Texas Restaurant Foundation

"Feeding Dreams and Building Futures"

Established in 1994 by the Texas Restaurant Association, the Texas Restaurant Foundation (TRF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a strong professional foodservice workforce in Texas. Leveraging the latest skills, tools, and certifications, the TRF creates pathways of opportunity for one of the state’s largest and most diverse industries. The organization’s flagship program is Texas ProStart, an industry-based, two-year high school culinary arts and restaurant management program that reaches more than 27,000 students across 250 high schools in Texas. The TRF also supports restaurants in times of crisis; for example, in 2020, the TRF established the TX Restaurant Relief Fund to raise and distribute more than $3.5 million to support over 800 independent restaurants and their employees through the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
The Foundation’s primary goals and objectives are to promote public awareness of careers in the foodservice industry, enhance educational opportunities by providing professional development training for new and existing personnel, and to provide industry based education to culinary educators in an effort to reach new standards in high school foodservice education.

“ The Texas Restaurant Foundation is the go-to educational resource for the restaurant industry in the great state of Texas. We exist to serve the industry. We accomplish this by investing and providing educational resources and successful foodservice industry tools to our TRA members, high school and college students, faculty, restaurant owners and operators. ” Former Texas Restaurant Foundation Chairman, Roger M. Kaplan, Founder, Restaurant Innovations, Dallas  

TRF Sustaining Partners

Thousands of students rely on the programs and career initiatives produced by the TRF. Partnership support is crucial to these programs. Thank you so much to our current Sustaining Partners for their continued support of the Foundation.

Learn about our current Sustaining Partners