Do you ever consider how much you accomplish in a day, a week or a year? We do. Each year at this time, Food Engineering's editorial team begins work on a three-and-a-half month project that provides a very unique service to our industry-the Food and Beverage Plant Construction survey. In its 29th year, this research survey uncovered more than 500 plant projects of $1 million or more last year.

I am writing this column on the day they call the most depressing day of the year: January 24. By the time you read this, say around mid-February, I am not so sure that day will seem any different.

As we prepared this issue's cover story on innovation in food manufacturing, I was reminded that innovation comes in all shapes and sizes.

After you have been doing something for 25 years, you have to hope you would finally get the hang of it.

About two months ago, a group of 80 people from the food and beverage processing industry got together in a quiet Utah mountainside community.

Every once in a while, I think it's a good idea to see where you have been in order to decide where you want to go.

If you want to be of service to the food industry, I suggest you keep on reading.

Over the past few decades, food and beverage manufacturers have fought tooth and nail to get the right products to the right consumers at the right time.

Is it the need to be first, the drive toward innovation or just the way we now do business in the 21st Century that causes food and beverage manufacturers to continue to work at breakneck speed?

Whether you call it lean manufacturing, getting more bang for the buck, increased productivity or doing more with less, it doesn't really matter.