Mexican restaurant franchise operator Alsea SAB has acquired exclusive rights to develop

UL has acquired Everclean Services, a food-safety auditor based in Agoura Hills, Calif. Everclean Services assesses and audits food safety, supplier qualifications, brand consistency and price integrity for restaurants, grocery and retail chains. It performs more than 40,000 audits on more than 10,000 facilities in North America, including many leading multiunit chains. The acquisition broadens…

A private-equity firm that already holds a majority stake in Peet’s Coffee & Tea has acquired Caribou Coffee Co., the nation’s second-largest company-owned coffeehouse chain. The Joh. A. Benckiser Group (JAB) announced a definitive merger agreement under which an affiliate of JAB will acquire Caribou for approximately $340 million. Caribou will remain based in Minneapolis…

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John Birchfield, FCSI, the founder and principal of Birchfield Foodsystems, a foodservice consulting and design firm, died Dec. 29. He was 82 years old. Birchfield had a long and multifaceted career in the foodservice industry. From offices in Annapolis, Md., and Okemos, Mich., he designed foodservice operations and served as an operations consultant for institutions,…

Erwin Shakin, a man who loved the foodservice industry and said he had to have at least one meal a day in a restaurant, died on Dec. 24. He was 83 years old. Shakin was the founder of Consolidated Restaurant Services, established in 1952, and Consolidated Commercial Controls in 1983, and now known as AllPoints…

APP OF THE MONTHRobert Regan, owner of Gumbeaux’s Cajun Café, a family-owned restaurant in Douglasville, Ga., is a big fan of the new high-efficiency P 38 convection fryer from Pearl City Manufacturing, Inc. For the past 19 years, he’s relied on conventional 40-lb., 2-basket fryers to cook seafood, his menu mainstay. But after learning about…

APP OF THE MONTHSometimes you find a tool that makes your life a little bit easier, and you begin to wonder how you ever worked without it. That’s how Chef John Bendzinski, Capital Banquet Center, Washington, Mich., felt when he discovered the Trash-Ease through his neighbor and the product’s inventor, John Cundy, JPC Products. The…

BUNN TRIFECTATrifecta puts full control over the three phases of brewing—wetting, extraction and hydrolysis (separating liquids from solids)—at your fingertips. Each recipe allows you to manipulate a total of 11 variables (recipe guide and recipe-development tools available). After determining an appropriate grind size and dose weight for coffee (or weight for tea), you can enter…