Terms & Conditions
Effective Date: These Terms and Conditions are effective as of January 8, 2026.
This page explains the legal terms that apply when you access or use the Restaurant Association website (“Site”), subscribe to our resources, participate in our community, or otherwise interact with our content and services.
By using the Restaurant Association website and services, you agree to these terms and consent to follow them. If you do not agree to these Terms and Conditions, please do not use the Site or our services.
Access and Use of the Site
Eligibility
You need to be at least 18 years old and legally able to agree to use this Site, whether you're here on your own behalf or representing a restaurant, hospitality business, or supplier. We can limit, suspend, or cut off access at our discretion, say, if we think an account is being used to misrepresent a business or work around these terms.
Account Registration
A few areas of the Site require an account: our member directory, training resources, and discussion forums, for instance. When you sign up, give us accurate details about yourself and, if it applies, your business. Things like your restaurant's name, location, and role aren't just paperwork; they help us point you toward resources that actually fit and connect you with the right people.
Keeping your login secure is on you, and so is anything that happens under your account. Don't share it, sell it, or hand it off to someone else. Accounts are tied to you or your business specifically.
Communications
After you register or get in touch, expect to hear from us: a confirmation email, something about your membership status, or details relevant to your account. Sign up for our newsletter or event alerts, and we'll send those too, though you can opt out of anything non-essential whenever you like.
Give us your email or phone number through the Site, and you're agreeing that our electronic communications count as written notice for any legal requirement that one be provided.
Content and Intellectual Property
The articles, industry reports, training materials, templates, checklists, and webinar recordings on this Site belong to the Restaurant Association or to the partners and contributors who've licensed their work to us. We're giving you a limited, non-exclusive right to view, download, and print that material for your own business or personal use, nothing more.
What's not okay: repackaging our guides to resell, posting our content elsewhere without asking first, or building a competing resource library out of material pulled from here. Want to license or reprint something more broadly? Just ask. We say yes more often than you'd think.
User-Generated Content
This community works because restaurant operators, chefs, and suppliers actually show up and share what they've learned. Post a comment, leave a review, jump into a forum thread, or submit something through the Site, and you still own what you wrote. What you're granting us, in exchange for being part of this, is permission to use, display, adapt, and share that contribution as part of our services, with no payment required on our end.
In return, we just ask that what you post is genuinely yours, reasonably accurate, and won't land another member of this community in legal trouble.
Prohibited Conduct
We'd like the Site to stay useful and professional for everyone in the restaurant and hospitality world. So please don't:
- ●Post anything defamatory, deceptive, discriminatory, or otherwise unlawful
- ●Use our forums, directory, or contact tools to spam other members with sales pitches they didn't ask for
- ●Scrape or repurpose our data, vendor listings, or research to build a commercial product of your own
- ●Get in the way of the Site running smoothly, or of another member using it
- ●Pretend to be affiliated with a restaurant, supplier, or organization you're not actually connected to
Break any of these, and we can remove the content, suspend your account, or cut off your access, at our discretion and without warning.
Third-Party Links
You'll run into links to outside sites as you use our supplier pages, health department resources, partner training platforms, that kind of thing. We add them because they're useful, not because we've combed through every page to vouch for them.
The moment you click through to one of those sites, their terms and privacy practices take over, not ours. We don't control what happens there, so it's worth glancing at their policies before you hand over information or complete a transaction.
Membership Terms
Membership in the Restaurant Association is open to restaurant owners, operators, and other professionals working in or serving the foodservice industry. By joining, members agree to provide accurate information, use member resources and community spaces respectfully, and follow the rules set out in these Terms and Conditions. Restaurant Association reserves the right to suspend or terminate a membership at any time if a member violates these terms, misuses the platform, or engages in conduct that harms other members or the organization.
Disclaimers
Think of the articles, checklists, and regulatory summaries on this Site as a starting point, not a replacement for legal, financial, or food-safety advice tailored to your specific situation. Rules shift from state to state, county to county, sometimes even city to city, and they change. We keep our content current, but we can't guarantee every page reflects the current law in your jurisdiction.
Anything with real stakes for your business, staffing decisions, permits, health code compliance, or legal questions deserves a second opinion from a qualified professional or your local regulatory authority before you act on it. What you do with the information here, and what happens as a result, is on you.
Limitation of Liability
Where the law allows it, the Restaurant Association, along with our officers, employees, board members, and partner organizations, isn't on the hook for indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages tied to your use of the Site. That includes lost revenue, business interruption, or data loss, even if we'd been told that kind of damage was possible.
That said, nothing here limits liability that legally can't be limited.
Governing Law
California law governs these Terms, conflict-of-laws rules aside. Anything that can't get sorted out informally goes to the appropriate courts in California.
Changes to These Terms
We update this page now and then: new features, legal changes, shifts in how we operate, that sort of thing. When we do, you'll find the new version here with an updated effective date. We don't usually email people about routine updates, so check back occasionally if you want to stay current. Keep using the Site after we've made a change, and that counts as accepting it.
Contact Information
If you have questions about these Terms and Conditions or need further clarification, please contact us at support@restaurantassociation.com.