Charles D. Cretors will be honored with the 2009 National Association of Concessionaires' Mickey Warner Award. The award will be presented Monday, July 27 at the Membership Luncheon in the Hilton Boston Logan Hotel during the NAC Annual Convention in Boston.

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 Charlie for his longevity, innovation and leadership in the industry as well as his support and commitment to NAC," said NAC President Maria Angles, ECM, of Hollywood Entertainment. Cretors is the eighth 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, Phil Noyes of Proof of the Pudding, and Ken Young of Ovations Food Services.

Charlie Cretors was born into his family's now 124-year-old company. Founded in 1885, Charlie Cretors' great-grandfather was the first to patent the process of popping corn in oil. C. Cretors & Company now manufactures a line of concessions equipment including popcorn poppers, nacho warmers, cheese dispensers, hot dog grills and cotton candy machines.

Charlie, the fourth generation of Cretors in the family business, is a graduate of the Michigan College of Mining and Technology (now Michigan Technological University) with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering and machine design. After graduation, he worked for five years at Commonwealth Edison in Chicago in central engineering, in the power stations, and in customer service doing energy consumption analysis.

He joined the family business in 1968, succeeding his father as chief engineer, to develop the Flo Thru® industrial line of hot air poppers. He moved on to the design, engineering and development of the company's retail popcorn machine equipment. In 1980 he became president of the company, and a few years later the sole owner. For the past 40 years Charlie has been responsible for the design of Cretors entire line of equipment. He has obtained twelve patents on various innovations and inventions.

In 1998 Charlie was elected to the Academy of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Michigan Technological University, one of 50 members out of 8,000 graduates. He is on the Board of Directors of the Illinois Manufacturing Association, a member of the Snack Food Association, and its Corn Tech Committee representing popcorn.

Charlie has been active in promoting and establishing education for the concessions industry. He was the first instructor in the Cretors Service School to diagnose and service Cretors machines that began informally in 1980 and grew to a two and a half day seminar with manuals and a curriculum. Charlie has given several presentations to the Snack Food Association (SFA) and wrote part of the SFA's Corn Tech Manual. He created a program on the manufacture of popcorn that has been incorporated into the Practical Short Course in Snack Food Manufacturing taught each year at Texas A&M University. He also wrote the 25-page textbook that accompanies the lecture. Charlie was the author of a chapter on popcorn in the book Snack Food Processing, published in 2001 and edited by Dr. Ed W. Lusas and Dr. Lloyd Rooney from Texas A&M.

Charlie and his wife Linda reside in the Chicago area and have three children - Beth, Charles and Andrew.

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.