After what it deems a very successful debut of its new concept,

The National Restaurant Association is looking for the visionaries in the foodservice industry. The association plans to honor commercial and noncommercial operators with its first-everRestaurant, Hotel-Motel Show, scheduled for May 5-8 at McCormick Place in Chicago. In other NRA Show news, President Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States, will give the keynote address…

Karl Winterhalter, the founder of

Henry Motes Jr., the guiding force behind the century-old dealershipRiverside Baptist Church or the

Theodore Barber & Co., well-known consultant firms and longtime collaborators, are merging into a new firm: RJS|Barber Associates. The new company will offer integrated foodservice design and advisory services. Its core segments include hotels, casinos, education, sports and entertainment and specialty restaurants. RJS|Barber will be headquartered in the former RJS offices in Old Lyme, Conn.,…

With a number of operator indicators improving in the last quarter of 2011, we thought we’d check in with the two major groups that forecast operator sales—Technomic Inc. and the National Restaurant Association—to see if the outlook for the coming year has changed. Not in any significant way, it appears. While NRA won’t release its…

Wholesales food prices fell in December for the second time in three months, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices at all three production stages tracked by the BLS posted declines. The National Restaurant Association’s average of wholesale food prices was 0.5% lower for the month. Still, average prices…

State tax revenues continued to improve in the third quarter of 2011, according to preliminary data from the Rockefeller Institute of Government, based in Albany, N.Y. Data from 48 early-reporting states show an overall 7.3% nominal gain over the third quarter of ’10, with only three states reporting falling revenue. It is the seventh straight…

While most of the economic data from the last quarter of 2011 was better than many economists anticipated, the outlook for the coming year and the first forecasts for ’13 remain muted. The consensus forecast for real growth of gross domestic product during ’12 in the U.S., as compiled by Blue Chip Economic Indicators, remained…