What's with the Pineapple?

The industry data is in, and it's a mixed bag — limited service is hanging on, full service is still struggling, and the highest margin item on every menu is quietly losing ground. David Henks, Senior Principal and Head of Strategic Partnerships at Technomic, joins Justin and Emily to make sense of all of it. Nearly 30 years of food service intelligence gets unpacked in one conversation: where traffic is actually growing, why beverages have become the industry's unlikeliest bright spot, what's r

Go green, go white, go get a Michelin star — apparently Detroit's in the running for all three. Justin flies solo this week to welcome Jay Davis, Crain's Detroit man on the restaurant beat, for a deep dive into the biggest food news the city's had in years: Michelin is doing a Midwest guide, and Detroit's hosting the very first Great Lakes reveal dinner next April at Michigan Central. Jay sets his over/under at three and a half stars and breaks down what a Michelin star actually can do to a rest

What do a U.S. Army platoon and a Taco Bell restaurant have in common? More than you'd think — and Monica Rothgery has the war stories to prove it. Monica went from second lieutenant to COO of KFC to keynote speaker, and her through-line the whole time has been the most underleveraged person in any restaurant or hotel: the frontline manager. She joined us to give a preview of her upcoming keynote at the Women in Hospitality Leadership Conference in November and it took a lot of will (WIHL?) pow

We're coming to you live from the 2026 MRLA Summer Board Meeting at Grand Traverse Resort, and we pulled Isaac Collazo aside before he took the stage to give us a few minutes of tell us more on the state of the hotel industry. Isaac leads analytics at STR, a division of CoStar Group — the people who quite literally wrote the book on hotel market data. If anyone knows where this industry is heading, it's him. We got into what actually drove that surprisingly strong June, what Michigan's numbers

We're doing something we've never done before: skipping the news, ditching the segments, and handing the whole episode over to our guests. That's how excited we are about this one. Josh and Jase — the British content creators who dove headfirst into Michigan in the dead of winter and loved it enough to come back — are here. We talked Great Lakes polar plunge, Mackinac Island, the Big Home, pasties, and why Midwest nice might be the most disarming thing one can experience in America. Fair warning

What does it take to cement a region as a premier culinary destination? This week, Justin and Emily sit down for an exclusive interview exploring the upcoming Traverse City Food & Wine Festival, unpacking the community partnerships and creative culinary forces driving northern Michigan's booming tourism scene.  Plus, a marathon overnight session in Lansing results in a massive $75.2 billion state budget—we’re breaking down what a split Legislature's eleventh-hour deal means for local operator