Welcome to FohBoh: The Professional Restaurant Community

What is FohBoh?

FohBoh™ is the first, leading social-business community for the global restaurant industry. If you are employed by or associated with this enormous and incredible industry, FohBoh is your online water cooler to connect, voice your opinions, and do business. We are passionate about this industry and about developing the most thriving, vibrant community to help serve this industry.

FohBoh is short for Front of the House, Back of the House (in industry parlance), and is unlike consumer-centric sites like NRN or CHOW. We are the first and leading B2B social-business community for insiders of the enormous, worldwide restaurant industry. In less than one year, we've grown over 11,000 members from 185 countries and are continuing to grow rapidly.

What is FohBoh’s Mission?

Our mission is to build the world’s largest and most vibrant online restaurant industry community to help you, our members, learn, share, collaborate and succeed. We want to create a superior environment (both online and off) where people can come together to share ideas, get feedback, make friends and new business connections, learn and do business. The foodservice industry has long needed a central water cooler. FohBoh is a powerful tool that gives you a voice in the global restaurant industry. We are passionate about creating a fabulous community that engages you, educates you, and helps you in your business. As we like to say, The Conversation Starts Here™...

Who Joins FohBoh?

FohBoh is for servers and CEOs, cooks and chefs, managers and executives, bartenders, commercial Real Estate developers and brokers, architects, designers, lawyers, accountants, food and beverage vendors, wineries, boutique produce growers, bakers, consultants, concept developers, investors, lenders, owners, franchisees, franchisers, operators, manufacturers, and more. It's a big universe!

The Power of Social Media

FohBoh is more than a network. We are social-business community. Social media is fundamentally changing how humans communicate. Because of this, social engagement online has exploded in recent years. As more people have access to the Internet, technology, Social engagement continues to evolve.

Many saw 2008 as the year for the rise of major vertical networks that can better serve niches than the horizontal networks like FaceBook. In 2009 and beyond, dedicated niche sites like FohBoh that add real value and provide context and relevancy to like-minded professionals, will thrive. People are naturally social, especially those in the restaurant industry and we saw a tremendous need for a restaurant-centric community. We believe that only a community dedicated to the restaurant sector could better address industry issues trends and needs. For example, these issues include staffing, concept development, employee hiring and retention challenges, shift-orientation and scheduling, purchasing methods, employee training, equipment and maintenance, licensing, health regulations, real estate, site selection, customer service, financing, legal and marketing, among others.

It’s Time for Restaurants to Better Utilize Internet Technology

Every day, billions of meals are prepared and served to hungry customers eager to evaluate performance, write and post reviews online. Too often, restaurateurs leave it up to online restaurant reviewers to rate their establishments. Restaurants have been at the mercy of reviewers. It’s time to take control and manage your destiny. Promote, blog, add value, learn, teach and grow. Become part of the conversation.

The Restaurant Industry

Few other industries are under such scrutiny. Few other industries have such high failure rates and no other industry employs so many on a part time basis than the restaurant industry. To suggest that the restaurant industry is fragmented is an understatement. So, why connect and engage with like-minded professionals online? Because our industry is fragmented, dynamic, and always moving. It's a huge industry and the community is the organization and the organization is the community. Restaurateurs must connect, communicate and conduct business in a social media world and FohBoh offers an insider’s view to the restaurant world.

The National Restaurant Association projects that in 2009, the restaurant industry, in the U.S. alone, will generate over $566 billion in sales, from over 945,000 restaurants operating in 50 states staffed by over 13.1 million full and part time employees, or 1:10 employed in the U.S. Restaurants are supplied by tens of thousands of vendors that provide fresh, frozen, packaged and pre-made products daily and keep the equipment operating. The total economic impact of the Restaurant Industry is $2 for every $1 generated in restaurant sales, or over $1.5 Trillion.

How do I maximize my use of FohBoh?

First, we recommend signing up! Once you do, you can comment on other people’s content and also write and post your own. After you sign up, complete your profile and customize your page to give others the opportunity to get to know you better. Since this is a B2B network/community, we recommend that you don’t hide behind an anonymous avatar, though you are free to do so. This also means that recommend you upload a great photo of your face so people can identify you. By default, we assign you a random avatar, mostly because everyone loves something colorful and interesting. Then, join or start a group. If you are a business owner, restaurant association or culinary school, start a private group. As the originator of a private group you will be able to engage, connect, collaborate with your students and alumni; as a restaurateur, invite your employees; as an association, invite your members and find new ways to help them be successful.

At FohBoh you have the largest online foodservice in the world. Use it to explore and content to catch up on. You can read from many thousands of useful blogs, participate in discussions, make new friends, ask questions of the community by posting a discussion thread. You can also view photos and videos contributed by the community as well as posting your own. There is a ton of fun and entertaining videos, but also some very useful educational ones as well.

We ask that you also familiarize yourself with our community guidelines before you post any blogs. WE DO NOT ALLOW SPAMMING! We do want to foster a helpful, positive and safe community. And we're quite proud of the incredible one that has developed so far. We have a number of member mavens and FohBohists™ who may reach out to you, so be prepared to be engaged by friendly FohBoh members :-). In the midst of what many believe is a new U.S. recession, there has never been a better time for a community dedicated to our industry. This is a unique and powerful tool to interact and help each of us through this time.

Welcome aboard!

The Founders, Ted & Michael