FoodService Director parent company Winsight is sold to Informa

Winsight, LLC, the parent company of FoodService Director and the National Restaurant Association Show, has been sold to Informa, a London-based global events, digital products and academic services firm.

Informa acquired Winsight from HPS Investment Partners, which acquired the company from the National Restaurant Association last year.

The combined group will create a global foodservice and retail media, event and market intelligence powerhouse, serving a global audience of more than 2 million and featuring some of those industries’ premier events and offering unparalleled expertise, journalism and market intelligence. 

“Winsight already hosts some of the biggest events and features some of the best journalism you can find in the foodservice and retail spaces and now we’ll have the backing of a global giant like Informa,” said Abbey Lewis, VP of Content Strategy for Winsight Media. “This combination is only going to make us better.”

Chicago-based Winsight owns a variety of business publications and events, including Restaurant Business and Foodservice Director, along with the convenience-store publication CSP Daily News and Winsight Grocery Business. It also operates various events in the foodservice and retail spaces, including the Restaurant Leadership Conference, FSTEC, the Global Restaurant Leadership Conference, Menu Directions and the CSP Outlook Leadership Conference. It also operates the data firm Technomic.

Informa, meanwhile, is a publicly traded company with some 11,000 employees worldwide. Informa Connect operates a variety of business publications and events and research that service a variety of different industries. It operates several publications in the foodservice and retail sectors, including Nation’s Restaurant News, Supermarket News, Restaurant Hospitality, Food Management and Catersource.

“This new combination of Informa’s existing foodservice assets with Winsight’s outstanding media, event and data assets, provides the capability to create even more market leading products and services that will better serve the needs of the foodservice industry and its customers,” Informa Connect CEO Andrew Mullins said in a statement.

Mike Wood, CEO of Winsight, will continue to lead the business, which will become part of the Informa Connect division. He noted that the acquisition is a sign of the quick return of event attendance over the past 18 months.

“Our team is incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved since originally acquiring our founding brands in 2012,” Wood said in a statement. “Our rapid recovery to pre-pandemic performance levels is a testament to the essential qualities of our products and services, and the caliber of our employees.”

For more information, check out this news release.