Normally, in May, we are gearing up for the annual FE&S Dealer of the Year and All Industry Awards Gala in Chicago. This year, that event is the furthest thing from our minds.

 I love the hospitality industry because I think it attracts the best people.

It’s hard to contain our excitement here at FE&S as we begin a new year and embark on our second decade as Zoomba Group. We have so much planned for 2020, and all of it is designed to make you the best-informed foodservice professional in the equipment and supplies industry.

For many years now, I’ve been telling you just how wrong I’ve been about predicting the eminent demise of printed directories.

Well, that’s the goal, right? This time of the year, businesses large and small peer into their crystal balls for a look at the future to form an idea about what the coming year will hold.

A special thanks goes out to everyone who made FE&S’ inaugural Tour the Trends event a big success.

Having worked in both foodservice operations and as a distributor sales rep, I’ve heard my fair share of complaining about health inspectors. They never showed up at a good time, their grievances — expressed as points on a checklist — always seemed trivial and I remember everyone viewing their presence as an unwelcome hassle in an already overwrought day.

The great national experiment toward the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes continues to gain steam. In January of 2020, Illinois will join the growing (sorry, not sorry) list of states where recreational use is no longer a crime.

A special shout-out this month to Editorial Director Joe Carbonara and the entire Zoomba Group team for establishing a new high-water mark for FE&S’ professional recognition. In May the American Society of Business Publication Editors recognized this publication with seven of its national Azbee awards for design and content excellence.

Welcome to the May 2019 issue of FE&S magazine. We hope that you will enjoy the fresh look and feel of the latest redesign.

One way we measure ourselves against our quest to deliver fresh and interesting new content is by regularly submitting our work to associations that judge us against business-to-business peer publications. The result is the list of our awards that appear on the masthead of our magazine. We are proud of these awards because they highlight the depth of talent that we plumb to produce a magazine that you tell us is worth reading month in and month out.

Well, I’m not sure that having fun was all that we wanted to do at The NAFEM Show 2019 in Orlando, Fla., but I can tell you that we certainly had some. (Yep — another reference to Sheryl Crow, who I would like to thank for tossing me her guitar pick.)

FE&S’ Dealer of the Year and All Industry Awards Gala celebration at the Four Seasons Hotel-Chicago on May 18th is shaping up to be a special one. Of course, every year is special to us and made even more so as we reflect on the roster of past winners. This year will be extraordinary, because the 2019 DOY, TriMark USA, is made up of so many — five to be exact — past winners.

Welcome to the first edition of FE&S for 2019 in what should prove to be an exciting and eventful year.

So … you haven’t decided whether to be a nanoinfluencer or a macroinfluencer in the foodservice industry in 2019. No matter, either way the FE&S  2019 Equipment & Supplies Directory serves as a great place to start your foodservice equipment and supplies-related research.

 What exactly is meant by the term “pay to play” and why do we at Zoomba Group avoid it?

It isn’t every day that you earn the kind of praise that makes you want to blush, but such was the case after our recent confab in Chicago, the Foodservice Equipment & Design Global Thought Leadership Summit.

I hope that you will take the time to read about Eric Harrison from Supplies on the Fly, FE&S’ 2018 DSR of the Year. As many of you know, this award is near and dear to my heart as a former DSR of the Year for ID, a magazine that covered the broadline foodservice distribution space. That award came early in my career and more than a few years ago. One might reasonably ask what relevance the award has in 2018 and my answer is... plenty.

There is a trend afoot that is threatening to become a movement, the roots of which, if you will pardon the pun, can be found emanating from the noncommercial segment of foodservice. I’m talking about the quiet and inexorable move toward a more plant-based diet.

If there was a common theme that emerged from FE&S’ 2018 Dealer of the Year and Industry Awards Gala held on May 19th at the Four Seasons Hotel – Chicago, I think it was finding success through doing things the right way. From the Dealer of the Year recipient, The Boelter Companies, emphasis on empowering their employees to follow their entrepreneurial instincts to Hall of Fame recipient Kathleen Seelye building a stellar career based on a lifetime of collaboration and inclusion, the whole evening seemed to underscore examples of winning companies and individuals committed as much to how they succeed as they are to what they

Take a multigenerational family-owned business — one that hires nice people from the Midwest who generally come predisposed with a customer-centric, friendly attitude and a strong work ethic. Combine that company with some progressive management ideas promoting company-wide transparency, entrepreneurship and empowering employees throughout the organization with the authority and resources to make sure the customer is always satisfied. What do you think you’d get?

It’s March and that can only mean that the FE&S awards season is underway. In this issue, we highlight some of the very best examples of creative tabletop installations across five industry segments. Our team of independent judges curated a list of winners that exemplify the best in current trends across a variety of foodservice applications.

We have a trifecta of great events on the horizon. It all starts in May with our annual Dealer of the Year and Industry Awards Gala, which coincides with the National Restaurant Association's annual trade show, which takes place May 19-22 in Chicago.

As a woman who has worked closely with men in male-dominated industries for more than three decades, you can believe the #MeToo movement holds some resonance for me.

It is December and that means it's time for the annual directory issue of FE&S as well as for my annual dose of humility as a prognosticator. For the record, in the last year I have also been wrong about the durability of Bitcoin, the outcome of Brexit and the timing of the first female president of the United States.

Looking back the other day at the publisher's letter that I wrote one year agoin the November 2016 issue of FE&S, recapping our first Foodservice Equipment & Design (FED) Global Thought Leadership Summit, I realized that, as hard as it is to believe, it is already time to start planning for our second event. It will be held at the Radisson Blu in Chicago next year September 10-12.

We know that we are asking a lot from our readers to participate in a study that takes so long to complete. The entire Best in Class (BIC) survey is broken up into three parts and each one takes about 45 minutes to fill out. That is a huge time commitment in a digital world that routinely measures time spent on a web page, for instance, in seconds and not minutes.

I’m a big fan of cooperation … in business, this can mean seemingly disparate groups establishing and working toward a mutual goal that ultimately benefits all parties.