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FROM THE FIELD
July 2008
Ask Not What Your Industry Can Do For You
If you're fortunate enough to make the industry's spring-meeting tour, you know it's a rush. Whether you're on the channel side or the operator side of the equation, there's just no substitute for getting out and gathering up as much input as you can carry from expert presenters and peers alike.
You pick up tons of useful information you might never have discovered on your own, and even ideas you've heard before trigger new thoughts and new perspectives. Just having time set aside for some concentrated thought is an advantage you seldom get in an interruption-riddled day at your office. It's amazing how smart you get when you shut off your phone, even for just a 60-minute seminar session.
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"Contributing your insights and experiences creates a smarter, stronger industry for all of us."
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At the Foodservice Equipment Distributors Association's recent meeting, for example, a session devoted to building profits during tough economic times took a workshop approach to comparing how various number-crunching strategies would yield different results. That single session alone, I'd think, would be worth years of FEDA membership.
At the National Restaurant Association's Multi-Unit Architects, Engineers & Construction Officers meeting in New Orleans, covered here in the May issue, operators similarly got a lifetime's worth of dues out of a single session on disaster management—direct from witnesses who slogged through the Katrina catastrophe. What can you possibly substitute for that kind of input?
Same story over at the Commercial Food Equipment Service Association's meeting, where management and marketing education went hand-in-hand with technical certification material.
So it' clear what's in these meetings for you.
But these activities are a two-way street, too, and one thing that's stunning in these meetings is just how important it is to provide your insights and information to the industry. The process of pooling observations and experience creates a kind of group intelligence—not to mention industry clout—that you simply cannot create on your own. And somehow, mysteriously, you always get more out of it than you put in.
And perhaps nowhere is that group gain more obvious than in the North American Association of Food Equipment Manufacturers' own Technical Liaison Committee. An assembly of scores of manufacturers, consulting engineers and operators, NAFEM's TLC literally gathers political, technical and regulatory information from all over the world, boils it down to what matters, and rolls it out for the benefit of the whole foodservice industry. Hazardous waste regulations in Europe? Political undertones in China? Sewer overflows in Virginia? Global warming and carbon footprints as they'll influence kitchen equipment regulations? All these topics, and innumerable others, are tackled by the TLC.
Not to mention the other kinds of projects. The NAFEM Life Cycle Calculators, available for download at www.nafem.org, came directly out of the joint efforts of a task force of TLC committee members, for example.
Out of all these efforts—again, none of which we could match on our own—the entire industry moves forward. We get smarter. We get stronger. And when we play our cards right, we can turn that strength into political influence—increasingly important when foodservice faces so many threats from so many different kinds of interests.
So don't just join your industry associations—volunteer on committees, share your knowledge, create a better industry. Move the ball. Raise the bar.
And if you're up for the NAFEM TLC, consider volunteering for any one of a number of task groups—data protocol, electrical, environmental factors, food security and safety, gas, international, refrigeration, sanitation and ventilation.
There's a ton of industry work to be done, and we all need each other to do it.
Brian Ward
Chief Editor
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