THE FCSI INTERVIEW


DRIVING DESIGN WITH A PASSION FOR PEOPLE


Roger Obeid FCSI is a consultant with many passions. Always looking to learn, thinking of how to meet the needs of clients, and fiercely advocating inclusivity – among customers and within the foodservice industry itself. He tells Jim Banks how these forces have shaped his career


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ospitality consultant Roger Obeid FCSI bridges cultures and, with more than 30 years’ experience in helping contractors, architects, civil and electromechanical engineers with a myriad


of diverse projects, he connects the industry’s past with its future. His blend of in-depth technical knowledge and hands-on industry experience could give him a professorial air, but when we speak he is instead humble, inquisitive and brimming with enthusiasm. Born in Lebanon in 1953, he saw his country go through a civil war, witnessing the damage to places and lives that people can inflict because of their cultural, social and religious differences. Although it is more than 40 years since he left the country and although he is now a Canadian national, those early experiences still shape his outlook on the world, which is driven by a fierce passion for bringing people of all kinds together. “I adore sports and when I was 14 or 15 years old I started working in


summer camps as a coach and coaching skiing in the winter,” he says. “So I was in many student hostels and similar organizations, in which I gradually took on more responsibilities. I became attracted to that world, where you don’t have to be in an office and where you deal with people, which is the spirit of hospitality.” “In my middle-class family I was educated to work with the poor and the physically impaired, and my mother would take me to volunteer with the deaf and the disabled,” he adds. “The war in Lebanon increased the number of people with motor disability. Later, when I was studying for my MBA, I had a classmate who was injured by a bomb playing football at the age of 13 and had been in a wheelchair ever since. Now, he is a lawyer. I realized then that people with disabilities are often underestimated.”


Never-ending learning At the start of Obeid’s working life, Lebanon was an advanced country in the region, with a sophisticated hospitality


“I was asked to organize, from scratch, in a


country in the full turmoil of war, Lebanon’s first hospitality trade fair and exhibition”


industry. He worked in a high-end hotel to see if that suited him, but when he enquired about courses of study for the hospitality industry, he was disappointed. “I found there was no education in hospitality in Lebanon, and although some people would go to vocational school, I was too advanced for that, so I had to look abroad,” he says. So began a learning journey that, to this day, is as important to him as it ever was. His first step was to study at the Glion


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WORLDWIDE


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