Food Processing: Serving Food and Beverage Manufacturing Since 1940
Food Processing is a trade magazine and media brand for the food and beverage manufacturing industry, now published by Endeavor Business Media — the Nashville-based group reflected in this directory's Nashville, Tennessee listing — and reaching its audience through foodprocessing.com. Its history is unusually long for a trade title: the magazine marked its 70th anniversary in 2010 and its publisher now describes it as being in its 85th year, with origins in a publication called Food Equipment Preview launched in December 1940.
The brand's mission, in its current publisher's words, is to serve the information needs of all job functions and purchasing types in the food and beverage processing industry so they can run their businesses more efficiently, safely and profitably. It covers every major food category — snacks, beverages, frozen foods and the rest — and every major plant function, from research and development and product development through processing technology, packaging, plant operations and marketing, holding a multi-functional audience of company management, operations and R&D professionals.
Beginnings as Food Equipment Preview in 1940
Putman Publishing Co. launched Food Equipment Preview in December 1940, billing it as a new service for food manufacturers. Publisher Russell Putman's front-page editorial in the first issue promised pages filled with concise news-facts — the latest developments in specialised equipment of specific interest to food manufacturing men, in the language of the period. The founding concept was equipment-centred: a young, mechanising food industry needed a regular channel through which makers of processing machinery could reach the plants that bought it.
As the decades passed, the publication's scope broadened exactly as the industry did. The magazine's own 70th-anniversary retrospective noted that Food Equipment Preview and its successors gradually expanded from equipment to ingredients, and then to all other aspects of food manufacturing — formulation, food safety, packaging, plant management and the consumer trends that drive product development. Its name evolved along the way into the direct, descriptive Food Processing, a title that claims the whole manufacturing function rather than any single department within it.
Putman Media: Eight Decades of Family-Era Publishing
For most of its life Food Processing belonged to Putman — Putman Publishing Co. and later Putman Media — a privately held business-to-business publisher based in the Chicago area, latterly Schaumburg, Illinois. Putman became a specialist in serving manufacturing communities, building a portfolio of engineering and processing titles around Food Processing that included Chemical Processing, Control, Control Design, Pharma Manufacturing, Plant Services, Smart Industry and The Journal, from Rockwell Automation.
The publisher was notably lean and entrepreneurial. A trade-association job profile from its independent years described a privately held firm with about 70 people who were expected to act quickly and were empowered to satisfy clients, with its publications aimed squarely at manufacturing audiences. By the 2010s more than a third of its revenue came from digital media rather than printed-page advertising — an early indicator of the direction the whole sector would take — and its anniversary editorials treated that shift matter-of-factly, as one more adaptation in a long line. Food Processing's then-publisher described the franchise — magazine, website and e-newsletters — as the most-read publication and most-visited website in the food and beverage field on the measures available to it, and credited cover stories driven by original reader research and reader participation, including an R&D Team of the Year programme that drew more than 1,500 reader votes in a single year.
Acquisition by Endeavor Business Media in 2022
On May 2, 2022, Nashville-based Endeavor Business Media announced its acquisition of Putman Media, an 84-year-old privately held company, in what trade coverage called one of the most significant of Endeavor's many deals that year. Terms were not disclosed. The Putman brands joining Endeavor were Chemical Processing, Control, Control Design, Food Processing, Pharma Manufacturing, Plant Services, Smart Industry and The Journal — collectively described as representing the world's largest audience of engineers, processors, maintenance, reliability and automation professionals, reaching more than two million global processing professionals each year in print and online.
Endeavor chief executive Chris Ferrell said the company was committed to growing its information and marketing offerings for the professionals Putman had served and honoured to carry the brands forward; Putman chief executive John Cappelletti, who retired with the deal, called it an exciting opportunity for the brands to leverage Endeavor's resources, audience reach and industry expertise. The Putman portfolio complemented Endeavor's manufacturing, processing and design-and-engineering groups alongside titles such as IndustryWeek. Endeavor, founded in December 2017, rebranded as EndeavorB2B in 2025, and Food Processing is now presented as part of Endeavor Business Media, a division of EndeavorB2B.
What Food Processing Covers
The magazine's editorial territory is the full route from idea to packaged product. Product development and ingredient coverage follows formulation trends, nutrition and wellness currents, flavour and functional ingredients, and the R&D teams behind successful launches — a beat the brand institutionalised in its reader-voted R&D Team of the Year recognition. Processing coverage addresses the plant itself: thermal and non-thermal technologies, automation, sanitation, food safety compliance, energy and water use, maintenance and the equipment categories — from blending and conveying to inspection and packaging machinery — that the 1940 first issue was founded to chronicle.
Business coverage completes the triangle: capital spending patterns, salary and workforce data drawn from reader surveys, supplier evaluations supplied annually by readers, plant openings and expansions, mergers and company strategy. The publisher describes the print magazine as delivering a deep understanding of the entire United States and Canadian food manufacturing industry — put at $500 billion in its media materials — from product development and ingredient trends to the latest processing and manufacturing equipment and technology.
Audience and Reach
Food Processing reaches its audience in print and online, and unusually for a trade title, its audience is deliberately multi-functional: company management, operations, research and development and product development, plus the marketing and corporate staff who decide which products the plants will make. The publisher reports more than 50,000 subscribers receiving the magazine every month, and more than 82,000 food industry professionals turning to FoodProcessing.com each month for industry information, news, product development, ingredient and manufacturing technologies and equipment.
That breadth is the brand's founding insight carried forward. A food plant is a system in which a formulation decision becomes a processing problem and a packaging decision becomes a marketing fact; a magazine read simultaneously by the R&D director, the plant manager and the company president gives an entire leadership team a common picture of its industry. Suppliers, in turn, gain a channel to every purchasing influence in the plant at once.
Digital Media and the Food For Thought Podcast
Like its former Putman siblings, Food Processing built a digital business long before the Endeavor acquisition. Its website is the brand's daily news and reference centre, carrying news and trends coverage, cover stories, supplier source guides developed from reader requests for more ways to contact vendors, and the research-based features — salary structures, capital spending, best-supplier lists — generated from its annual readership studies.
The brand also produces Food For Thought, a podcast published on Fridays in which editors talk with experts across the food and beverage industry, taking listeners behind the headlines on subjects spanning product development, plant operations and industry business. The podcast is distributed through the Food Processing website and standard podcast platforms, extending the magazine's interview tradition into the medium plant managers and executives actually consume during commutes and travel.
Reading Eighty-Five Years of Food History
The magazine's anniversary retrospectives have used its own history as a lens on the industry's. Its 70th-anniversary cover package deliberately looked back not at the magazine but at milestones in the food industry across those seven decades, crediting news editor Diane Toops's observations on how domestic and world developments in each decade shaped food manufacturing — wartime production and rationing in the 1940s, the frozen-food and convenience revolutions, the rise of food-safety regulation, globalisation of supply chains, and the wellness era's reformulation pressures.
One honest detail in that retrospective captures the industry's social change: the early years' constant references to the men of the food industry gave way, in magazine and industry alike, to recognition of the critical contribution of women at every level of food manufacturing. A trade title publishing continuously through that span becomes a primary source for its own sector's history, and Food Processing's editors have treated the archive with that responsibility.
Standing in the Food Industry
Food Processing's position rests on breadth and seniority. Specialist titles serve slices of its territory — meat, dairy, baking, beverages, food safety, packaging — but Food Processing addresses the whole manufacturing enterprise and the whole management team, and it has done so since before the Second World War reshaped American food production. Its survival through the Putman-to-Endeavor transition, with its Putman stablemates intact around it, reflects an acquirer's judgement that the franchise retained exactly the audience and authority its anniversary claims described.
Published today by Endeavor Business Media from Nashville, Tennessee, and read by tens of thousands of subscribers and online professionals each month, the magazine that began in December 1940 as an equipment preview for food manufacturers continues to do the job Russell Putman promised in its first issue: bring food manufacturers concise, useful facts about the equipment, ingredients, technologies and business developments that determine whether their plants — and their products — succeed.
