Robin Ashton Biography

Robin Ashton is principal at Ashton Foodservice Consulting and the publisher/editor of The Ashton Report and The Ashton Report Insider. He has more than 40 years’ experience as an editor, publisher and researcher of the foodservice and foodservice equipment and supplies markets in the U.S. and worldwide. Ashton has a penchant for creating and disseminating unique, ground-breaking market data on these segments. He has forecasted growth of the foodservice E&S market since the early 1980s, and helped create most of the essential data used by manufacturers, distributors, consultants and others in the E&S market. He launched Ashton Foodservice Consulting and the e-newsletters in 2018.

Ashton was co-founder and publisher of Foodservice Equipment Reports and its ancillary print, electronic and event products, and president of Gill Ashton Publishing and FER Media LLC from 1996 to 2018. Before founding FER, Ashton spent 18 years as an editor, editor-in-chief and publisher with Cahners Publishing (now Reed Business). He has been involved with magazines including Restaurants & Institutions, Foodservice Equipment & Supplies Specialist, Foodservice Equipment & Supplies International, Packaging, and Research & Development. Throughout his career, Ashton has pioneered innovative market research in every market in which he has been involved.

As an editor, Ashton has won numerous awards, including American Business Press (now Connectiv) Jesse H. Neal Certificates of Merit and Finalist honors, and two national awards for in-depth features from the American Society of Business Press Editors While publisher and research editor of FER, he, his editors and art director won 65 editorial and design awards.

Ashton was educated at Shimer College, the University of Massachusetts and the State University of New York at Binghamton (M.A., Comparative Literature). He lives in Evanston, Ill., with his wife, Jan, FER’s news editor. They have three children: their daughter Emma, who is a sales associate with FER Media, son Samuel, and his son Daniel.