He was 19 years old and he had never eaten outside of his house because he was too scared. This was the first meal he’d ever had prepared by somebody besides somebody in his family.” The waiter was blown away. And then another girl who was 14 or 15 had the same thing. And then the chef had to sit down with another little girl who was just scared to death because she had so many allergies and she was so scared to eat food made by somebody besides her mom. And so to me, Jessie, that actually kinds kind of comes into that sensory thing as well because seeing that and not knowing what’s in the food can trigger a lot of emotional impact. So providing labeling of what’s in the food and having conversations or sending out information that they can read or meeting with the chef, I think those can help eliminate some of those sensory things as well.

Jessie: Okay. Thank you.

Chris Wise: You’re welcome.

Jessie: I have one other thought in, we’re also trying to have people in their marketing and advertising to be inclusive, and that’s show everyone. Don’t show the “perfect” person. Show everyone. Bring everyone to the table, both in what is visually seen and the people that are helping put it together in hiring. What you deal with is really an invisible disability of which there are more of those than there are visible disabilities. I’m sitting here trying to think of how do we incorporate that, or can we in our just day to day? Unless it deals specifically with food, I don’t know if we can. But do you have any thoughts around that? That just came to mind in some of the things that we’re trying to move forward.

Tracy Stuckrath: Yeah, that’s a really good question because in an image you can’t really show, “Hey, this person’s got a food allergy,” right? Because I’m not wearing a badge. And I don’t want to wear a badge and I shouldn’t have to wear a badge. It makes me think of people who are blind and you’re showing a picture of an elevator or the braille on a window, right? If you’re in a cafeteria, can you show the labeling on the food so that maybe you’ve used icons or they say it contains gluten or dairy free, things like that? So if you’re in that kind of an environment of a rush, somewhere that their food is there, showing how the food is labeled to me would be a way to incorporate that dietary need into those images.

Chris Wise: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Subtle detail but important.

Tracy Stuckrath: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because you’re looking at signage, thinking at a baseball stadium, right? Or can you do it on the event if you’ve got somebody holding their phone and they’re picking a restaurant, right? Maybe they’ve got it and they’re showing the image of trying to find that restaurant and looking for reviews or how it’s coded, doing something like that. But it would be subtle. Or showing them having a… They’re carrying their EpiPen in their pocket, right? That could potentially be a way to do that. Or their AUVI-Q. There’s a couple of different versions of that. I think the EpiPen is a lot more well known in its look than the AUVI-Q is because it looks more like a credit card and it could hide in a back pocket. But a lot of kids or individuals with food allergies carry fanny packs. So they could have a fanny pack on with their EpiPen coming out of it or something like that.

Chris Wise: So those are the case where you even have to educate producers, executive producers and the likes within that whole world.

Tracy Stuckrath: Mm-hmm.

Chris Wise: Never thought of it before today to that extent in us being a step removed from day to day eating, but it fits nicely into what we’ve been trying to share with people. Tracy, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time, barely getting in the door from an early flight home from Orlando. I do look forward to our journey together in the work we’re doing in true inclusivity. I hope we talk a lot and help a lot of people.

Tracy Stuckrath: I do too, Chris. Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you on this podcast.

Chris Wise: And thank all of you for listening to Ignite, a podcast from Designsensory Intelligence. If you want to know more about the various ways we gain intelligence about audiences and turn that intelligence into solid marketing solutions and how to understand the position your organization holds in the minds and hearts of all people, just send a note to me, Chris Wise. Till next time, stay wise.

Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Ignite, a podcast from Designsensory Intelligence. If you want to learn more, head to designsensoryintel.com. Until next time, continue your pursuit of quenching your unending thirst for intelligent understanding of human consuming behavior.