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Chipotle Mexican Grill will enter the burger market this fall with a limited-menu concept called Tasty Made. The first location will open this fall in Lancaster, Ohio. The menu will include burgers, fries, and shakes. The Denver chain, still regaining its sales footing following E. coli outbreaks that affected its primary brand restaurants in 14…

Now that it’s found success with its next-generation “Experience of the Future” restaurant in parts of Europe, Canada, and Australia, McDonald’s plans to further expand the program in the United States. The company said in its second-quarter earnings conference call that more than half of its restaurants in Canada have been fully converted to the…

Scotsman Ice Systems has appointed Nick Mirkovich as its new Vice President-Sales and Marketing. Mirkovich, based in the company’s corporate headquarters in Vernon Hills, Ill., will be responsible for managing sales through distribution, key chain and direct accounts throughout the Americas. He joins Scotsman after nearly 15 years working in sales, marketing, product management and…

Consumers’ confidence remains at a fairly high level, but they were a bit less optimistic in July than a month or year ago, according to separate surveys from the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers and the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. According to the UM Surveys, the recent decline is attributed to rising concerns,…

Softer sales and a dampened outlook among operators led to a decline for the second consecutive month in the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Performance Index, but even as restaurant performance and operators’ expectation continued to fall, the overall numbers still attest to expansion in the industry. The RPI stood at 100.3 in June, down 0.3…

Paul Westra, a well-known restaurant market analyst for Chicago-based Stifel, set off quite a kerfuffle last week.  He downgraded 11 leading restaurant company stocks, noting a broad-based slowing of same-store sales since the first of the year, according to a survey his firm conducts. He said the trend “reflects the start of a U.S. restaurant…

UL Environment, a business division of Underwriters Laboratories, has published the first global Product Category Rule for hand dryers. The new rules are the first step in developing Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), which establish a consistent method for evaluating the environmental impact claims of all products in a specific industry. The EPD process will allow…