Inside Sysco: How America’s Restaurants Get Their Food

I’m American and I left the US to live in Italy. And I tell you what… When I go back to visit, I feel sick and bloated almost right away from the food. This sort of processed shit is at the core of it. Everything so processed, cheesy, fatty, greasy, salty, sugary, etc.

I think that if you live in the US, you have boiled-frog syndrome and don’t realize how terrible the food is. I constantly see Americans talk about how good it is and the variety. And I’m not saying that you objectively cannot find good food, but it’s hard.

Even your ingredients suck. I got an “Italian” sub sandwich at a pretty high quality place. And it was good overall, but stuff like the tomatoes struck me. They were so pale and tasteless. And it’s a recurring theme in the US. Food made to be produced year round at the lowest price point.

Sysco and US Food are huge contributors to why restaurants in the US are such garbage most of the time. And why they make me feel sick when I visit.

This is the part of the food business most people never see, and Business Insider did a great job getting inside it — the scale of moving hundreds of thousands of products through 25 facilities and still getting fresh produce to a small kitchen on time is a serious operational achievement. What struck me most is the chef shopping $50–100 a trip at a cash-and-carry warehouse, because that is the one lever a small restaurant still has over its own costs. As a founder, I keep thinking about that tension: the same scale that makes delivery reliable also concentrates the power to set prices. Thank you for showing both sides so clearly — the warehouses, the suppliers, and the chef’s actual receipts. For the independent restaurants watching this, what do you think protects a small operator’s negotiating power once that alternative disappears?

Damn, i’m sorry for you America