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LEADERS

OF INDUSTRY These five Louisiana companies are driving economic growth and strengthening communities in very powerful and very different ways. SIMPSON SPORTS ENGINEERING | FRESH MARKET BY PREMIER DYNAMIC GROUP | CRUMP WILSON ARCHITECTS | descote, inc.

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G. Anthony Miller, Chief Operations Officer of St. John the Baptist School System, with Simpson Sports Engineering owner Jesse Simpson, who recently completed turf replacement projects at East St. John and West St. John High Schools with support from Marathon. (Photo by Don Kadair)

SIMPSON SPORTS ENGINEER ING

WHEN INDUSTRY INVESTS IN LOCAL SCHOOLS, SSE CREATES A TRUE HOME FIELD ADVANTAGE

hen people think of industry, they think of pipes and steel, smokestacks and cranes. But ask Jesse Simpson, the owner of Simpson Sports Engineering, about Louisiana’s booming petrochemical and manufacturing sectors, and he thinks about something else: improved recreational facilities for schools that could not otherwise afford to upgrade. A case in point: the recently completed installation of new football fields at East St. John and West St. John High Schools, the result of a partnership between Marathon Petroleum’s Garyville Refinery, the St. John the Baptist Parish school system and Simpson’s Baton Rouge civil engineering firm that specializes in sports facility

construction. For Simpson, who founded the company in 2017, that project exemplifies the ways that manufacturers contribute to Louisiana’s quality of life beyond the jobs they create and the spending they generate for local businesses. “These partnerships are a great example of how the industry Louisiana is known for is giving back to be sure their communities are benefiting in big ways,” Simpson says. Simpson Sports Engineering focuses on athletics site design, project management and bid process consulting.

Top Executive: Jesse Simpson, Owner SIMPSONSPORTSENGINEERING.COM • 225.572.8852

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SSE designs and engineers sports facility projects for schools and colleges like Walker High, Zachary High and McNeese State University, as well as recreation facilities like the Chappapeela Sports Park in Hammond, (Photos courtesy of SSE)

“These partnerships are a great example of how the industry Louisiana is known for is giving back to be sure their communities are benefiting in big ways.” -Jesse Simpson, OWNER, SSE ENGINEERING

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Its client list includes city and parish governments that have driven Louisiana’s sports-tourism boom and, increasingly, public and private high schools and colleges. Recent school projects include a new turf field for Walker High School and a 100-yard indoor football practice pavilion for West Monroe High School. “Structures like the West Monroe pavilion are becoming more common and more necessary, given the attention on heat-related illnesses in high school athletics,” Simpson says. Zachary, Port Allen, East Feliciana Parish, and Brusly are among the Capital Region high schools now competing on playing surfaces SSE has designed and helped to install. While his firm’s reputation for quality and innovation have his services in demand outside of Louisiana, Simpson continues to prioritize

community involvement at home. SSE is active in First Tuesday, an organization supporting roughly a dozen nonprofits around Baton Rouge; the office closes one day a month so staff can volunteer. “It is one of my favorite things we do as a company,” Simpson says. That same throughline — investing in institutions that serve a broader public — is what Simpson credits for the company’s success as it approaches the 10-year mark. “Showing up with consistency has continued to be an integral part of our business growth,” he says. For school systems like St. John the Baptist Parish’s, and for the industrial companies that call those communities home, that consistency is turning into visible results on the ground in the form of firstclass fields that students play on.

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From left, Adam Curole, Operations Director; Grady Verret, Founder & CEO; Emily Bonvillain Rini, Strategic Growth Director; Chef Kevin Calmes, Culinary Director (Photo by Tyler Neil)

F R ES H M A R K E T BY P R E M I E R

FEEDING THE WORKFORCE, RIGHT WHERE THE WORK HAPPENS

t a 24/7 workplace, lunch does not always happen at noon. Employees may have a short break, controlled-access gates to navigate and few practical food options nearby. At manufacturing facilities, industrial sites, offices, and other large workplaces, something as basic as getting a meal can quickly become an operational issue. Employers face the other side of that problem. They want to keep teams close to the job, support multiple shifts and overtime, reduce unnecessary vehicle traffic, and provide quality food without creating another operation for management to run. Fresh Market by Premier was built around that need.

The Thibodaux-based company provides workplace meal solutions for commercial and industrial environments. Its flagship Fresh Market program places chef-prepared meals, snacks and beverages directly inside the workplace, using selfservice technology that can operate 24 hours a day without a permanently staffed point of sale. Fresh Market is only one part of the model. Depending on the facility, Premier can support fullservice cafeterias, permanent or secondary Fresh Markets, pantry and coffee programs, catering, overtime meal programs, temporary markets and hybrid foodservice plans combining several services under one provider. “Every facility is different,” says Premier

Companies Strategic Growth Director Emily Rini. “The workforce, hours, available space and service needs all play a role in determining what the right foodservice program looks like.” Fresh food is still the reason the program works. Fresh Market locations can include chef-prepared entrees, salads, sandwiches, and other meal options, along with a full selection of snacks, healthier choices, beverages, and convenience products. What customers see is the market. Behind it is a larger production, delivery, and field-service operation. Meals move through a managed cold chain and are transported in refrigerated vehicles. Market technology provides sales and inventory

Top Executive: Grady Verret, CEO, Premier Food Group 1600 RIDGEFIELD ROAD, THIBODAUX, LA 70301 • 985.446.0075 • FRESHMARKETBYPREMIER.COM

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Premier deploys 53-foot climate-controlled mobile Fresh Market trailers that can be placed on-site for short-term increases in workforce.

Fresh Markets are stocked with chefprepared meals, snacks and beverages directly inside the workplace.

information, while field operators adjust product mix and service frequency based on actual usage. Some facilities need one market. Others need several. A large workplace campus may require multiple service points, while a location with an existing cafeteria may need 24/7 meal access after the cafeteria closes. Other customers may 1012industryreport.com

Laconte Robertson, Packaging Team Member (Photo by Tyler Neil)

need overtime meals, catering, pantry service, or a combination of programs. Turnarounds, maintenance shutdowns, and major construction projects create a different challenge altogether. A facility’s population can increase dramatically for weeks or months, putting pressure on foodservice programs designed for the normal workforce. For those projects, Premier deploys 53-foot climate-controlled mobile Fresh Market trailers that can be placed on-site, scaled as workforce activity increases, and removed when the project ends. A 2026 maintenance shutdown in Plaquemine put that flexibility to the test. Over 52 active days, a temporary Fresh Market handled 29,924 transactions and sold 70,258 items. Daily volume averaged 575 transactions and reached a peak of 908 in a single day. As activity increased, Premier raised service frequency to five or six visits per week and adjusted inventory using transaction data and field feedback. As the workforce decreased, service and inventory were adjusted with it. The temporary market changed along with the demands of the project rather than requiring the facility to build a permanent solution for a temporary need. The idea behind Fresh Market can be traced to another large workforce event. While feeding cleanup crews following the 2010 BP oil spill, Premier

saw firsthand the need for quality meals that workers could access quickly and take back into the field. That experience helped shape a workplace food program around employees who could not simply leave the jobsite for a traditional meal. Premier already had decades of restaurant, catering and foodservice experience. Fresh Market applied that culinary and operating experience to a different setting: the workplace. The first Fresh Market opened in 2019 at Fletcher Technical Community College, and the program expanded into manufacturing and petrochemical facilities the following year. Since then, the platform has consistently grown. Fresh Market by Premier will have more than 50 locations this year, along with an expanding number of permanent and temporary foodservice programs. “Every new location teaches us something,” Rini says. “The needs aren’t the same from one workplace to another, and that’s helped us continue to improve the program as we’ve grown.” The needs vary by customer, but the objective is consistent: give employees dependable access to quality food where they work. Whether a customer needs a staffed cafeteria, a 24/7 Fresh Market, multiple markets across a large campus, a mobile market supporting a shutdown or a combination of services, Premier can tailor the foodservice program to the facility and its workforce. 10/12 INDUSTRY REPORT • FALL 2026 49

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION Ross Aguilar was named President, USA/CAN of descote, inc. in December 2025. (Photo by Don Kadair)

d e s c o t e, i n c .

A FRENCH MANUFACTURER WITH DEEP LOUISIANA ROOTS USHERS IN A NEW GENERATION OF LEADERSHIP AND GROWTH

n 1984, Jean-Pierre Richer packed his descote

bellows sealed globe valve in a suitcase and set out from his home in Lyon, France, to find customers wherever the world’s most hazardous chemicals were produced. Richer’s travels included Baton Rouge, where he found a ready market for his overseas manufacturing company’s signature product, engineered to manage the flow and pressure of lethal, corrosive fluids that other valves can’t handle. After five years of relying on a local distributor to bring its valves to market, descote established its own North American sales, technical and distribution office in Baton Rouge in 1989. Today it serves roughly 150 U.S. and Canadian companies and more than 200 industrial sites along the Mississippi River corridor and beyond, including Olin Chlor Alkali, Bayer, Marathon Petroleum,

OxyChem, Formosa Plastics and Westlake. “A lot of these clients have quality expectations for these valves because they’re going into highly hazardous and corrosive environments,” says Ross Aguilar, president of descote’s U.S. and Canadian operations. “Our entire focus is on reducing the probability of a failure, especially of the fluid leaking out of the valve and exposing humans and their operators to these fluids. We are dedicated to this one product, and that’s it.” In 2024, descote’s 50th year in business globally, Jean-Pierre’s son, Vincent Richer, became global president of the company and handed the reins of the USA and Canada operation to Aguilar. He succeeds longtime president Mark Fucich, now descote’s chief strategy officer. “Jean-Pierre really wanted to secure descote’s future for the next 50 years in USA and Canada,” Aguilar says. A six-person Baton Rouge team—including

application engineer Beau Dennis, regional sales managers Eric Nicaud and Billy Bahnsen, customer service rep Parker Smith and warehouse manager Carey Darcey—covers the full U.S. and Canadian market. Underpinning all of it is an exacting quality assurance process. Every valve is built to an inspection and test plan that follows it from raw material to finished product. “Everything we do is for lethal, toxic, hazardous, radioactive service,” Aguilar says. “That’s our standard manufacturing process.” It’s a standard built on a simple philosophy that has carried descote through five decades and two generations of leadership. “We’re going to take the hard right instead of the easy wrong,” Aguilar says. “Our total focus is delivering to the customer what the customer requires and expects.”

Top Executives: Ross Aguilar, President, USA/Canada 11529 SUN BELT CT • BATON ROUGE, LA 70809 • 225.308.2424 • DESCOTE.COM 50 10/12 INDUSTRY REPORT • FALL 2026

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An aerial view of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ West Shore Lake Pontchartrain Barrier Construction Project in partnership with Dynamic (Photo by Louis Bergeron/Dynamic)

DY N A M I C G R O U P

LISTEN FIRST: HOW DYNAMIC TURNS HARD PROJECTS INTO SHARED WINS

ynamic’s approach to a project starts long before the first shovel goes into the ground: listen to the client, build an execution plan centered on safety, and adapt as conditions change. Safety is treated as a nonnegotiable across every job site, from a hyperscale data center build to a storm-barrier to protect a region for the next century. CEO Zach Butterworth has seen that discipline pay off from more than one side of the table. Before leading Dynamic, he spent years on the government side of major construction programs, an experience, he says, that showed him the best contractors listen before they build. “Every client has a different challenge, and you have to understand the problem before you can build the right solution,” Butterworth says. “At Dynamic, we start by listening to what the client is trying to accomplish, understanding the pressures and constraints they are working under, and then building the best solution around their needs.” It is a philosophy that shows up first in

Dynamic’s mission critical work on hyperscale data center campuses where schedule certainty is everything and the margin for error is razor-thin. The same discipline carries into flood-protection infrastructure, like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ regional flood protection project, and into disaster recovery work that rebuilds communities at scale. “On a mission-critical hyperscale project, the client’s priority is safety, communication, certainty and the flexibility to keep the overall project on schedule,” Butterworth says. “When we build flood protection for the Army Corps, tens of thousands of families are relying on us to deliver. The challenges are different, but our approach is the same: listen first, understand what the client needs and build the right solution for them.” Much of that flexibility comes down to capability. Rather than subcontracting out most of a project, Dynamic executes many scopes across clearing, grading, foundations, pile driving, concrete and site logistics with owned equipment, along with building

construction and interiors spanning hundreds of thousands of square feet. “That breadth allows us to bring more of the solution under one roof with our divisions taking the lead,” Butterworth says. The company pairs that in-house capacity with a deliberate push to hire locally and bring on local subcontractors and vendors wherever it’s working. “By bringing people from the community into the project, we build relationships and create trust around the broader work being done,” he says. It also keeps clients close to the process. Butterworth and Dynamic’s executive team personally checks in regularly, and gives clients direct access to Dynamic’s leadership, project teams and crews. “We bring ideas and solutions to the table, listen to their direction and make decisions together,” he says. “We want our clients to know we are working alongside them toward the same outcome.”

Top Executives: Josh McCoy, Executive Chairman; Zach Butterworth, Chief Executive Officer; John Austin, Executive Vice President for Mission Critical 3045 WESTFORK DR. • BATON ROUGE, LA 70816 • 225.570.6377 • DYNAMICGRP.COM 1012industryreport.com

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From left, Project Manager Eric Kimbrough; Interior Design Project Manager Cassidy Blank; AIA | Architect and Managing Partner Mike Wilson; Architect and Project Manager Emily Messelt; and SDA | Administrator Katharine Simon (Photo by Don Kadair)

C R U M P W I LSO N A RC H I T ECTS

BUILT ON RELATIONSHIPS: CRUMP WILSON’S PETROCHEMICAL REACH SPANS 18 STATES

or more than four decades, Crump Wilson Architects has quietly built one of Louisiana’s most far-reaching architecture firms by developing a unique design niche: petrochemical plant facilities. “It’s not that we don’t enjoy those other sectors,” says the firm’s managing partner, Mike Wilson. “We enjoy fire stations, financial institutions and other commercial projects, but we’ve been most heavily vested in the petrochemical sector.” Crump Wilson’s first petrochemical project was in 1984, when it was selected to be part of the design team that brought new life to BASF’s Geismar site. Typically, large industrial engineering firms design the manufacturing components of a site and “call us in to do the buildings related to that,” Wilson says. “The control centers, change houses, offices, that sort of thing.” Word of the firm’s work spread through BASF’s

regional and corporate ranks, carrying Crump Wilson’s projects into Georgia, the Carolinas, Missouri, Texas and as far aways as New Jersey. Today, the firm is licensed in 18 states, with a recently completed project in Michigan. Among its many clients are ExxonMobil, BASF, and W.R. Grace. One job leads to another, and another, and another. “We will work with the internal engineering groups of a particular client, and that lead engineer may leave and go to some other company. They call us a few months later bringing us to the new company,” Wilson says. “That’s pretty much how we’ve grown.” Most current projects run $8 million to $40 million, including a $35 million biosafety level 3 laboratory now under construction and a $25 million facility headed soon to bid. Anything larger than that and Crump Wilson partners with a bigger firm.

But no project is too small. Wilson says his team will help a longtime client pick out lampshades if that’s what’s needed. Crump Wilson employs 14 people, most working out of its Baton Rouge headquarters, with additional staff based in Atlanta, Birmingham and Mandeville, Louisiana. Even the remote team members come into the office on a regular schedule to maintain camaraderie. “It’s not about Mike Wilson, it’s about the team here,” Wilson says. He describes Crump Wilson as a place where young architects, interns, and designers can build a broad base of experience and grow into project managers and senior staff. “We always ask ourselves what’s in the best interest of the project,” Wilson says. “As soon as you take your focus off the project and start becoming self-serving, that’s when things fall apart.”

Top Executives: Mike Wilson, Managing Partner 9311 BLUEBONNET BOULEVARD, SUITE B • BATON ROUGE, LA 70810 • 225.387.2307 • CRUMPWILSONARCHITECTS.COM 52 10/12 INDUSTRY REPORT • FALL 2026

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