By Phil Kafarakis, IFMA The Food Away from Home Association, President & CEO
March 2025
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A big part of our commitment to serve our membership is through providing fact-based information, education, research, guidance, and best practices to assist members in growing their businesses. That includes alerting them to any conditions that could challenge their business existence. As our organization continues its transformation, we are expanding our efforts through the development of a news and media platform.
At our COEX event earlier this month, prompted by the legislative environment and business policy actions that we see being implemented, we launched a “Regulatory & Trade Insights Committee” as directed by our Board.
The committee’s intent is to create a structure and process for reporting on how any specific legislative actions that are being discussed and rolled out may impact the food-away-from-home ecosystem. We have no intention of committing to any policy positions ourselves, we remain firmly non-partisan; our focus will always be in assisting members to stay on top of the issues so they may have current information when making future operating plans.
We have engaged with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) who will provide us updates on their legislative work since they represent thousands of manufacturing companies across the county, including food. By leveraging the expertise of association peer groups like NAM and the National Restaurant Association, and by following business-focused media outlets closely, including Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Fox Business News, CNBC, and The Financial Times, we have already begun to report on how legislative business actions could impact our members and the industry we represent.
To report the news accurately and on a timely basis, we recently announced an addition to our Team – Peter Romeo who serves as our new Managing Editor.
Romeo is a trusted journalist with 40+ years' experience in reporting on government affairs and food industry topics. He will be creating relevant news alerts for us, as well as providing analysis and feature stories on topics that matter to our membership. Romeo can draw from a multitude of industry senior executives that he has developed as sources over the years to give our articles as wide a perspective as possible, so our membership is informed on the range of business positions out there.
You'll see a few of Romeo’s latest articles in this issue of The Pulse. We’ll continue to highlight them in future issues as well.
You can find all of Romeo's recent articles on our website.
Bringing you provocative perspective from inside the food industry is what I do. For more than 30 years I have been operating at the cross-roads of the global food ecosystem. An executive insider from the food manufacturing community and an industry advocate, I cover the amazing transformation taking place in the food industry. The comprehensive and unique perspective on what moves food companies to success or failure that I share, is driven by confidential access - from emerging innovators to the board rooms of multinationals, and everyone in between. Currently serving as the President & CEO of IFMA The Food Away from Home Association.