Richard is the Director at The Food Service Technology Center (FSTC), a publicly funded energy-efficiency research facility operated by Frontier Energy and known to most industry insiders as “fishnick”.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 thirty years ago. He is a contributor to the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College and a member of the College’s Regional Culinary Arts Advisory Board. 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 focuses most of his efforts on translating Frontier Energy’s 31 years of food service research into practical information. He has over 25 years of experience creating and presenting seminars, has authored numerous research reports as well as articles in magazines, newsletters, and on the web and is a contributing author to the food service sustainability blog: Sustainability Beyond the Plate. He is also the author and creator of the online Foodservice Energy Efficiency Expert (Fe3) training and certification program (www.fethree.com).