The $320B Underbelly of Restaurant Distribution That Needs Modernization: Part 3

There’s an inexplicable dichotomy that we’ve observed from watching retailers for over a decade. 

Might even call it cognitive dissonance.

In a retailer’s personal life, the retailer will not only use but often seek out technology to make their lives easier.

Order delivery from their grocery store’s mobile app.

Encourage their accountant to leverage software to file their taxes because it’s faster, more accurate, and cheaper.

Pray that their physicians use gene therapy and modern AI practices to prescribe the latest and most effective treatments.

But at work?

No thank you.

No science here, please.

Even things as obvious – and as well-heeled – as e-commerce seem to fly over the heads of retailers.

And foodservice distributors behave similarly.

In foodservice distribution, business-to-business sales still take place over millions of phone calls (literally 80% of all orders are placed this way), with orders scrawled on paper, laying about the office if they even get found at all. 

And if there’s an error to the order – which as you can imagine happens more frequently than should be acceptable by any rational person in 2024 (about 10-15% of the time according to insiders) – how do you audit it?

It’s someone’s notes versus another person’s notes: there’s no digital ledger pointing to the truth.

If you’re reading this as a sales rep at a foodservice distributor, you know precisely what we’re talking about: you get in the car on Monday morning and you’re listening to 30+ voicemails from customers placing orders. Once at your desk you spend the rest of the day transcribing these orders into your company system. 

Maybe you fat finger a number or two, or maybe a customer’s order isn’t clear, and you can’t reach them before they wanted the order, and now they’re pissed.

And on top of all of this, you’re fielding calls from other customers inquiring about products, checking orders on email and fax (yes, really: a fax machine), sorting out customer issues, and trying to decide on the optimum price points to quote. 

The top ten broadliners (think US Foods and Sysco) have enough money and resources to build their own (and some are inarguably shitty) e-commerce platforms. 

The rest of the market is a long tail of independent foodservice distributors with no real technology to speak of.

Though there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

In theory.

Modern software companies like Butter, Cut+Dry, Choco, and Pepper are trying to do for foodservice distributors what companies like Amazon have been doing for retailers for decades: offering digital order management, catalog enrichment, accounts receivable, customer support, marketing, and advertising, with some providers now realizing how far behind foodservice is and offering AI-powered solutions for functions like sales prospecting and customer relationship management.

From a single pane of glass with full audibility and a near-zero chance for screw-ups.

But you can only lead the horse to water.

If we’ve learned anything from retailers, it’s that they are techno-phobic.

So it’s no surprise that foodservice distributors behave the same way. 

The small and independent distributors count nearly 17,000 competitors amongst themselves, and they definitely don’t have the financial or technical resources to run their own e-commerce platforms.

The question is if they will even adopt modern third-party e-commerce platforms in any reasonable amount of time. 

Smaller players may have some apprehension about working with third-party providers instead of building tools in-house, but when you consider the costs to build and maintain an e-commerce platform, it’s a false choice: you either leverage a third-party tool, or you get nothing.

To add credibility to the magnitude of investment required, SYSCO spent $800M building their ecomm platform.

The real challenge, as we see it, is merchant adoption: SYSCO is large enough to dictate that their customers use their platform. But a restaurant might otherwise use 6-10 independent distributors for other needs. There’s no way this restaurant is going to manage 7-11 logins: they can’t even manage software for their own critical business operations.

The party that’s successful will need to aggregate the long tail of those 17,000 distributors so merchants only have one additional ecomm platform to log into. 

What follows is a summary chart of the ecomm players aggressively targeting that long tail. In our subsequent article we’ll dig into the nuance of these categories and the players involved. 

Just like it is with retail software, there are some oddities that are worth bringing to light.