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Introducing the RestaurantOwner.com Hospitality & Culinary Education Center

For more than two decades, RestaurantOwner.com — the official website of Restaurant Startup & Growth – has been committed to educating and inspiring independent restaurant owners and managers to engage their team, delight their guests, and build an exceptional business. Our team of editors continually develops articles, tools and training to help improve the skills and systems essential for sustainable restaurant success.

And during that time, university and college hospitality educators have supplemented their restaurant and foodservice management curriculum with RestaurantOwner.com articles, business plan templates, and learning management system content.

RestaurantOwner.com's Hospitality and Culinary Education Center is a new membership program for university and college hospitality and culinary educators and their students.

Recognizing the value of its management best practices content to hospitality management students, RestaurantOwner.com has curated its online courses, training videos, whitepapers and downloadable templates for its Hospitality and Culinary Education Center (HCEC).

The HCEC offers a dedicated landing page and an affordable student membership program to supplement classroom theory with the applied learning that has helped thousands of independent restaurant owners succeed at restaurant ownership and management.

Hospitality management educators can expand their curriculum beyond dated textbooks and YouTube videos. The HCEC is a portal to a library of engaging real-world content on restaurant accounting and finance, business planning, entrepreneurship, human resources, kitchen management, law, leadership, marketing, real estate, sustainability and technology.

The HCEC speaks the language of hospitality academia via its advisory board of hospitality and restaurant management academics. They will help select content to optimize hospitality curriculum from community college to graduate programs, and to guide classroom implementation. They will also be key contacts to discuss development of the HCEC to meet the needs of hospitality academics and their students in this rapidly changing industry.

Why Now?

The RestaurantOwner.com approach to hospitality management education is more relevant and important than ever for educating the next generation of restaurant industry leaders. According to Stephani Robson, senior lecturer emerita at Cornell University, "Students don't want textbooks anymore – they want tools. That is why I had all my students sign up for RestaurantOwner.com instead of buying a textbook for my course in restaurant development."

Adds Robson, "They especially like the videos that reinforce key concepts like prime cost and labor budgeting. And, of course, the business planning and financial templates are a huge to help them as they develop their restaurant ideas for class."

Robson has found that many of her students maintained their RestaurantOwner.com memberships after graduation. "It has useful material on just about everything they need to get their real-life restaurants open and to operate them profitably. That is why I like to create content for the site. It is a great learning tool for anyone who wants to become a successful restaurateur."

Complimentary Educator Plan

The RestaurantOwner.com HCEC offers a complimentary six-month membership for college and university hospitality educators. It is available to any academic who is teaching in a program that leads to culinary and hospitality and restaurant management degrees and certifications.

Participating instructors may incorporate these resources with students while in the classroom, if they properly attribute and cite the source as RestaurantOwner.com. (Of course, this requirement should be familiar to any educator using others' intellectual property.)

This might include:

• Creating and distributing pdf files of articles, forms and whitepapers.
• Presenting RestaurantOwner.com videos and webinars in class.
• Incorporating RestaurantOwner.com content in PowerPoint and other presentations.

After the complimentary educator membership expires, educator members may continue as members for $79 for each additional six-month membership. Educator members can cancel anytime.

That said, RestaurantOwner.com will provide an additional 30 days of complimentary membership to educator members for each student in their classes who becomes a student subscriber (details on that plan below).

For example, if 10 students subscribe to RestaurantOwner.com during a given semester, the instructor will earn 300 days' complimentary membership. This is no different than textbook publishers providing free access to their materials if the educator incorporates them in their courses.

The RestaurantOwner.com HCEC offers six-month, discounted student membership for $79. Compared to many academic resources, such as textbooks, this is quite affordable and offers several valuable benefits for culinary and hospitality students, including:

• Articles, business plans, forms, spreadsheets, success stories, templates and on-demand videos to assist with assignments.
• Online courses on a variety of restaurant management topics with certificates of completion to add to their portfolios.
• An online discussion forum that allows students to ask questions about the business to restaurant owners.

RestaurantOwner.com provides a licensing agreement to colleges and universities that wish to incorporate HCEC content across their curriculum, to make the integration of the materials on learning platforms, such as Blackboard and Canvas, even more affordable and seamless. This includes a dedicated dashboard on RestaurantOwner.com.

Real-World Application

Haragopal "H.G." Parsa is professor and chair at the Fritz Knoebel School of Hospitality Management, University of Denver Daniel's College of Business. Says Parsa, "University hospitality management education is as much about application as theory. I supplement my course materials with articles, videos and more on RestaurantOwner.com so that my students can learn how to put restaurant business and management best practices into action."

Parsa believes RestaurantOwner.com content on restaurant accounting, finance, HR, marketing and operations helps students conceptualize and apply key concepts in these areas "better than any resource available. I have used the site's content in the finance, HR, and law courses I have taught to help students make the leap from theory to relevant real-world application."

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