Ken Young of Ovations Food Services will be honored with the 2008 National Association of Concessionaires’ Mickey Warner Award. The award will be presented Monday, July 28 at the Membership Luncheon in the Sheraton Park Hotel during the NAC Annual Convention in Anaheim, California.

The Mickey Warner Award is named for the originator of the NAC Concession Manager Certification program, and a great innovator and educator for the concessions industry. “We are pleased to honor Ken for his longevity, innovation and leadership in the industry as well as his support and commitment of NAC,” said NAC President Maria Angles, ECM, of Cinemark Theatres. Young is the seventh person to be honored with this award; previous winners are Shelley Feldman, NAC director of education, Walter Dunn of The Coca-Cola Company, Frank Liberto of Ricos Products Company, Jeremy M. Jacobs of Delaware North Companies, Chris Bigelow of Bigelow Companies, and Phil Noyes of Proof of the Pudding.

A native of Philadelphia, Ken Young has been in the recreational food business for over 35 years since graduating from Penn State University in 1972. He began his career with Aramark and then held senior management positions with the Volume Services Division of Interstate United Corporation. Through his tenure with Volume Services, Young became the corporation’s president for the eastern half of the United States. Among his responsibilities was the oversight of accounts for Major League Baseball, the National Football League, arenas and convention centers, and the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Young then founded New Vista Services, a company that provided food service to recreation facilities such as the Orlando Arena, the Citrus Bowl Stadium, Harbor Par and new ballparks in Rochester and Syracuse, New York. In 2000 Young founded Ovations Food Services, a recreation food service business which currently has over 80 accounts in the U.S. and Canada. The firm acquired Fanfare Enterprises in 2001, another foodservice contractor based in California. In 2001 Ovations was partly sold to Comcast-Spectacor, the Philadelphia-based sports and entertainment firm which owns the Philadelphia Flyers, the Philadelphia 76ers, The Wachovia Center and Wachovia Spectrum, Comcast SportsNet, Global Spectrum, a public assembly management company, New Era Tickets, and Front Row Marketing, among other subsidiaries.

Ovations has grown to one of the major foodservice contractors, with annual sales over $200 million. Food Management magazine named Ovations 16th out of the Top 50 Management Companies, according to domestic top line revenues. It was ranked second in terms of sales volume growth from 2004-2006, with a growth rate of 138 percent.

In addition to his management of Ovations, Young also owns several minor league sports franchises. He has been the president of the Norfolk Tides AAA Baseball Club since 1993. Under his leadership, the club has experienced great success, averaging in excess of 500,000 fans a year. The team was named professional baseball’s 1993 Franchise of the Year and received the Freitas AAA Franchise of the Year in 1994.

Young is also owner and president of the AA Bowie Baysox and A Frederick Keys of the Baltimore Orioles organization, and the AAA Albuquerque Isotopes of the Florida Marlins organization. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of Minor League Baseball.

He entered the hockey franchise arena in 2004 with the purchase of the American Hockey League’s Norfolk Admirals and has increased attendance more than 17 percent to nearly 200,000 per season since assuming ownership.

Young was honored by Venues Today magazine in 2006 and 2007 for their Hall of Headlines Award for Concessions. He has three children and resides in Tampa for most of the fall and winter months and in Norfolk for the summer.

The inspiration for the award, Mickey Warner (1920-1995) had a passion to give recreational foodservice its professional place. His passion led to the innovation of certification programs, an industry textbook, and an NAC university chair. In the early 1980's, Warner discussed the idea of funding university-level research and teaching with then-NAC president Shelley Feldman. The NAC Board established a chair at Florida International University's, School of Hospitality Management.

In 1985, at the age of 65, Warner entered a doctorate program at the College of Education at FIU to perform research in recreational foodservice management. Within two years, he completed the entire required curriculum, passed the comprehensive examination and presented his research topics on the competencies of a recreational foodservice manager to the dissertation committee. He was turned down because of a lack of "body of knowledge."

Not to be defeated, Warner set out to establish a "body of knowledge" by producing an all-encompassing textbook, Recreational Foodservice Management, which is the cornerstone of the NAC certification program today. During the busy summer of 1988 Warner wrote the textbook, established an undergraduate course at FIU, and established a new, one-level certification program for NAC. The next fall Warner represented his request for research to the doctoral committee and was approved.

The National Association of Concessionaires was founded in 1944 to serve the recreational and leisure-time food and beverage concessions industry as a network and resource for operators, suppliers, manufacturers and distributors. Association services include publications, educational seminars and training programs, convention and trade shows and other programs for the concessions industry.