Now that the FER Top Dealers Report is finished, the NRA Show has come and gone and we’ve attended the annual Association for Healthcare Foodservice meeting, it’s time for me and my forecasting partner John Muldowney, a marketing executive at The Boelter Cos., to begin work on our annual foodservice equipment and supplies market forecast. …

Two trends are very clear from our annual Top Dealers survey detailed in this issue. First, the biggest dealers, those in the Top 30 or so, continue to grow rapidly, partly by exploiting their chain orientations and partly through acquisition of smaller dealers that fill in regions or niches for them. Many of these dealers…

The heavy-gauge stainless Caster Cradle is the only caster stabilizing device having a patent-pending uniform circular design that allows for approach from any angle, utilizing units secured to the floor where the casters of mobile equipment are to be centered. There is no need to line up wheels at the same time while trying to…

The past two-and-a-half weeks have reminded me of something I’ve known a very long time: Few businesses offer more people more opportunity than foodservice. As Beth mentions in her editorial, we’ve been very busy. We attended the annual convention of the Foodservice Equipment Distributors Association in late March, then headed to Shanghai for the Hotelex…

We knew the brutal winter in most parts of the U.S. was hurting restaurant and other foodservice sales. But we had no idea it was this bad. New research from Technomic Inc., the Chicago-based research firm, indicates just how bad it’s been. Technomic research in February found 40% of restaurant operators in every region of…