Twenty-seven years after opening its first international store,

Top restaurant business associations in the U.S. and Canada are partnering up. The National Restaurant Association and the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association have signed an agreement to launch a Canadian version of the NRA’s Conserve Sustainability Education Program. The Conserve program is an online resource designed to initiate and inspire environmentally friendly actions to…

Mitchell Schechter, president, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Schechter Report and Newz-Zoom newsletter, died of heart failure on June 20. He was 60 years old. Schechter spent the past 29 years covering the foodservice industry. He started as an associate editor with Food Management in 1983, and moved on to found PROSERVICE, a firm supplying…

Winston Industries is strengthening its sales force. The Louisville, Ky., company has appointed Bill Wright and Justin Fox as national account executives for the West and East Coasts, respectively. Both men will oversee sales and distribution activities across their regions of responsibility. Wright is a 25-year veteran of the foodservice equipment industry, ranging from product…

New board members and nominating committee members elected in March will take their seats in August on the Association for Healthcare Foodservice’s board. New board members beginning their two-year terms are: President-Elect: Laura Watson, Admin. Dir.-Patient Support Services, Intermountain Healthcare, Utah Valley Regional Medical Center, Provo, Utah. Secretary-Elect: Jacqueline Sikoski, Dir.-Nutrition Services, Bozeman Deaconess Hospital/Admin.…

Two personal notes on

Just weeks after FER Fortnightly reported on the expansion problems chains are experiencing with Utah’s restricted number of liquor licenses, the business-minded state has jumped off the wagon to address the problem. Last week, the Utah Legislature approved a bill to issue 90 new liquor licenses to alleviate the backlog in applications; 33 liquor license…

There might be more than 30 million ways to make a pizza, but the joys of customization are colliding with the realities of regulation. Last week, the nation’s largest pizza chains went to Capitol Hill to push for changes to a proposed menu labeling plan that would force chains to post their products’ calorie counts…

The failure rate for Chicago restaurants—both in inspections and in business success—should be shrinking, thanks to long-awaited reforms in city inspection laws. Not only do a third of all new restaurants close within their first year of operation, two-thirds of the city’s restaurants fail at least one initial inspection. The latter statistic is not surprising…

By the time you read this, the Supreme Court will have ruled on the fate of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. (The court is scheduled to release its ruling Thursday, June 28.) In an effort to consolidate and communicate their position on the healthcare law, the National Retail Federation and National Council of Chain Restaurants have…