Travel plans

It seems like the National Restaurant Association show in Chicago just ended, but here we are into June and into the heart of what, for we who cover non-commercial foodservice, is our busiest time.

From now until mid-July, editors at FoodService Director will be involved in seven events, beginning June 5 with the inaugural Association for Healthcare Foodservice in Austin. Associate Editor Becky Schilling, along with Publisher Bill Anderson, will be on hand to network with operators and sponsors. Becky will be chronicling the event for us, with stories and photos to be posted on our Web site and Facebook page.

Meanwhile, I will be heading northeast, to Amherst, Mass., for the 16th annual Chef Culinary Conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts. This will be the fourth straight year I will be involved as the conference’s Master of Ceremonies. It is a great way for us to stay connected with the college foodservice market by netowrking with the people most intimately involved with college menu planning and strategy. I will also take time to post information and photos—and maybe even some videos—on our social media sites.

Other events in which we will be a part this summer will include FARE (Foodservice At Retail Exchange), a three-year-old conference hosted by CSP Information Group. Managing Editor Lindsey Ramsey will be attending, and will also moderate a panel of college operators talking about portability. Speakers on the panel will be Jon Lewis, Ball State University, and Paul Komelasky, Sodexo.

I will be on the program at two conferences in July. First, I will be in Chicago at the Dietary Managers Association annual meeting. On July 4 I will address the group on social media, and the following day I will moderate a panel on trends in healthcare. My panelists will be Marcy Stone, Rush University Medical Center; Sonia Alexander, Northwestern Hospital, and Melissa Temkin from the American Health Care Association.

Three days later, I will be in San Jose, Calif., at the NACUFS conference, again speaking about the uses of social media. I also will be making history, of a sort: I am one of three speakers who will be part of what NACUFS is calling “super sessions”—larger than typical interest sessions but, because they will be happening simultaneously, not general sessions. I’m looking forward to staging what I hope will be a very interactive 90-minutes.

At that same conference, FSD will once again be part of the Farm-to-Fork event hosted by Truitt Brothers and the Food Alliance. This year’s soiree will be held on a working farm outside San Jose, which definitely will lend some authenticity to the message the group hopes to impart to attendees. Lindsey and I will provide photos and commentary on this and other happenings at the conference, including the announcement of the 2010 Theodore Minah Award winner.

Becky will wrap up our summer conference swing by reporting on the events at the School Nutrition Association annual meeting in Dallas, beginning July 11. Finally, lest I forget, FSD and Hormel Foodservice will partner in mid-June to stage the second In Front of the Future Summit, which involves about a dozen university foodservice professionals for three days of idea-sharing in the “other” Austin—Minnesota.

In the midst of it all, we will still manage to publish our July and August issues of FSD, update our Web site and keep you up-to-date with our FSD This Week newsletter—which, by the way, we will begin publishing twice weekly starting July 2. We will try to maintain our sanity as we rack up those frequent flyer miles.