Editors' Blog

Here at FSD we've got a lot of opinions. The Editors' Blog is a place where we get to speak our minds. Check back often for posts from Paul King, Becky Schilling, Lindsey Ramsey and Peter Romeo on the foodservice topics of the day.

A Healthy Philosophy
Geisinger's Steve Cerullo doesn't control his customers, but he does control his menu.
03-28-2013

In early March, I paid a visit to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa., where the foodservice team recently completed construction on the Atrium Café, a stunning dining space in the campus’s main building. (You can see the Atrium Café in our April cover story, “Great Spaces.”)

I spent some time chatting with Steve Cerullo, the foodservice director, and the conversation eventually came around to issues of health and wellness. Geisinger, like so many hospitals, is working very diligently to encourage employees to live a healthier lifestyle, and the...

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College foodservice becomes a big "bracket"
The Cooking Channel stages a favorite college foods competition.
03-20-2013

I’ve written about how I think it is semi-ridiculous to rank the food at different colleges, but this is just too much fun to ignore. Taking a page from the NCAA Championship basketball tournament, The Cooking Channel has compiled a list of “classic” college foods from around the country and then matched them up head to head in true March Madness style. Website visitors can vote for their favorites; winning foods move on to the next round.

Perusing the list of contenders I saw a few items created by dining services worth calling out, especially in light of FSD...

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It's A Wrap: MenuDirections 2013 Put to Bed
Conference featured record number of sponsors and a "wow" factor that was off the charts.
03-11-2013

Well, the dust has settled on what just might be our best MenuDirections conference ever. Despite—or, perhaps, aided by—the less-than-optimum weather in Tampa, our more than 200 attendees said they had a great time learning and networking.

We had record sponsorship for the conference, and those sponsors provided value far beyond the products they presented at our various vendor fairs. From sustainable seafood to hog butchering, from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, from lowering sodium to raising the fruit quotient of food, attendees certainly got their money’s...

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MenuDirections 2013: A Seat at the Judge’s Table
Restaurant Business' Pat Cobe reflects on her time as a judge of MenuDirections first cooking competition.
03-07-2013

It was my great luck to be in Tampa, Florida, from March 3-5 to attend MenuDirections 2013. This much anticipated conference for non-commercial operators includes a stellar lineup of speakers, workshops, chef demos and more. But I was luckier still to be asked to be one of five judges for the first-ever Culinary Competition.

I was really pumped as I took my seat at the judge’s table, feeling a bit like "Top Chef’s" Padma Lakshmi—only considerably less chic and much more humble. You see, two of the other judges were bona fide chefs: Andrew Hunter,...

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MenuDirections 2013: Day Two Highlights
Coming face-to-face with a pig's head adds clarity on FSDs' changing roles
03-05-2013

It’s not a routine conference when the speaker reaches for the severed pig’s head on the counter and lifts off the face, explaining he’d carved it free earlier so he’d have time to saw apart the carcass that’d been parted from the skull (“The brain’s still in there, but that’s okay.”)

Welcome to one of the more extraordinary sessions of Menu Directions 2013 and the lens it provides on how the food service director’s job is changing. During one of the conference's 30-Minute Universities, Stephen Gerike of the National...

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