“The envelope please. And the winner is…”

This is one of my favorite times of the year—when we learn about some of the top new products at retail and foodservice. Each spring, Information Resources unveils its annual look at supermarket “Pacesetters” ranked by first year sales. Shortly afterward, foodservice industry judges help the National Restaurant Association recognize Food and Beverage Innovation award honorees. Respectively, you can find these stories on pages 23 and 25.

Meanwhile, we’re hard at work on Prepared Foods’ own “Spirit of Innovation” awards. Co-sponsored by Ventura Foods, these awards recognize manufacturers’ product development teams for their collaborative work behind some breakthrough new offerings (in both channels).

Stay tuned here for more news about our 2015 winners.

New Website

If you’ve had the opportunity to visit PreparedFoods.com in the past few weeks, you will have noticed some significant changes.

Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. The entire website has been redesigned. There are several reasons why we’ve gone through the process of redesigning the site, not the least of which is to enhance your experience. The new PreparedFoods.com embodies a clean, simple design that helps readers more quickly identify what’s new on the site—to whatever is most important to you.

We have a dedicated homepage column that showcases daily industry news, so you can discover what has transpired in the food processing world by simply scrolling our homepage. We have also placed an emphasis on images, so you can develop a visual understanding of people and products shaping the food and beverage industries.

What is perhaps more noteworthy is that PreparedFoods.com now inhabits a mobile responsive design.

There are a series of technological goals we’ve achieved by implementing this change, but in the end what this means is that you will be able to access Prepared Foods content more readily on your mobile devices. Though our content will be the same across platforms, it will display differently when accessed via a desktop/laptop computer, smart phone or tablet. You no longer will need to resize pages or zoom to see them more clearly. The content you call up on your devices will automatically conform to the dimensions of your screen.

As a result, PreparedFoods.com will look great no matter what device you use. Lastly, our NutraSolutions website now is part of PreparedFoods.com. NutraSolutions content will mostly be found under the Special Nutrition Products section on our menu. Features and commentary from NutraSolutions will be featured on the PreparedFoods.com homepage. And, of course, you can always access NutraSolutions content under “Magazine” on the menu.

We are very excited to bring you all of our daily product news and long-form features in our new cutting-edge design.