Case Studies

What doesn’t beat you only makes you stronger. Sure, it’s a cliche but at least in Vistar’s case, Kelly Saad says it applies. “We’re an even stronger organization now than we were before COVID-19,” she tells Terra Firma in September. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons, including how to do more with less.” As president […]

Giuseppe Loffredo and his family had only been in the U.S. for a year when he founded the Loffredo Fruit and Tobacco Co. in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1892. He cultivated land to grow tomatoes and other vegetables he sold to hotels, restaurants and even U.S. Army soldiers stationed in the Midwest. It was a […]

A sprinkle of praline caramel pecans atop a scoop of fresh strawberry ice cream can strike the perfect balance between salty and sweet, crunchy and smooth, on a hot summer’s day—or even a chilly winter’s one. J.C. Brigham had the same idea over 70 years ago when he started making not only ice cream, but […]

When a steakhouse needed a new oven but couldn’t afford it because business had slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, CRS paid for it and provided a financing plan. Then, it installed and serviced the oven. According to Derek Clark, the owner and vice president of CRS, or Clark Restaurant Service, this was just business as […]

Michael Lessing may not be able to share every meal with his family, but he has had the opportunity to work with some of them for the past four decades. He’s in the fifth generation of the family that’s been running Lessing’s Hospitality Group for well over a century. The New York-based food service management […]

Josh Beckett didn’t start off as the owner and chief executive officer of Anna’s House—he came in 2004 because he loved the food and the atmosphere. In 2005, a year after his first meal and not wanting the business to close, he purchased the business from Becky Miller, who was no longer interested in owning […]

Things were looking good for Rick and Cheryl Barsness in March 2020. The couple was celebrating the success of their Incredible Pizza Co., founded in 2001, and the opening of a new restaurant in Shawnee, Kansas. As Don Potvin, who’s worked with the couple since 2004, notes, these are no ordinary pizza joints. They are […]

On an otherwise quiet December Sunday in 2020, an errant spark amongst some wires and cables flared into an electrical fire that decimated CoreFX Ingredients’ headquarters in downtown Chicago—including the company’s Customer Innovation Center. Opened just three years earlier in 2017—just a little over a year after Denis Neville launched the food ingredients manufacturer—the 5,000-square-foot […]

When Chad Yakobson founded Crooked Stave, he wasn’t just trying to make good beer. He was trying to prove something. While most brewers had spent decades removing Brettanomyces in beer, he’d spent years studying how to use the yeast species. As laid out in his master’s thesis, he concluded that when left in, Brettanomyces creates […]

Imagine walking down New Orleans’ Magazine Street, the first five blocks of which were created in 1788. A stone’s throw from the Mississippi river, the street is now six miles long and lined with quaint shops occupying buildings constructed in the 1850s. Restaurants are abundant, but one serves up both culinary and musical delights: Juan’s […]