SPONSORS

Welbilt, Inc.

Welbilt, Inc. provides the world’s top chefs, premier chain operators and growing independents with innovative products and solutions that are backed by KitchenCare – our aftermarket repair and parts service. Our portfolio of award-winning brands includes Cleveland, Convotherm, Delfield, fitkitchenSM, Frymaster, Garland, Kolpak, Lincoln, Manitowoc Ice, Merco, Merrychef and Multiplex. Visit www.welbilt.com.

Middleby Corporation

Of all things a company can supply none is more important than trust. This is evident at the Middleby Corporation by our strong relationship with customers, suppliers, shareholders, and employees. Trust is why we’re the world leader in commercial cooking equipment. We perpetually “disrupt” our industry with advanced cooking innovations that bring speed, energy saving and green benefits to commercial kitchens.

Scorpion

Restaurant franchises that want to maximize their online exposure and drive more customers to their locations partner with Scorpion to reach their goals. We guide your digital marketing strategy and leverage award-winning technology to scale your plan across your entire restaurant franchise system. You get increased foot traffic, award-winning customer service, and measurable ROI for your restaurant brand.

Chatmeter

Chatmeter helps enterprise retail brands and agencies managing multi-locations increase their revenue by identifying areas in their online presence that drives customers to choose their stores over competitors. The leading Local Reputation platform with listing and review management, social monitoring, and Local SEO rank tracking, Chatmeter is a complete online reputation solution.

Dinova

Dinova is an innovative, proprietary marketplace connecting expense account diners to quality restaurants nationwide. Dinova influences $6B annually in business meals and entertainment expenses. Participating companies range from more than a million SMBs to hundreds of Fortune 500 enterprises, and its 14,000+ restaurant network includes local independents, national full-service and limited-service brands, encompassing all price levels and cuisines.

f’real

f’real is the innovation leader in frozen blended beverages, with 15 years of experience and over 18,000 retail locations. Our revolutionary technology provides retail and food service operators with a quick, easy, and affordable solution to deliver 4 delicious product lines: milkshakes, smoothies, frappes, and blended drinks.

Frost Brown Todd

Frost Brown Todd is a full-service law firm with more than 500 lawyers across its eight-state footprint. Our franchise and distribution team is a leader in the field, representing franchise systems of all sizes in many industries. We’ve put our balanced approach to problem solving to use in helping to establish and expand franchise and distribution systems throughout the country.

Gusto

Born in the Cloud in 2012 to seamlessly deliver a multi-channel commerce platform to franchisors and multi-unit enterprises within the Fast Casual/QSR space, Gusto provides serious restaurant operators the tools they require to stay ahead of the competition. Gusto enables our users to be nimble and drive their customer engagement initiatives.

LevelUp

LevelUp builds custom mobile experiences to help clients engage customers, grow sales and build a scalable mobile strategy. Our platform offers a broad range of functionality including mobile rewards, payments, online ordering, CRM, and more. LevelUp is passionate about ensuring client apps achieve maximum consumer penetration through excellent design and promotion.

MicroSale

MicroSale is a powerful, hybrid-style point of sale system for restaurants. With the dependability of the Windows platform and the conveniences of the cloud, MicroSale is a proven solution for fast-paced environments. MicroSale offers multi-location management, EMV technology, online ordering, loyalty, online reporting, inventory, employee scheduler, 24/7 support, and more.

MomentFeed

Capture More Mobile Moments. Software for multi-location brands to manage the entire mobile customer experience. MomentFeed drives consumers in the moment of decision from their phone to your store.

PlayerLync

PlayerLync is modern learning software that integrates mobility, digital forms, content distribution, and daily performance management into a single solution that helps operational teams deliver exceptional customer experiences. Create and publish digital content and videos to mobile devices securely, without impacting network bandwidth or requiring user downloads.

Suttle-Straus

S4 is a powerful online platform allowing franchises to increase efficiency by managing brand standards and marketing assets across distributed networks. S4 is powered by Suttle-Straus, one of North America’s largest commercial printers, with end-to-end print capabilities including creative design, conventional, digital, wide format, direct mail, kitting, fulfillment and distribution.

Taylor Company

As a foodservice equipment leader, Taylor Company offers frozen drink machines, soft serve ice cream machines, and commercial grills. Taylor Company has the foodservice equipment that you need to excel. Taylor offers the highest level of quality products and extraordinary customer service. Since 1926, Taylor equipment offers best-in-class manufacturing, with a worldwide factory authorized distributor network.

Visualogistix

Professional. Consistent. Timely. You need all of these from your marketing strategy, execution, and distribution. Our extensive marketing supply chain management solution allows our team of experts to partner with you on everything from print production, promotional products, inventory management and fulfillment services. Visualogistix is your one stop shop.

Bloom Intelligence

Bloom Intelligence provides a Wi-Fi sensor-based business intelligence and marketing automation platform that helps restaurants improve sales, decrease customer attrition, and increase profitability. We collect hard-to-capture customer information like traffic volume, dwell time, return rate and visit frequency, and turn that into business intelligence including a location’s churn rate, predicted traffic, and customer lifetime value.

Chatter Research

Chatter Research is the world’s first AI-powered customer feedback solution. We provide conversational surveys over text message that are triggered as soon as a customer leaves your store. Insights are analyzed immediately on our real-time dashboard to drive customer experience wins. Our solution generates an 8x higher response rate and a 90% completion rate than off the receipt and email surveys.

Giftogram

Giftogram lets you reward, motivate and engage your employees and customers with one card, good for eGift Cards at hundreds of non-completing retailers. Even better, Giftograms can be personalized, so you can include your company logo, add a matching greeting card, and even include unique messaging. It’s the easiest way to give a gift that will go from being distinctly yours to distinctly theirs.

Panasonic

Panasonic custom designs the best integrated restaurant and retail technology solutions in the industry. Digital signage, loss prevention, mobile computing and point-of-sale solutions are just a few of the ways Panasonic can enhance customer satisfaction and keep you one step in front of the competition.

SweetIQ

SweetIQ gets hundreds of businesses listed on search and discovery sites like Google, Bing, and Foursquare. Our suite of local products and services, combined with the strategic insight of our Local Experts, helps enterprises connect with consumers by boosting brand awareness through reviews, consistent local content, keyword monitoring, and making them to truly own their presence on the buyer’s journey from search to sale.

Winmark Franchise Partners

Winmark Franchise Partners assists entrepreneurs and emerging franchisors who can benefit from our experience in establishing, growing and managing successful franchise businesses. As a subsidiary of Winmark Corporation, a publicly traded franchisor of 5 brands, 1,200 locations and over $1B in sales, we have the experience, resources and capital to help clients succeed in franchising their business.

Detecto Scale

Detecto Scale, an ISO-9001 certified scale manufacturer, markets a complete line of quality weighing products for the healthcare, foodservice and shipping/logistics industries. Detecto’s headquarters and factory is in Webb City, Missouri, USA. Founded in 1900, Detecto Scale is the largest medical scale manufacturer in the United States.

Dot It Restaurant Fulfillment

Dot It Restaurant Fulfillment is a specialized restaurant distributor. We source, stock, pack and ship all of a restaurant’s branded products and restaurant supplies. This includes all FOH and BOH products that don’t fit into broadline distribution, such as labels, signage, menus and apparel. Visit us online at brand.dotit.com.

ReviewPush

ReviewPush helps restaurants monitor, manage and improve their online reviews across the web. ReviewPush also helps restaurants convert more satisfied customers into positive web reviews through POS, CRM and mobile app integrations. More than 15,000 businesses currently leverage the ReviewPush system to improve their online reputation.

UberEATS

Your restaurant, delivered. Partner with UberEATS for a new way to make money, reach new diners, and deliver food to your customers.

Scoppechio

Scoppechio is a full-service omnichannel marketing agency with offices in Louisville (HQ), Cincinnati and Columbus. With more than 200 employees across the network, Scoppechio serves a broad client portfolio including: LongHorn Steakhouse, Cheddar’s, KFC, NPC/Pizza Hut, Einstein’s, YUM brands and more. Visit scoppechio.com to view our work and to learn more.

Fishman Public Relations

Fishman Public Relations executes strategic PR and content marketing programs that create brand awareness and drive inbound leads for franchise sales. For more than 25 years, Fishman PR has generated high-level print, broadcast and online earned media coverage that puts brands on the map, closing countless franchise deals.

Frontier Communications

Frontier Communications supports thousands of QSR locations across the country. Customers love our “Catering to You” platform that delivers proven solutions for content marketing, voice technologies, managed Wi-Fi and business continuity for peace of mind. All are designed to improve your customer experience plus reduce cost and risk for operators.

Marketing Informatics

Marketing Informatics solves marketing challenges for national restaurant brands by combining data and strategy to propel social, digital and direct. Without contracts, minimums or hassles, we expertly address challenges by implementing programs that drive awareness & traffic. You get a partner that deliver results, works efficiently and reduces your stress.

Northeast Color

Northeast Color specializes in environmental branding solutions for the franchise industry. Our years of experience producing branded interiors and signage for national chains of all sizes and varieties ensures that your locations will launch on time and on budget, maintaining brand consistency with an eye toward maximum impact.

SOCi

SOCi is a leading, next-generation SaaS solution for social media management and content discovery. SOCi’s proprietary content scoring technology and efficiency tools streamline social media management empowering social marketers to manage 100s, even 1000s of accounts.

Soundtrack Your Brand

Soundtrack Your Brand is a Spotify-backed company with a mission to kill bad background music. We’ve spent the last couple of years building the world’s best music streaming service for brands. We provide businesses with an ultramodern music platform and a scientifically proven content curation model, crafted by connoisseurs and perfected with technology.

TDn2K

TDn2K (Transforming Data into Knowledge) is the parent company of People Report™, Black Box Intelligence™ and White Box Social Intelligence™. Together they report on 43,000+ restaurant units, 2.5 million employees and over $69 billion in sales. They are also the producers of leading restaurant industry conferences including the Global Best Practices Conference each held annually in Dallas, Texas.

ZIVELO

As a public computing pioneer, ZIVELO has quickly emerged as a market leader in the self-service technology landscape. At its core ZIVELO is a full service design agency with the capabilities to design, engineer, manufacturer and take cutting edge products from conception to completion.

video sponsor

Hughes Network Systems

Hughes’ HughesON™ high performance network & digital media solutions enable retailers & restaurants to securely and cost-effectively drive customer loyalty & employee satisfaction. HughesON gives you the agility to leverage mobile with Wi-Fi, increase employee effectiveness with video, and streamline operations while increasing revenues without overwhelming your network or staff.

photo booth sponsor

Location3

Location3 is the digital marketing agency that delivers enterprise-level strategy with local market activation. Our proprietary platform, LOCALACT, is built to power and scale local digital marketing for franchise systems and multi-location businesses. Location3 and LOCALACT combine into a unique Software-with-a-Service model, while integrating client data in a centralized platform.

wifi sponsor

Revolution

Restaurant Revolution Technologies is the off-premise partner for restaurants. Revolution licenses its omni-channel ordering platform, Order One, which integrates with POS systems enabling customers to easily order from any channel—online, mobile, voice, chat– for delivery or takeout. Revolution provides live phone support, delivery enablement, data capture and demand creation.

lanyard sponsor

SpenDifference

SpenDifference partners with restaurant companies providing customized supply chain solutions. Our “Better Together” approach provides leverage, expertise and transparency to ensure your supply chain delivers maximum value. With services tailored to meet your needs, SpenDifference manages costs, risk and business intelligence, for a stronger bottom line while supporting brand growth.

Louisville Forward

Louisville Forward is an integrated approach to economic and community development. Created in 2014, Louisville Forward combines business attraction, expansion and retention activities, and talent and workforce attraction, with all of the city’s real estate development, land use and planning and design functions to present a unified solution for job growth and quality of place.

MCM CPAs & Advisors

MCM CPAs & Advisors offers expertise in audit and assurance services, tax planning, business valuation, litigation support, fraud examination, business start‐up and consulting for non‐profit, public and privately held organizations, and individuals. MCM was recently ranked by Inside Public Accounting’s Top 100 list as the 79th largest accounting firm in the United States.

United Mail

United Mail is a direct marketing company with our roots in the data, print, digital and mail arenas. Our team approach is to enrich customer response rates through a 1:1 Omni-channel approach. Our intentional and deliberate use of our unique tactics is what sets us apart from our competition. Our national clients rely on every campaign being targeted and relevant – positively impacting results.

Fast Casual

Fast Casual is the global online leader for news, analysis, blogs and research in the worldwide fast casual restaurant industry.

Food Truck Operator

Food Truck Operator was launched in 2017 to meet the needs of the thriving food truck industry. The new digital property covers industry trends and news, profiles business owners, and explores the technologies and tools available to help operators grow their businesses.

Kentucky Restaurant Association

The Kentucky Restaurant Association is a not-for-profit trade association representing Kentucky foodservice outlets and a variety of businesses associated with the foodservice industry. The Association provides members with a wide range of educational resources.

The NPD Group

The NPD Group is the leading global provider of market information and business solutions covering brick-and-mortar, e-commerce, and emerging channels in more than 20 industries. We combine our unique data assets with analytic solutions to help our clients measure performance, predict trends, and improve results, advising them to help drive successful growth.

Pizza Marketplace

Pizza Marketplace is the premier online destination for C-level pizza executive leadership seeking cutting-edge intelligence for their multi-unit restaurant concepts.

QSRweb

QSRweb delivers fast-breaking news, features and analysis on the quick-service restaurant industry.

Scarlet’s Bakery | Scarlet Hope

Scarlet Hope is an organization dedicated to raising awareness against sexual assault and exploitation. In 2015, in the heart of Louisville, Scarlet’s Bakery went from a vision to a reality—affording new job opportunities and bringing new light to women who felt helpless in a presumably dark future. We proudly support Scarlet’s Bakery—their baked goods are incredible! Try them if you can. 100% of the profit goes to rescuing exploited women.