Foodservice News & Operator Intel

EPA’s May rule easing refrigerant requirements includes a warning few operators are likely to see. The agency said the relief could increase demand for HFC refrigerants, which “may result in tighter supply and higher HFC prices for downstream consumers, including users of HFCs in subsectors outside the scope of this final rule.” Put simply, the rule helped supermarkets but could raise costs for everyone else […]

Salad and Go appears to have done nothing wrong. It did not serve the lettuce linked to this summer’s cyclospora outbreak and was not named in any related case. Still, the fallout reached the company anyway: on August 5, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, closed all 70 Arizona and Nevada locations, and shut down […]

A Tampa diner noticed a 3% “venue fee” on her bill this summer at RO in Hyde Park, even though the charge did not appear anywhere on the menu. She posted about it on Nextdoor, and restaurant staff reportedly told her other nearby spots were doing the same thing.2 The complaint spread just days before […]

NOAA-tracked weather stations logged more than 1,000 daily temperature records in June 2026 and another 1,400-plus through July 19, with a heat dome in late June and early July exposing more than 200 million Americans to dangerous heat.⁸ Independent restaurants and cafes in Philadelphia, Manchester, London, and Leicester have each closed kitchens or restructured hours […]

Restaurants and bars shed nearly 33,000 jobs in June 2026, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revised May’s initially reported gain down by 10,300 jobs, according to Nation’s Restaurant News.¹ The industry has added positions at just 0.62% annually over the past four years, compared with 1.8% in the four years before the pandemic, […]