We are especially excited to bring you this July edition of FE&S. Inside you will find a photo recap of this year's Dealer of the Year and Industry Awards Gala. We enjoyed a record turn-out this year and feel particularly good about that fact given the change in date necessitated by NATO's visit to the Windy City.

I know that you will enjoy the other outstanding content in this issue, too. Joe and the editorial team continue to raise the bar on timely and relevant industry coverage, going in-depth on the hugely important college and university segment in this issue.

Lastly, as many of you know, we traditionally run the results of our annual forecast study in September. One important distinction I would like to make about this report is that the proprietary research that we do with our readers beginning in early July serves as the basis for the study. This stands in sharp contrast with forecasts that merely aggregate third-party research. We will base our 2013 forecast primarily on specific data that we have gathered from actual foodservice equipment and supplies channel partners. This satisfies the significant goal of allowing us to help our readers benchmark their plans against those of their peers.

We do it this way because we have looked around and no one else drills down to the kind of detailed industry data that discerning foodservice professionals require in order to make fact-based decisions about the upcoming year. Other research companies gather information on the larger foodservice industry, but you can only extrapolate the numbers for foodservice equipment and supplies from there, making any resulting conclusions less reliable.

We feel our study, augmented by the findings of third party researchers in order to make sure that our findings are corroborated by theirs, is an important part of our editorial mission. Therefore, in addition to our detailed foodservice equipment and supplies industry forecast coverage in the September issue of FE&S, this year, for the first time, we will offer a free interactive webcast covering our findings.

So please be sure to join us virtually on September 11 and make sure your voice is heard by participating in the 2013 Forecast and Best in Class studies.