Podcast

Transcript

Joshua Miller

Today, we welcome Chef Chris Galarza. He is an entrepreneur, author, public speaker, including on international stages, and podcaster. Renowned for his work in kitchen electrification as one of the founders and culinary sustainability consultant for Forward Dining Solutions, LLC, it is the first firm dedicated exclusively to creating sustainable and efficient commercial kitchens. Chef Chris has worked on notable projects such as for Microsoft and Chatham University's Eden Hall campus. Not only is it the world's first fully self-sustained university, it is also where he got to embark on a construction journey of one of the country's first all-electric commercial kitchens. Chef Chris, thank you, welcome, and so glad to have you here on this podcast episode with me. It feel like it's been forever since we last seen each other in culinary school.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza

Yeah. Well, thank you for, thank you for having me here. And yeah, it's been, it's been over a decade since we last saw each other. So I want to you know on this podcast, first of all, I must congratulate you on all the success you've seen. And I'm really looking forward to digging in and talking to your audience.

Joshua Miller 

Thank you, thank you, I appreciate it. So let's just start off, let the audience get to know you a little bit better. So why don't you walk us through your journey and how it led to you and your career as a chef to start out.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza

Yeah, well first and foremost, I started my career as a youngling. I started off in restaurants in Florida and things like that. Eventually, I decided I want to go to culinary school and as someone who loves cold weather, I decided to apply to every culinary school I could think of that got snow. And I decided I was just gonna let fate take me and the very first school that called me, I didn't care what it was, I was gonna go.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

So Art Institute of Pittsburgh called first, I signed up. The second school that called was actually the French Culinary Institute of New York, where Bobby Flay went. And I was like, sorry, already taken for the Art Institute. But it was an experience, and I got to work with a lot of great folks from there. I went to the Greenbrier where I worked for Certified Master Chefs and several culinary Olympians. Came back, ran a bunch of places here in Pittsburgh .

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Eventually landed myself at Chatham University, where we got to build this incredible campus. I mean this campus, you know, as you mentioned, is the world's first fully self-sustaining university campus set on almost 400 acres. I had my own fish, I had my own maple syrup, honey, my own farm, like my own orchard, anything I wanted we could just grow. And we would do fun things like growing popcorn and doing all these different things. So it was really

Really cool to experiment and yeah I did a lot of things there. I often joke like I got the chance to work with Olympians and Master Chefs but that was the coolest job. From there how I got into consulting was simply I got a call from Microsoft and they were thinking about making this transition but they weren't quite sure you know they had factions within their ranks that were saying yes we have to do this others that were saying absolutely not we can't possibly sustain that because

You can't cook good food without gas and all these things. So they called me and said, hey, you don't work for us. You're an unbiased source. You've had experience in both. What do you think? And after we talked for about an hour.

I thought that was it. And that was September of 2018. I remember Tuesday after Thanksgiving of that same year, we came back from break. I was working at Chatham still and then.

I got a call from the engineer who was like, hey, I don't know what you did, but for the last three years, we've been trying to do this and one hour conversation with you and they're on board. So thank you for helping us do that. Would you like to do this for other clients? So which I said, I thought consulting was what you do when you retire, but I guess not. So I went ahead and said, yes, let's do it. So we started talking to the clients because I was trying to figure out what my role is. How do I even talk about these things? And then Microsoft asked me to join the project to which I had to start my own company to do so.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

They couldn't just pay me as an individual. So that's how Forward Dining Solutions started. Was not by choice, it was by demand. So after that, I got my LLC paperwork in June of 2019, signed my contract August of 2019, and as we all know, the pandemic hit and everything shut down. Which honestly was the perfect opportunity for me to really sit down and figure out what I wanted to do. Because FDS was always gonna be a back burner thing because I had a day job. I really loved my job.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

It was a chef's playground. I had everything I wanted and it was amazing. But I decided that I wanted to help give back to an industry that's given me everything. And I figured this is my way to do it. This is some way that I can help the industry understand what this is, what this could mean. For everyone that works in the back of the house, for everyone that works in the front of the house even as well.

And I decided to go in full force. So I left Chatham November of 2020. January 21, I started full time at Forward Dining Solutions and never looked back. And it's been a lot of ups, a lot of downs. It's been a struggle. But it was, and so far, has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.

Joshua Miller 

Nice, I love it. So you did the exact opposite. I wanted to go away from the snow, but I keep going further north. I went from Ohio to Pittsburgh and then Now New York, but uh, it's all good. It's each your own, right? Everyone gotta have people that love both, right?

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Ha ha ha!

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Yeah, I love the snow. You guys can keep the humidity and the heat, just not for me.

Joshua Miller

Nice, Nice. So in terms of you becoming a consultant and opening the door with Forward Dining Solutions, that obviously brings you into the playground of kitchen electrification and that's a hot topic today and there's some people that are for it, some people that are against it. What would you give first off for those that are aspiring in the possibility of switching over from gas to electric?

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Yeah, that's a good question. This, first off, this has become quite the topic of conversation this year specifically. For those who are thinking about switching, just the cliff notes, what you would see immediately is your kitchen will be cooler, right? There was a study that was done by ASHRAE that tested over 100 different kitchens in all different manner of climate zones, and they found that kitchens are hot. Shocker. They found the only time a kitchen was comfortable

is when they were prepping or cleaning. When you were cooking, you couldn't do that. You couldn't be comfortable because there's no amount of exhaust that's going to help you exhaust out that radiant heat that's stuck in there. So in order to do that is to eliminate the radiant sources of heat, i.e. electrification. So your kitchen will get cooler. You'd notice that cleanup time would be less. You'd probably on average about 30 minutes. So imagine the savings 30 minutes per employee, per shift, per day, per week, per quarter. It's the savings adds up.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

It's easier to clean so there's no you don't need harmful degreasers to clean it. It's hot soapy water you're done. So you're seeing a reduction in the temperature of your space which means you're saving on electricity because you're not running your air conditioner as hard. You're saving on labor, you're saving on chemical, you're saving on water consumption and also you're able to increase your productivity because your throughput is going to be increased. You know there are those analysis that saw that 70.9 pounds of food per hour was being what could be created with induction versus 38.6 pounds per hour with gas. So now the productivity of your staff is increased. So they're comfortable, they're happier, they're out faster. And that means that you can now, you can reinvest all that back into your space, back into your employees, back into your business, and you can do a lot more. So it's really going to open up a world of possibilities because you are now able to really do a lot more with your business.

Joshua Miller

Wow. And you know, it's crazy. So, you know, I've heard years ago that commercial kitchens in terms of like footprint against any other industry square foot by square foot, it has the most condensed amount of utilities compared to pretty much most other industries out there, right? Just the amount of gas, electricity, you have all this equipment, the hoods running, you have HVAC, you have, you know, all kinds of waste lines, incoming water.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza

Yeah. The numbers behind that, the numbers behind that is that the average energy use intensity or EUI of a commercial building, like an office building, is about 30. When you include a commercial kitchen, it has an average EUI of 325. Now the energy use of that building goes up tenfold, just by including a kitchen. Yeah.

Joshua Miller 

Wow. Wow, I didn't know that. That's a great, great statistic to hear about. So, I mean, this podcast is, it's gearing towards college, university dining programs, but however, I was on a webinar that you were on here a couple weeks ago, and surprisingly, and kind of not surprising, even K-12 schools are apparently really, really looking into the possibility of going all electric. Tell me a little bit about that.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Oh yeah. Yeah. So K-12 has been, pardon the pun, has been remarkable to see the support that we've gotten from them. So we've done a bunch of webinars like last year, for example, we did three with the state of Pennsylvania. One was for nonprofits, one was for higher ed, and one was for K through 12. The nonprofit and higher ed probably had about 30 people show up, two each. That's great.

the one with K-12 was 130. So huge jump. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people are realizing that, one, schools don't have a lot of money. So any opportunity they get to save money is gonna be important for their operating budget. But two is that they understand that children have a higher base rate of breathing, which is why they're more susceptible to asthma and things like that.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza

and two, they want to take care of the kids, right? So you are able to, by eliminating those sources, you know, fossil fuels, you're able to reduce the carb, not just the carbon emissions of your building, but you're also able to reduce the amount of NOx, the amount of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, soot, smoke, all these things that are in the air. And folks may think, yeah, but you got a big system on top, like how's that possibly gonna work?

if you can smell food, aromas, that just means that there's things escaping that hood, correct? So it's fair to say that there are also other particulates that are escaping, which means that what the people in the kitchen smell are breathing in, the students are breathing in. And there was a recent study done by the Albert Einstein School of Medicine last December, which we're coming up on a year on.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza

Basically what they did was they took 50 years worth of medical studies and saw that there was a population attributable fraction, which means that they can, with a reasonable degree, conclude that 12.7% of children who have asthma today can attribute it to gas stoves. So that means about 650,000 children in America alive right now in this country can say have asthma because of this gas stove. And a Baltimore study, I think it was in 2015, showed that black and brown children, our communities, are eight times more likely to die from asthma. So it's no longer just, you know, hey, gas or electric, which is cool. No, this is an equity issue, this is a health issue, this is a big deal, especially in our K-12 schools.

Joshua Miller

Wow, that is powerful, powerful. And speaking from someone, I had really, really bad asthma growing up and it is definitely, yeah, it's no joke. I think I've been able to grow out of it as an adult for the most part, other than exercise. I just use an inhaler before that, but it's not anything to play with. I just remember going through school and all the teachers would try to help other students understand how those with asthma were feeling. And I can't remember, there was some kind of like move with your hands where they try to make someone that doesn't have asthma try to feel what someone with asthma feels when they're trying to breathe in and out. I gotta look that up. It was some kind of trick that was easy to do but it's definitely no joke nothing to play around with at all.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

I mean, that's honestly really powerful. If you can show what someone else is feeling, like if you can impart that, that just instills empathy. That's amazing. I wish I was taught that. because my mom has asthma. I remember watching her cook dinner, like at night, and then just watching her struggle, and I'm like, what is she doing? Is everything okay? Because I don't know. I don't have asthma. But now I know it's because of what she was breathing.

Joshua Miller 

Yeah, exactly. So what's some of the biggest arguments that you're hearing against cooking with electric commercial kitchen equipment? And how would you combat some of those arguments?

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Yeah.

There's a lot of them, I call them myths. So truth be told, it's just people are coming up with excuses why we shouldn't change. And that is in and of itself kind of ridiculous. That they have to just.

That's a great question. So I've gotten a lot of them. I've compiled a list actually that we put into the William J. Worthen Foundations Building Decarbonization Guide that we helped write. And really what it boils down to is that people are making up excuses as to why they shouldn't change. So we put together like a myth busting section on that. And I've heard a lot of them. None of them are really based in reality. So there was, for example, people are saying you can't saute on induction because once you lift up the pan it's not connected therefore it can't possibly work. And that one I got from while working with a big tech company that

I had to explain to the chef, who's a lot older than I, a lot more experienced, that once you lift up the pan from the flame, the flame doesn't follow the pan. Same principles apply. The pan is just hot. You saute, you put it back down. Right? I've heard things that cooking speeds are exaggerated, but once we go through the figures and facts, we're able to kind of point and say, hey, you know, with this gas stove, it's 30% efficient at best. So you're looking at 10,000 BTUs actually reaching the food.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

This induction you're looking at 15 000 BTUs reaching the food so now we can see there's a lot more energy making it in cook faster but there are some that people just don't that isn't intentional for some and they think that it's going to hurt their traditional ways of cooking so i'm thinking of tandoori ovens or woks right and then we're going to focus on woks because that's the one that's gotten the most attention, woks are induction are induction

Chef Christopher A. Galarza

They have been for some time now. In fact, I have a friend of mine, Rochelle Boucher, who does demonstrations with Martin Yen. Martin Yen's been talking about induction for over a decade, which is incredible in and of itself. But he was saying that every new restaurant in Beijing is all electric. That includes woks. In fact, they're so far beyond the conversation on whether or not this is a viable thing that they're actually coming up with automated woks. So one chef can maintain a line of five woks versus having five chefs.

Right? So, yeah, so you can do a lot of things. So electrification allows us to continue on with our traditional ways of cooking, while also allowing us to be good stewards of the planet. So my mother's Brazilian, four generations ago, my great grandfather left the Amazon rainforest, right? So he left this tribe, my grandmother had recipes. One day I'm going to inherit these recipes from a tribe I don't know the name of of.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza

And I know I'm going to be able to replicate them just fine on induction or whatever it is that we want to do because cooking, as you know, is all about fundamentals and techniques, has nothing to do with your fuel source. So it doesn't matter if you're sauteing on a campfire or sauteing in your gas stove or sauteing on your induction range. A saute is a saute, a braise is a braise. These are fundamentals, right? So, but it'll also, why I say it refines our traditions and allows us to be a resource of the planet is because now that wok can also save you in your commercial kitchen about half a million gallons of water per year just from switching. So now you have additional savings. If any of your listeners are on the West Coast, you know as well as I do that water is as good as gold. So there's a lot of these things that are just honestly I've even heard people be worried about radiation coming off.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

That's how deep down the rabbit hole people can get. So they think that, yeah, so yeah, it's like, you know, the old, like when cell phones were coming out, they were saying it's going to give you cancer. There's been study after study that showed that non-ionizing radiation is not going to kill you, right? It's just not. You're not going to get cancer from any of these things. In fact, I haven't been able to find a study, a reputable study that links cell phones to cancer, let alone induction stoves.

Joshua Miller 

Whaaaaat? That's the first one for me. I have not heard that one. Yeah, yeah, right?

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

So there's a big difference in which we have to educate people on what the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation is. Ionizing radiation has enough oomph to knock out electrons from your cells, from your DNA or whatnot, and that's what causes cancer. That's what can hurt you. Non-ionizing radiation doesn't have that power. And it's been tested at around 3,000 nanoteslas comes off of induction ranges, which sounds like a lot. Sounds like a scary number until you realize that a 2016 study in the UK, when they were trying to figure out, is it safe to live under power lines, found that about 10,000 nanoteslas were being generated from power lines. And they found there's no adverse effects from living underneath the power line, which I've lived in under my entire life. I've lived in the city my entire life. I live under power lines right now. And totally safe. So if it's okay to get way more radiation, way more consistently with the power lines, when you cook your eggs in the morning for five minutes. You're going to be just fine.

Joshua Miller 

That's definitely good to hear. So I don't want anyone getting sick from cooking eggs here. So speaking of five gallons, I have one last question here. There was, I can't remember the exact number, but a commercial induction burner, right, a high powered one, you can boil like a big pot of water in how many minutes is it?

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Right.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

So there's different levels. So actually, I was just, this is fresh in my mind because I was just doing this for a client. So big stock pot, right? You can boil, what is it? Five gallons in like 11 minutes. Yeah, which is wild. No. Nope, no. But like, you know, like we've done demonstrations where we're like actually taking a pot of ice and in like 5- 10 minutes it's melted and boiled.

Joshua Miller 

Wow. Oh, I can't do that on the gas stoves that I've been coming across.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Like it's fast. We've done demonstration where we've taken a saute pan full of ice, dumped the contents out, tossed fresh vegetables in, started saute within seconds. And then the audience doesn't know that when I pull the pan out to show them the cooked vegetables with a hundred dollar bill, underneath that pan. Because again, no radiant sources of heat. We're just using magnets. And I feel like I have to explain how induction works. Induction works by creating an oscillating magnetic wave that excites the molecules within the pan and creates that molecular friction that heats the pan up. So imagine, so think of your microwave at home, you turn it on, microwaves go in, excites the water molecules, the food cooks from the inside out. Similar process. So there's no fire, there's no like radiant sources of heat like you would get from traditional electric stoves. 

It's simply using science to work within the structure of the pan to heat your metal. So you're not gonna get any more pans, any more hot and cold spots, any more big soot build up, no more pans that doesn't sit right on your saute line. It stays flat all the time.

Joshua Miller 

Yeah, I can't tell you the number of warped pans I've come across in my career. Yeah.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Yeah, and how many times sauce just spills out because, hey, it's just not sitting right, right? And the chef doesn't want to buy new pans because they're cheap.

Joshua Miller 

All right, and Chef Chris, I know that I said one last question, but I'm actually going to ask one more. So please do share what is next on the horizon for you and how can people connect with you.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Yeah, good.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Yeah, so there is a lot happening. I can't talk about it all right now, but we're working on a few things that, if all goes well, we'll redefine how we design, build, and operate these commercial kitchens. We're gonna be redefining education around all of this. So there's a lot that we're doing. And if you would, follow me on social media. I'm primarily active on LinkedIn. Just Google my name and you'll find me.

Or search my name on LinkedIn, you'll find me Chef Christopher A. Galarza. We do have a small presence on LinkedIn and Twitter, but we don't, sorry, on Instagram and Twitter, but we don't focus primarily on that. So if you wanna know the latest on what's going on as I announce it, follow me there. And I promise you, what's coming down the pike is going to change everything. This is going to be big and...

We're looking forward to having you all part of the journey.

Joshua Miller 

Nice, awesome, I can't wait. I'll definitely be one of the ones following you and cheering you on in the background, man. Thank you so much. right, done. All right.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Thank you so much.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza

But yeah, if all goes well, the book will be coming out.

Joshua Miller 

Yeah. All right. Well, listen, thank you. This has been great valuable information. I'm hoping that we get some people on board here because like I've been trying to say this electrification is not going to go anywhere. It's here to stick around. It's here to stay. And hopefully we got some more people second guessing and considering this here. But so I do refer to everyone that is involved in the academic food service community. So remarkable academic foods, I call everyone that's a part of it, no matter what capacity, including yourself, you're helping K through 12, you're helping college and universities, we are all what I call RAF ambassadors. So I thank you for joining on this podcast and helping RAF Nation throughout the nation here. And I'll see you next time. And thank you again for your work. I will definitely leave a link so that anyone can find you. This is going to be posted on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Chef Christopher A. Galarza 

Fantastic.

Joshua Miller 

RAF Nation, until next time, we're out.