Nation’s Restaurant News teams up with Datassential and its Firefly data platform to present a look at the restaurant landscape that tracks the performance of the largest 500 chains.
Last December, the value menu’s importance in the competition for cash-strapped customers jumped out from billboards touting Burger King’s $1 double cheeseburger as bigger than the equally priced version from quick-service leader McDonald’s.At the...
Last year was brutal for pizza operators like Ron Berger, chief executive of Figaro’s Italian Pizza, but you’d never hear it in his voice. Foreign demand for dairy products sent cheese prices through the stratosphere, and domestic...
This history of cocktails is a Darwinian tale of how those things that don’t kill you make you stronger, and how the people who work hard to make the craft better are keeping cocktails on menus in increasingly varied venues as consumers seek more...
Despite the well-publicized slips and falls his company has experienced, Shakey’s Pizza operator Chuck Wilburn is glad he chose to remain a franchisee rather than become an independent restaurateur.Franchising, he says, “is the way to go because...
Happy 40th birthday, Red Lobster. The nationwide seafood chain is segueing into middle age as not only the oldest chain of its kind in the country, but also the largest. According to Kim Lopdrup, who is president of what is also the...
America remains a litigious society, with its penchant for lawsuits so far managing to survive every effort at tort reform. In fact, the American tort system costs more than 2 percent of the gross domestic product, more than double the average...
Indulgence never goes out of style, and despite constant reports of macroeconomic pressures causing consumers to be more conservative with their dining dollars, some restaurateurs who deal in decadent dining experiences find that nothing succeeds...
The invention of radio did not kill newspapers, as doomsayers of the time predicted. Nor did television kill movies any more than the Internet killed television.The only thing that happened as each medium became popular was that advertising found...
International Dairy Queen chief executive Chuck Mooty laughs when asked why, to some observers, half of all Dairy Queens look like they are barely surviving. “That reason is a big part of why we are reinvigorating and becoming...
There are a lot of ways to describe a 50-year tenure in the industry. For IHOP, the journey can be best measured in the growth from one location to 1,344 units, and annual servings of more than 700 million pancakes, 1.5 million gallons of syrup...
