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.

Joy and Sadness
03-01-2010

Fortunately for our tour group, we had taken off from the airport in Santiago only five hours before the quake hit. We were unaware of the event until we deplaned in New York and were standing in line at Customs. There, television monitors tuned to CNN alerted everyone to the tragic news. Five minutes later, I received the first of several texts on my cell phone, this one from my niece, asking if I was all right.

It was a surreal moment, even more so because, 24 hours earlier, the New York contingent on the trip had joked about wishing we could stay in Chile a...

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Tempest in a Tweet-pot
02-12-2010

A man known as Questlove learned this earlier this month when he posted a photo on Twitter of the menu board at the NBC company cafeteria in New York City. You may not know who Questlove is, but 1.2 million followers on Twitter know him as the drummer for the Roots, the house band for comedian Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talk show.

The menu board identified the lunch special of the day, in honor of Black History Month, to be “fried chicken, collard greens with smoked turkey, white rice, black-eyed peas, and jalapeno cornbread.”

Apparently some people were...

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In Memory of Ernie Collins
01-29-2010

Ernie and Fedele were colleagues at Saga Corp. who joined forces in 1986 to found Bon Appetit Management Co. I only recently learned that Ernie Collins, now retired, had passed away late last year at the age of 67 after a battle with cancer, and I caught up last week with Fedele to talk about his partner and friend.

Ernie was always the quiet member of the team, working behind the scenes while Fedele served as front man. It was an arrangement that played to both men’s strength, Fedele said.

“We had two different skill sets,” Fedele recalled of his friend,...

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One goal, two voices
01-25-2010

But they do share two traits. They have passion for school foodservice and they are impatient. Both traits were exhibited earlier this month when the two women shared a panel at the Child Nutrition & Industry Conference, staged by the School Nutrition Association in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

After presentations by Jean Ronnei, foodservice director for St. Paul, Minn., Schools, and Jody Houston, foodservice director for the Corpus Christi (Texas) Independent School District, Cooper took the stage. The former restaurant chef and now self-styled “renegade lunch...

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Careful What You Wish For
01-18-2010

The main reason we chose to do this is we realized that culling information from the largest institutions does a disservice to scores of operators who work at much smaller schools, colleges, hospitals, etc. What use can you make of average food cost at a group of urban hospitals that have 400 or more beds when you operate foodservice for a rural, 85-bed tertiary care center?

As we came to this realization, we began to wonder how valuable our census reports were to readers. So we decided to ask you, by conducting focus groups for each of the market sectors. Thus...

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