Unified Brands has added Kyle Graalum as Senior National Account Manager. He will manage existing chain business while also focusing on new customer growth for the Conyers, Ga., company and its five brands. Graalum’s résumé includes five years as a national accounts manager at ITW FEG.

Stoelting/Vollrath Co. has appointed industry veteran J. (John) LaForge as Chain Accounts Sales Manager. LaForge will focus on improving Stoelting’s competitive position and chain penetration, direct efforts to support distributors, work with product managers on new product concepts and monitor existing operator programs. He’ll report to Greg Stak, director-sales operations at the Kiel, Wis., manufacturer. In his 17-year foodservice…

It’s mid-April and dealer buying group season is in full-swing. PRIDE met a couple weeks ago. SEFA met in Kapalua, Maui, Hawaii last week, and IFED meets this week. ABC and Excell will convene in May. Tedde and Jim Reid, who started SEFA 30 years ago, were kind enough to invite me to Kapalua to…

Specifi LLC, the Chicago-based provider of end-to-end design information and solutions supporting the foodservice equipment specification process, has agreed to purchase the business of Schematic Ltd, a UK-based supplier of Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, content creation and repository services to the European foodservice equipment industry.  Terms of the agreement, announced April 14, have not…

ITW Group has appointed Axel Beck, Hobart General Manager and Vice President, as Group President Global Ware Wash. Beck will keep his offices in Offenburg, site of Hobart’s European headquarters. The European and Asian Hobart companies as well as the American and the Italian warewashing group will report directly to him there. Beck joined Hobart…

Rebounding sales here and in China, and led by a focus on long-term, high-growth sales opportunities, is prompting McDonald’s to plan 1,250 new restaurants in China over the next five years. The chain already has more than 2,200 outlets there; the expansion would make China its second-largest market after the US. McDonald’s also plans to…

Five months after debuting in Manhattan with its largest restaurant in the country, Chick-fil-A has opened a second location in the heart of Midtown. The restaurant is engineered for New York’s tight spaces and serves busy on-the-go customers in under 8 minutes in a space measuring just 23 feet wide. There are plans to open…

As part of a wider initiative to make its three chains “global iconic brands,” Yum! Brands is launching Taco Bell in China. Yum CEO Greg Creed says Taco Bell will open its first store there by the end of the year. The Louisville, Ky., company already operates more than 7,000 restaurants in China, nearly all…

The growth of fast-casual restaurant concepts continues to dramatically outpace that of all other restaurant segments, according to data from The NPD Group. The upscale limited-service concepts remain a small part of the overall restaurant environment. According to NPD’s ReCount restaurant census for the year ended Sept. 30, 2015, fast-casual units numbered 19,043 out of…

The latest consumer data from the University of Michigan show an interesting divergence: Consumers are quite optimistic about the outlook for their personal finances but realistic about the outlook for economic growth. Consumers currently view their personal finances as the strongest in a decade but also anticipate that the growth rate will not be strong…