SPEAKERS

As Vice President and Shareholder at Ricca Design, Tarah is heavily involved in planning, concept, and schematic design, and oversees the design process. Her designs will fit the vision and financial goals of the team, with a focus on green and sustainable approaches to operations. Tarah will work closely with her team during the completion of design and construction documentation, overseeing all project deliverables. She works with in-house quality control personnel to ensure the highest levels of coordination and documentation are delivered.  She is instrumental in keeping the design team on schedule to meet all milestone deliverable dates.

Tarah started her foodservice journey at Whole Foods Market helping to develop their Rocky Mountain presence and Green Mission program.  Now with Ricca for fifteen years, Tarah promotes the client’s vision and is a good listener that is able to elicit key information from the project team.  She proactively engages all team members, building trust and consistency, and sees the big picture to come up with collaborative solutions.

​Tarah is a sought-after expert on 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.

Richard is the Director of Outreach at the Frontier Energy FSTC. 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 34 years ago. He is a contributor to the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating system and the EPA’s ENERGY STAR^® program. He currently focuses most of his efforts on translating Frontier Energy's 35 years of foodservice research into practical information. He has created and delivered over 1,000 presentations and classes on energy efficiency and authored numerous research reports and articles in magazines, newsletters, and web publications. Richard is also the creator and author of the online Foodservice Energy Efficiency Expert (Fe3) training and certification program.