Jim Wernette has been tapped as the new Chain Account Sales Manager at Unified Brands. Wernette has been with the Conyers, Ga., company since 1993, garnering experience with their manufacturing, customer service and design engineering teams. He most recently served as design support manager for Groen and Randell. Wernette will now concentrate on growth in…

Hotelex & Expo FineFood Shanghai 2016 calls itself one of Asia’s largest hospitality and catering trade shows, and with an overall exhibition area covering more than two million square feet, that is certainly true. The show will mark its 25th year when it opens March 29-April 1 in the Shanghai New International Expo Center in…

The “healthy food-centered” LYFE Kitchen chain kicked off the year with its 18th grand opening. The new unit in Playa Vista, Calif., the chain’s seventh location in the state, makes Southern California its largest geographical market. LYFE Kitchen’s menu offers only dishes with fewer than 600 calories and 1,000 mg of sodium. Since the chain…

As we suspected, the sharp drops in equities prices in January spooked operators who responded to the National Restaurant Association’s December Restaurant Performance Index in January. (The survey is conducted the month following about the prior month.) The RPI bounced back in January, led by strong upticks in the survey’s two capital spending indicators. The…

We often say the restaurant market in the U.S. is “mature.” The NPD Group’s foodservice research practice, based in Rosemont, Ill., released restaurant unit-count data February 24 that clearly supports that characterization. For the second year in a row, the number of total restaurants in the U.S. fell, in spite of 2015 being the best…

Rock and roll will never die, if you measure it by the unit growth at the 45-year-old Orlando, Fla.-based Hard Rock Café. The chain added 21 stores last year, expanding from 145 to 166 locations and entering two new states—Arkansas and Minnesota—and eleven countries: Austria, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Greece, Kazakhstan, Laos, Montenegro, Nigeria,…

The NPD Group will host its 2016 Foodservice Summit April 6-7 in Chicago. This year’s theme is “The Path To Consumption: How Customers Choose.” Summit topics will address how consumers decide whether to eat away from home rather than at home; what motivates consumers’ decisions about where and what to eat; and how they choose…

To recap key economic indicators that affect foodservice: Wholesale food prices rose in January after declining three of the previous four months. Wholesale food prices at the final demand stage rose 1%, fell 0.7% at the intermediate stage and rose 5.5% at the unprocessed stage. All data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer…

A New York appeals court on Monday temporarily stopped the city from enforcing a new rule requiring chain restaurants to post warnings on menu items high in sodium. The appellate court judge granted an interim stay of enforcement of the law, which was to go into effect March 1. The rule, believed to be the…