Why 95% of US Restaurants Suck and How We Learn Not to Notice
Posted by Jay on Wednesday, 31 May 2006
JAY’S NOTE, January 2009: This was our first serious post addressing the death-grip that the industrial food complex has on our lives. In the years since it was written, we at the Linkery have drastically changed the way we source our ingredients, to bring them much more in line with how all of us ultimately want to eat (and need to eat).
We haven’t used a broadline distributor since I wrote this. More importantly, the thought of us serving farmed salmon or commodity veal or duck is amazing to me now — we’ve gotten to a point where we just don’t work from thpse parts of the food chain, and by now I’ve mostly forgotten that we once did. Without dissing our 2006 selves, or anyone who chooses to eat or serve commodity meats, I am happy that those ingredients are only distant memories to us.
Additionally, we’ve learned a lot since this post about farming, distribution, local economies and operating a restaurant. You’ll find much more depth in more recent posts on this blog. But this post remains here as a document of where we were, and of the depth of our dismay in trying to feed people real food, when we were desperate to learn how we could procure more ingredients with integrity.
When I first traveled to Australia, and was blown away by the quality of the food there — even at corner shops and cafes — I couldn’t understand why we in the US couldn’t, or didn’t, have food of this quality at all prices (as opposed to just at the finest restaurants). Yes, I sensed that Oz’s agriculture is more local, and that due to their smallish population and huge land area, they were simply going to have more rural land and better food. But it’s still possible to get good ingredients in the US — why didn’t most restaurants do this?
After a year and a half of us working to create a restaurant with food of that quality, I know a lot more about the obstacles to doing so.
To my surprise — though it shouldn’t have been a surprise — the leading obstacle to flavorful, affordable restaurant food is the success of a cooperative effort between big factory food producers (like, say, Tyson) and big distributors like Sysco and US Foodservice. These organizations, along with complicit groups like the National Restaurant Association are furthering their financial interests by changing the world so that it comprises:
- A homogenous mass market of indistinguishable food consumers, who know and care nothing about the flavor, quality or history of their food. That’s what they need you to be, so that you won’t notice or care that the steaks at Outback taste the same as the steaks at Applebee’s (or where-ever), except for the proprietary spice mix they shower everything with at Outback.
- Food production facilities that output 100% standardized meat and processed foods, with maximum productivity and minimum cost to the business (regardless of the cost to their workers, their neighbors, or our environment). This food is bland, cheap, and often genetically bred to contain the most “useful” size and composition for these industrial (restaurant) customers.
- Producers and distributors working together to serve as corporate food aggregators, who together handle every element of food production, processing, preparation and cooking up until the final stage of heating the item for somebody’s actual consumption. In other words, the idea is that Tyson and Sysco do all the work of creating chickens and pigs, turning them into meat cuts, flavoring, packaging, and sometimes cooking these meat cuts, and delivering them portioned and prepackaged to restaurants. The restaurant’s job in this model is to “market” a “concept”, develop an appropriate menu of these “food servings”, and “cook” and serve these products as part of a “completely integrated guest experience.”
Yeah, that’s why I don’t eat out much. And why, when I do eat out, I’d rather eat at an unassuming place like, say, Apertivo, instead of at many of the more well-publicized restaurants that have great ambience but basically buy into the above model. You can taste it.
The two big distributors are Sysco and USFoods. As far as I can tell, they’re the Hertz and Avis of the industry, respectively. (Not the Windows and Linux, by any means.) Sysco is so ubiquitous, and Sysco reps are so overbearing, that we’ve just refused to deal with them for anything. Some perfectly good restaurants use Sysco (and we might have to use Sysco some day, too), but a lot of really bad ones use Sysco to buy everything. As in, everything on the menu comes in from Sysco prepackaged and frozen, and the restaurant just fries, sautees, or heats up the stuff, puts it on a plate, and serves it. These restaurants of course are Sysco’s version of Shangri-La, and Sysco works night and day to make sure all restaurants are like this.
USFoods people are, in our experience, a little more human. I assume they have to be nicer ‘cause they aren’t as big as Sysco, and hope to pick up businesses (like us) that just can’t bear to deal with Sysco. But ultimately USFoods wants to be just as big and strong as Sysco, and would like every restaurant to serve the same bland and branded “food”. Just with a different brand.
There are other smaller players in the industry, of course. We tried to do business with one of them, Vistar, but they wouldn’t even take our orders. I’m guessing they need to focus on big accounts to grow to be big, at which point they’ll seek out incremental growth by dealing with small restaurants and trying to convert them to restaurants that serve only Vistar products. Go Vistar sales team.
Anyway, we had a typical problem with USFoods today. It wasn’t a big deal for a small business (though it was sure irritating). But it illustrates so well what all of us are up against, I’m inspired to write about it.
***
USFoods hates dealing with the Linkery because we don’t buy that many things from them. They want to sell us everything — that’s their business. They want to sell us the produced, processed, flavored, and sometimes precooked meats that they build their business on. This is how they make their money, and in their mind it’s a good deal for everyone — their economy of scale allows them to buy meat at a lower price, from huge producers whose scale allows them to produce meat at a lower price, via processors whose scale and scientific technology allow them to synthesize new variations and deliver them at a lower price…all totally standardized and portion-controlled for maximum cost efficiency for everyone.
Instead, we buy meat, fish, produce, and bread from local suppliers. These suppliers aren’t perfectly homogenous or perfectly consistent. They’re small businesses, cutting meat or baking bread and so forth every day. We pick these distributors and producers because they care about what they do and work hard to provide great quality stuff.
A quick digression: as a side note, the quality of what we get from smaller local places varies, usually between very good and excellent, and the size of different portions vary a lot, too (in the outside world, not every animal is exactly the same size). They and we both do our best to stay on top of it, and usually we catch anything that does make it to us that’s undersized or mediocre. Sometimes we don’t, and our guests get inadequate or mediocre meals, which is embarrassing, and then we go into crazy hyperdrive figuring out where we made a mistake and getting everything squared away. The good side of this is that we’re small enough that we have a lot of regular guests who will let us know if their meal is not up to snuff, and also that we’re small enough that we can react fairly quickly, and be knocking on our distributors’ doors the next morning. I can understand that larger places might not have those advantages, and maybe that’s why many of them use the big distributors. So maybe blandness is a natural result of size. On the other hand, we don’t have to worry about their challenges, so we won’t.
The most important reason, though, that we’ve picked our distributors is because they know there’s more to food than portion and price.
That said, there are a few products where we actually prefer to use huge national distributors. A couple of our meats (duck and veal) are only available to us frozen, and once you get into the world of frozen meats, USFoods’ stuff is as good tasting as we’ve found. Additionally, we use a couple processed foods in serious bulk — mustard and sauerkraut. (We are a sausage place, sort of.)
In both cases our favorite tasting brand (Beaver and Vienna, respectively) is only available (as far as we know) through big distributors, and other brands through smaller distributors are much more expensive. If we buy the other sauerkraut at Restaurant Depot or the local grocery store, we’ll have to raise the price of our choucroute dish by a couple bucks and it may not be as good. That doesn’t serve you well, so we accept that life entails compromise and we deal with the devil. (Oh, and our excellent linen-like paper napkins come from them, too. We love those.)
Our USFoods sales rep is, I think, actually a nice guy working for a crap company. but given how often they bully us for not ordering enough from them, I wonder why they sell to us at all. I don’t think they’re legally required to, so I guess they just have a policy that they don’t let customers go. I bet there’s a poster on a wall somewhere at USFoods HQ saying “There are only three types of people in the world: customers, former customers, and future customers.” Or something like that.
Anyway, we order from them about once a week, and they deliver in the morning. They often show up right as our morning people are arriving, about 11am, and just dump the goods and leave. Then we see that they’ve added a bunch of stuff that we haven’t ordered (and, yes, charged us for it), just to “make it worth their while to deliver.” We call our rep and complain, and he basically says that if we’re not buying all of our stuff through them, we’re lucky they even bother with us. I guess he’s right, in a way, ‘cause we keep ordering napkins, sauerkraut, and mustard from them.
***
Today at 10, I got a message from our USFoods rep, who had called at 9:30 in the morning. I was zooming around trying to make a train to San Luis Obispo and missed the call. The upshot was that their driver “didn’t have time” to come back to our place when someone was going to be there, so he was going to leave the delivery in our parking lot, and we could just get it when we got there, at 11am.
Now, this is food. Sitting in the sun for nearly two hours. And it was hot today, particularly on a black top parking lot. And of course the food was vulnerable to foraging by people and animals. I wasn’t at the shop, and couldn’t check the order, so I still don’t know exactly what was in it — but still. It’s impolite, dangerous, a violation of health codes, and most importantly, incredibly disrepectful of you, the person who’s in line to eat this food.
When I got the message I immediately called our rep and left a message that we’d be throwing out all the perishables and not paying for them. So there’s no harm from the incident other than just the lack of respect to the food (and, by extension, all of us, as people who eat the food).
I reckon that, sooner or later, we’d have been fired as their customer and have to find a new provider of sauerkraut and mustard. After today, we’ll just end up firing them first.
And there will possibly be a few of more of our guests’ favorite things we’re unable to get.
This has happened before — that’s why we can’t get Morehouse’s great-tasting dijon mustard — and it will continue to happen. I hope that folks will be understanding if we have to switch to a lesser quality napkin, just because we want to carry meat from a local meatcutter/distributor.
It’s a wacky world in the “foodservice” (that’s what they call it, which pretty much says it all) business.
***
If you know of any good suppliers who aren’t in the Sysco/Vistar/USFoods mold, I’d love to hear about them. We tried switching to Tarantino’s distribution service, but even though they’re local we were too small to be of interest to them. Which is a shame, because we actually don’t mind paying a premium to deal with real people who will work with us in getting us the goods we need, if we can find people like that.
If there’s no distributor out there who cares about good food, maybe we’ll end up starting one. That would make it easier for small restaurants that want to serve quality stuff, which would be good for everyone. We don’t know anything about that business, of course, but I’m convinced amateurism is usually an asset. We’ll add that to our “possible project” list. We often find the most satisfying solution to these problems is just to DIY.
Excitingly, Mars has started to make some of our own mustards — the real DIY solution — though we’re not yet able to produce enough to meet all of our needs. And sauerkraut is a bit of a different story.
And if we can’t live without the great napkins, Sysco might just sell them to us. I might just poke my own eyes out with a hot poker, though, it’s a hard call.
***
Back to my trip to Oz. While I think these problems are most prominent in the US, when I was back in Australia in March I saw that Sysco and lousy food were gaining a foothold in places I hadn’t noticed them before, like some nicer neighborhood pubs.
Watch out world! As usual, it looks like we in the US are not totally exceptional – we’re merely on the leading edge of industrializing and dehumanizing everything. Eventually these economics will prove hard to resist for your local, too.
***
If you’d like to help save real food so you can eat it at restaurants, some of the best things you can do are:
- Find out who your restaurants buy their food from, and patronize places that buy fresh food from real people.
- Be understanding if that great little café or sandwich shop near your house doesn’t carry a certain mass-market product you really like. Coca-cola Distributing has a 15 case minimum order. US Foods won’t take an order less than $500 (and even then they’ll leave it to rot in the parking lot if it’s not big enough.) A lot of small places can’t make orders like that, and so they can’t carry big-market goods.
- Make an effort to really taste your food when you eat out. Paticularly do this if the restaurant has a great reputation, a stellar concept, great ambience, fancy food presentation (particularly with nifty garnishes) and/or lots of attractive people working and eating there. Are you being distracted so you won’t notice that the food is the same flavorless stuff you get most other places? A lot of high-end places use heavy sauces, sweet glazes and marinades, and/or butter and garlic to disguise the fact that their principal ingredients are useless. Midrange places often do this with a fryer.
- If you’re eating at a place that cares about their food, and you get a subpar meal, let ‘em know (politely, of course). Because this restaurant’s food is not mass produced, they have more variation in their products and have to work harder to make it all excellent. They’re happy to do it, but you can help them by calling attention to mistakes. Rest assured, they appreciate it.
- Pay a little more for real food. You’re paying to help keep these businesses viable that are working outside of the mainstream channels. If these businesses go away then we’ll only be left with flavorless, nutrutrionless food, and we’ll all have no choice but to be fat, unhealthy, and unsatisfied.
- On the other hand, don’t pay a lot more. Companies that charge a fortune for the real stuff are basically just exploiting the situation the same as the bland-food purveyors, and don’t want anything to change. Everyone should be able to eat real food, not just affluent folks who purchase it as a luxury brand.
Wow – this is a bit longer than I intended when I started out. Good thing it’s a long train ride to SLO. By the way, did you know that the Burbank airport is named after Bob Hope? Or maybe just the train station next to the Burbank airport. I’m not sure.
June 1st, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Great post, Jay. We were actually just having a discussion in class recently about the price of efficiency. America is such an efficient nation that we’ve completely forgotten about the fact that some things just aren’t meant to be done really fast or really cheap or in huge numbers. This is especially true when the sacrifice that gets made is in the quality. And it’s not like efficiency always represents good value either. Some places will charge you a premium for crap.
Keep up the good fight!
June 1st, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Lets come up with some ideas about doing our own distribution. I know my own ordering volume will be small at first and am hardly looking forward to finding sun baked food cartons in my parking lot.
June 1st, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Great information and writing.. I love all this behind the scenes stuff.
June 1st, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Thanks for a really great post. I laughed, I cried, I emailed the link to tons of friends. This is a really good summary of what we are all up against!
As far as recommendations go, back when I was running coffeehouses, Monterrey Provisions seemed to have higher quality stuff and a more “friendly” feel. They had lots of the same things that the big guys had; I’m not sure they were actually any better though. Their HQ was downtown, in what is now the Ballpark district, so they may be defunct.
Also from the coffee world; recently a bunch of independrent coffeehouse owners banded together to buy large amounts of the kinds of stuff they had to go to sysco for; napkins, paper cups, sugar, etc. They wanted higher quality/sustainability, so they are able to “co-op” buy direct from manufacturers. I will see if I can get more info about this project….
Peter G
June 1st, 2006 at 6:42 pm
Jay, great story. Feel your pain, yes, they are up here in Canada as well, $350.00 min. and drop there bland crap off when ever they feel like it. I call the rep
complain and it falls on deaf ears.
It got to the point were we ended up selling our place to concentrate on a smaller just great coffee and simple home made pastries kinda joint.
geir.
June 2nd, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Thanks everyone for the notes, and for letting your friends know about the post so they can learn how this stuff works. Learning about how the system works is the first step to creating an alternative.
I called Vienna, Beaver, and Hoffmaster (the napkin makers) yesterday and they were all really helpful. Vienna and Beaver in particular came up with solutions right away. We’ll be able to buy Vienna from our produce distributor and Beaver directly from the company. Still working on those pesky napkins.
Mike, absolutely let’s figure out if we can together buy these types of things in enough bulk to not have to deal with the big companies!
June 5th, 2006 at 11:03 am
Did you catch 60 minutes on Sunday? Cool story on the Whole Foods saga. Here is a snippet:
Mackey insists he’s made no tradeoffs as his business has grown. “America has a romance with small businesses. And it has mistrust of the large businesses,” he says. “Whole Foods is out to prove that wrong. I don’t see any inherent reason why corporations cannot be just as caring and responsible as small business.”
Link to entire story:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/31/60minutes/main1671466.shtml
June 5th, 2006 at 11:45 am
[…] After I wrote this post, I arrived in San Luis Obispo and went to dinner with my Mom at EP Koberl at Blue. It’s a good restaurant, our server was super helpful and our meals were delicious. Plus they were open past 9, which is hard to find there on a Wednesday — they don’t call it SLO Town for nothing. […]
June 6th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
They just left it in the parking lot?? Unreal. I’ve passed along the link to this entry, too. Thanks for your commitment — both to food and to education.
June 6th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
I haven’t had a chance to check in for a few days - this is fascinating! I know of what you speak. Attending culinary classes at Grossmont, that is what they prepare you for. Of course I can take what I want and leave the rest, but it’s apparent that we’re not really expected to care about the quality of ingredients. If you’re a line cook at Chilis or what not, what difference does it make? I have been mulling the possibiliy of starting a food-related business at some point in the future. I’m surprised there are no high quality purveyors/distributors here in San Diego already…something to think about!
June 6th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
Thanks for the note Alice. I’m not surprised to hear that about some of the classes one can take.
I really want to note that there are some very good local distributors and purveyors in town. We’re actually blessed to be living in California where we have a lot of good food and good food people. On the links page of our website you can see who we use, and there are plenty of other vendors selling high quality stuff we could have chosen.
The challenge is that the mainstream distributors have a lock on certain products and are the only (or highest-quality) option for other products at certain prices. But they want to lock you in and keep you from using specialty providers for other things.
Here’s our conundrum:
If you use the big guys, you can either spend a lot of money on good stuff and have very high prices, or spend a fair amount of money on lousy stuff and have moderate prices. And of course, either way, you’re feeding the beast of factory food.
If you don’t use the big guys, your choices are to either
1) have very high, fine-dining prices
2) not offer certain things that you would like to offer; or
3) work really hard to offer everything you want to at a moderate price, but possibly lose money in the added labor costs, and also have a higher incidence of running out of things, making mistakes, etc., due to the complexity and difficulty of using scores of suppliers.
Lots of good places go with any of the options; they all have their strong and weak points. We pursue option 3.
I haven’t counted, but I’d wager that when all is said and done we use over 30 suppliers of food and beverage. Maybe 40. A fair number of places get by with 3 (Sysco, Southern Wine & Spirits, and Anheuser-Busch). When we’re running smooth, it’s great and we know we’re serving the best stuff we can find. On the other hand, when we have a quick change in business, or one of our purveyors has problems, or when we simply make a mistake, then it really impacts the level of how well we serve our guests. At the same time, we have to make sure we maintain a certain level of business in order to be able to offer such labor-intensive shopping at a moderate price.
We’re not special. There really are a lot of good places that are working outside of the standard Sysco-USFoods system, and busting their backsides to put great food out at an affordable price. I always mention Apertivo ’cause they’re close to us and they’re super-inexpensive, but there are many more. I just write about it ’cause I happen to have the blog and I figure folks might like to know what kind of things go on in the back-end of the restaurant business.
June 11th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Wow, that was such a fantastic essay that I just have to respond with my own 10-year experience as the owner of a restaurant/coffeehouse that went to extreme efforts to do exactly what your talking about.
The Third Place Coffeehouse in Raleigh, NC was created with a very strong philosophy that had a social component (a local gathering place for the community) as well as a quality component. I wrote a chapter in a book called Celebrating The Third Place that outlines the social philosophy that we religiously adhered to during my tenure as owner.
As for the quality component, everything in The Third Place was made or delivered fresh everyday; chocolate syrup for hot chocolate and mochas was made twice daily from high quality Dutch cocoa, cane sugar and hot water, whipped cream was made all day long from heavy whipping cream and monin vanilla syrup, chai was made fresh everyday from a homemade blend of anise, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, cane sugar, honey and high quality black tea, coffee was roasted and delivered three times per week, all of our produce was delivered daily from a local organic farmer, scones were made from scratch in-house every morning, cookies from scratch every afternoon, pastries and bagels were baked fresh and delivered everyday from local bakeries, seasonal fruit pies were sourced from local grandmothers(no joke-the best!), hummus and tubule were made fresh every day, soups were made from scratch every day. Our sodas were made to order from seltzer water and monin syrup. No corn syrup was allowed on premises. Our milk was delivered three times per week from Pine State Dairy until they went out of business. Even our paper goods were sourced from a local supplier, PFS, who we worked closely with in order to help them carry goods like java jackets so that they could supply all of the small, independent, local coffeehouses. US foods was used for mustard, mayonnaise and individual cream cheese packets. US foods insisted upon delivering when it was convenient for them and they usually blocked traffic on Glenwood Avenue during morning rush hour, causing lots of honking and shouting from the commuters I was trying to attract as customers.
The sandwich and salad menu at The Third Place was totally unique as a result of the limitations that we place on ourselves. This is an important point and I hope a few people are still reading this so that this point can be made. Sysco and US Foods offer such a huge variety of foods so that anyone can offer anything any time of year. As a result, everyone has the same exact menu. This seems counterintuitive since you’d think more options would mean more variety, but in truth, people are lazy and the menus all end up having the ubiquitous turkey brest sandwich and basic panini options. Since we were a vegetarian restaurant and we were working closely with local growers, we were forced to get as creative as possible with the ingredients that were available and so we ended up with creative home made spreads (sun dried tomato mayo, basil pesto aioli, etc) combined with roasted veggies, heirloom tomatoes, locally produced chevre cheese, homemade bean burgers, veggie BLT’s, a seitan reuben made with homemade sauerkraut, a signature sandwich called The Plethora that has become know as ‘muffalatta of Raleigh’ made from hummus, tubule, fresh roasted sunflower seeds, sprouts, havarti cheese, homemade pico de gallo, mustard vinaigrette dressing and 6 minutes in the oven. Every year the farmer we worked with would give us heads up on what was coming into season, and we would put our heads together to produce seasonal specials - organic mixed greens with strawberries and lemon poppy seed dressing, local fresh mozzarella with organic heirloom tomatoes and organic basil picked that morning and served on organic mixed greens, roasted pablano peppers served on 12 grain flat bread with a roasted garlic spread and chevre cheese……the limitations forced us to be creative and in the end the customer always had unique, healthy and delicious options to choose from. We even worked out a deal with our grower to buy bulk produce that was not nice enough for him to sell to restaurants, and we would use this produce for soup stock.
All of these measures took more effort than just ordering from Sysco, but the end result was an eye opening one for customers and an education for everyon in what good, fresh food tastes like. Local slow-fooders eventually found us and thanked us while busy professionals trying to grab a quick lunch scorned us and never came back. We made a choice about who we were and what we were all about and we never wavered from that, which is why I think we enjoyed the success that we did.
I have to say that in my job(sales rep for Counter Culture Coffee) the majority of people that I am running into are not looking at this option and when I mention to them that they could make chocolate syrup instead of using hershy’s or come up with thier own proprietary chai, I get blank stares and confused looks.
Food offerings in cafe’s are often an afterthought and it shows. An honest to goodness high-quality local independent coffeehouse is a true labor of love and the shortcuts that people take are glaring reminders to me that there is still a message out there that the coffee business is a quick and easy money maker. My goal in my current position is to gently dispel this myth, seek out the people who are going to do it right, and try to help steer them in the ‘quality is everything’ direction……unfortunately, the $6.00 24oz sugar-filled whipped creame topped frappe is a huge money maker.
June 13th, 2006 at 12:14 am
[…] Rich made the following comment to the post “Why 95% of US Restaurants Suck and How We Learn Not To Notice”. I think it makes for an inspiring and interesting read. Wow, that was such a fantastic essay that I just have to respond with my own 10-year experience as the owner of a restaurant/coffeehouse that went to extreme efforts to do exactly what your talking about. The Third Place Coffeehouse in Raleigh, NC was created with a very strong philosophy that had a social component (a local gathering place for the community) as well as a quality component. I wrote a chapter in a book called Celebrating The Third Place that outlines the social philosophy that we religiously adhered to during my tenure as owner. As for the quality component, everything in The Third Place was made or delivered fresh everyday; chocolate syrup for hot chocolate and mochas was made twice daily from high quality Dutch cocoa, cane sugar and hot water, whipped cream was made all day long from heavy whipping cream and monin vanilla syrup, chai was made fresh everyday from a homemade blend of anise, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, cane sugar, honey and high quality black tea, coffee was roasted and delivered three times per week, all of our produce was delivered daily from a local organic farmer, scones were made from scratch in-house every morning, cookies from scratch every afternoon, pastries and bagels were baked fresh and delivered everyday from local bakeries, seasonal fruit pies were sourced from local grandmothers(no joke-the best!), hummus and tubule were made fresh every day, soups were made from scratch every day. Our sodas were made to order from seltzer water and monin syrup. No corn syrup was allowed on premises. Our milk was delivered three times per week from Pine State Dairy until they went out of business. Even our paper goods were sourced from a local supplier, PFS, who we worked closely with in order to help them carry goods like java jackets so that they could supply all of the small, independent, local coffeehouses. US foods was used for mustard, mayonnaise and individual cream cheese packets. US foods insisted upon delivering when it was convenient for them and they usually blocked traffic on Glenwood Avenue during morning rush hour, causing lots of honking and shouting from the commuters I was trying to attract as customers. […]
June 17th, 2006 at 11:09 am
Fantastic post, very informative and opinionated.
I’ve seen many local & small restauranteurs shopping with the wheeled flat-cart at my CostCo store. I’m curious, where does a warehouse retailer fit into the picture in your raw-materials supply chain, if it fits into the picture at all?
It seems that they have great prices on many restaurant staples like paper goods, bulk condiments & spices, etc. But my view of “great prices” could be only in comparison to full retail, and if you are buying from Sysco things might be far cheaper. This is an area I don’t have much expertise in.
Thanks for your thoughts.
June 17th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Wonderful post, it’s been a decade+ since I’ve been an insider in the restaurant industry and it’s sad to see that the same old situation exists, worse today in fact. I couldn’t agree more with your premise - The girl and I cook at least one meal every day from scratch, and it’s frustrating to eat out and think Wow, why don’t they use fresh this or fresh that like we do? - and I’m stoked that you’re fighting them with a good a’marican entrepreneurial bent.
Have only been there once, about two months ago for dinner… been out of town for a while, including New Orleans where they *totally* get food. I’m looking forward to coming in tomorrow for the Cup matches, some of that Real Ale, and some good real food. Keep it real,
Jon
June 18th, 2006 at 8:05 am
Miss T, that’s an interesting line of discussion. In San Diego, there are two notable warehouse retailers for restaurants. One is Costco, the other is a warehouse restricted to resale licensees called Restaurant Depot.
Costco is more expensive but has very high quality products and is usually in stock. Restaurant Depot has very low prices but is unpredictable. Neither stores carries everything you need to run most full-scale restaurants, so most people I know use them to supplement their usual buying.
Sysco and USFoods’ prices are higher than Costco or RD, at least for small restaurants like us. Their main appeal is one-stop shopping with delivery. Many restaurants can get everything they need dropped off at their door, which makes running the kitchen and restaurant *a lot* easier. (Of course, we know what it does to the quality of the food choices in a neighborhood.)
I personally don’t think Costco or RD are a big problem. They aren’t pushing restaurants to drop other suppliers or withholding goods or raising prices for small orders. They don’t charge big restaurants less for their goods, either, so they help smaller places compete.
Interestingly, sometimes what’s available at Costco is the best-quality item in town. When we offered a salmon dish, we found that Costco’s farmed salmon was better quality than any of the fish wholesalers in San Diego. We were eventually able to move away from offering farmed fish, so we don’t really use Costco now unless we run out of something and need to buy goods in a hurry.
Jon — look forward to seeing you today. I’ll be working the bar until 1:30 or so, please say hi when you’re in.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:03 pm
I read your posting and wanted to comment. Having dealt with US Foods and Sysco myself, I know how hard they work to provide great customer service. Many times the drivers are treated badly by huffy,self-righteous business owners (like yourself). Repeatedly they are left waiting outside restaurants for hours because of lazy-asses who flaked and can’t make it to meet them on time, yet complain when their food and goods are late on other days. Having a problem with having to deal with big distributors is fine, but slamming the hard-working employees is completely ignorant. You slammed other companies for not wanting to deal with you because your a small business, but you turn around and take your uncalled anger out on the little man yourself. I look for resaurants that serve real food, but I know I could never, and would never eat at a place such as yours again. I also will now make sure that I slam your restaurant to everyone I know or come in contact with. Also, just a quick note, I hope that US Foods drops your account, you are not worth the work they do. Oh yeah, I do my business dealings in the area and know that you threatened to fire them in your blog, yet you keep using them. Instead of being a self-righteous hypocrite, why not thank them for providing goods at a low price so that you can keep your mediocore meals affordable?
June 20th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
Abbey,
Please note that the only comment I made about any US Foods employee was that “Our USFoods sales rep is, I think, actually a nice guy working for a crap company.”
I stand by both elements of that statement. As for the driver, I assume he’s just doing as directed by his company and is not personally responsible.
We have not used US Foods since the incident described in this account. If you have information to the contrary, please email me with it as it would mean we have a communication issue internally.
June 24th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
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June 24th, 2006 at 6:37 pm
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August 20th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
[…] In a previous post I asserted that one goal of the titan foodservice producer-distributor alliances — by this I mean huge distributors like Sysco and USFoodservice, in league with producers like Tyson and Hormel — is to perform as much of the actual flavoring and cooking of the food as possible, before it even gets to the restaurant kitchen. In this model, the restaurant focuses on the “guest experience”, while the food, prepared with the enormous resources of a large distribution corporation, is very consistent in quality and carefully costed to maximize profit. Although, of course, this food is not something I’m particularly interested in eating, for a multitude of reasons. […]
February 21st, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for such a well-written post. I refuse to use Sysco/USFoods and will not be bullied by their reps (that was a spot-on use of the word, by the way…). I don’t carry sodas, and you detailed the reason why. Customers don’t always understand that as a small business, I can’t offer certain items — not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t.
Thank you again for venting for the rest of us!!!!
March 4th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Hey Abbey,
Do you still have that blue cube tatoo on the back of your head? Your comment shows that you are just another sysco hack looking to justify the shabby treatment you provide your customers.
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July 24th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
[…] Why 95% of U.S. Restaurants Suck and How We Learn Not to Notice Good rant, with an especially useful ending, a list of ways restaurant customers can help the 5% of restaurants that have not completely succumbed to bland homogenization. If you’re not feeling like clicking on through, at least ponder the following suggestion: Make an effort to really taste your food when you eat out. Paticularly do this if the restaurant has a great reputation, a stellar concept, great ambience, fancy food presentation (particularly with nifty garnishes) and/or lots of attractive people working and eating there. Are you being distracted so you won’t notice that the food is the same flavorless stuff you get most other places? A lot of high-end places use heavy sauces, sweet glazes and marinades, and/or butter and garlic to disguise the fact that their principal ingredients are useless. Midrange places often do this with a fryer. […]
October 8th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
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I stumbled upon this blog and I was very shocked to learn this. Great post! I hadn’t made that mass-food market connection before.
I can’t stand the “americanized” concept of what other cultures’ cuisines are supposed to taste like. I work in a restaurant called “cafe del sol” and there is absolutely nothing Spanish about it- a colorful rich-white perspective of what Spain might look like. Similar to what you say, so much of the attention centers around the presentation; the minimalist porcelain plates on which the food is served, the candle-lit flare, sedating music. No one would think twice about a generic meat patty if it is stuffed between what the menu calls “hand-crafted” sauces. It’s all very rhetorical.
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