Real Work, Real Talk: 30 Years of FSTEC

This week's Shoutout goes to the good people at Informa and to FSTEC, which just marked its 30th anniversary. Thirty years. In an industry where most things don't last thirty months, that's a milestone worth celebrating.

If you don't know it, FSTEC is the conference that puts restaurant technologists and operators in the same room, FSTEC 2026, with 1,500-plus operators, 70-plus speakers, and 230-plus tech providers. And it does the one thing our industry desperately needs more of.

Longtime readers know I bang this drum constantly: technologists and operators too often talk right past each other. FSTEC is built to fix that. Real work and real talk, in person, about what operators actually need, not what a roadmap says they might want.

That’s the gap where most restaurant tech goes to die, and closing it is the entire point of a room like this.

Now, a special shoutout within the shoutout. Mr. Keith Lee delivered a keynote, fittingly titled "Beyond the Review: How Authentic Influence Drives Real-World Impact," and by every account the packed room felt exactly what I've always felt about him: this is a genuine, generous, and authentic person.

Keith built an audience north of 20 million by doing something deceptively simple, telling the truth about family-owned restaurants, and the "Keith Lee Effect" has since put more struggling small operators on the map than any ad budget could dream of. He didn't buy that trust. He earned it, one honest review at a time.

And borrowing from this week's Top of the Fold on collaboration, it's not lost on me that Keith is a stakeholder and partner of Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, which, full disclosure, is a Branded portfolio company.

But here's why that partnership works, and why it belongs in the same conversation as Dunkin and L.L.Bean rather than the forced pairings that fall flat: it's real. Keith says he backed the brand b/c "it's creative, it's accessible, and it doesn't cut corners on flavor," and anyone who follows him knows that is exactly the food he actually champions. The man and the mission match. That's the whole game.

So thank you, Informa, for three decades of building the room where operators and technologists finally hear each other, and congratulations to Keith on a keynote that clearly landed. If you build restaurant tech, or buy it, this is a room worth being in.

Here's to the next thirty.