No, Sysco Is Not “Ruining Restaurants”

There’s a meme going around that Sysco is “ruining restaurants”, and it’s spreading fast, probably because it feeds way too easily into recurring consumer fears concerning food quality, corporations, and homogenization.

The problem is that the meme, like most punchy viral outrage, collapses under basic scrutiny.

While there has been some underground Sysco-critical buzz for a while, the idea went viral recently with the release of a video from More Perfect Union called “I Tracked Down The Company Ruining Restaurants“, which has millions of views across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

I have no affiliation with Sysco or the restaurant industry, I just immediately clocked this argument as suspect and was surprised that no one else had written a takedown yet.

The narrative roughly breaks down as follows:

• People are noticing that restaurants are “starting to taste the same”, and that you can be served the “same mediocre food from New York to Alaska”
• The reason is that an increasing number of restaurants are using Sysco for distribution, which now controls 35% of the market via a number of acquisitions of smaller distributors
• Sysco uses their size to get good deals on goods, and this leads to potentially unethical practices like sourcing from providers that treat animals unethically or use slave labor, or deregulate the trucking industry causing truckers to get worse pay
• Sysco has their own line of mass-produced frozen foods, and these foods are increasingly used by restaurants, meaning dining experience is less unique and worse
• Regional distributors are dying out, and restaurants in rural areas don’t have any other options

Let’s break those down into smaller, implied arguments, and handle them one by one:

Does Sysco serve poor quality food?

Sysco has been around forever, and “Sysco = bad” is not a new idea. When I was at Boy Scout camp in the late 1990s, we used to make jokes about the poor quality of the Sysco food they served in the dining hall. As the video states: “If you’ve ever spent time in a hospital or a prison, you might have had a meal off of a Sysco truck”.

There’s nothing surprising about this. Hospitals, prisons, and boy scout camps are institutions where the consumer is not directly paying, so the institution cuts price any way they can, sacrificing quality as a result. Mentioning these institutions is nothing more than a scare tactic, attempting to paint Sysco food as universally poor quality.

If you’re eating out at restaurants, are you in danger of eating poor quality Sysco frozen food? If you have any taste, probably not.

Sysco is not a “poor quality food” company. They don’t just serve frozen food and diner slop. They are simply a distributor, buying from all sorts of different suppliers. As a distributor, they don’t specialize in poor quality food, they specialize in making money. Many Sysco customers want to order free range eggs, impossible burgers, and sustainably-raised meat and seafood, so Sysco stocks all of them. Sysco has a large line of premium products, too, which get good reviews from chefs in the analyses I read. And, due to economies of scale, I’m willing to bet they offer the best price on distribution of those products, versus local sourcing at comparative quality.

After the video’s release, reddit is flooded with people asking “which restaurants use Sysco”, so they can avoid them. This is an utter misunderstanding of how food distribution works. For example, many restaurants use Sysco for their very popular paper and disposables line, and source local for everything else. Should they be maligned because a Sysco truck is spotted outside of their brick and mortar?

Sysco serves poor quality products. They also serve great quality products. Remember, if restaurants are buying poor quality products, it’s because it’s all you, the consumer, will pay for.

Does Sysco support slave labor or factory farming?

In 2024, there was one instance of Sysco purchasing food from the Chishan Group, a Chinese processor that was accused of using Uyghur forced labor. Sysco ceased purchasing from this group and denounced the practice.

This is not a Sysco issue, it’s a systemic issue. The seafood supply chain is notoriously opaque and complex. Every single distributor that sources from foreign countries encounters these problems on occasion.

How about animal welfare? Plenty of Sysco’s products come from factory farms. But there are also plenty that do not. In 2019, Sysco announced a plan to stop using pig gestation crates.

Again, animal welfare is not a Sysco issue. Sysco offers countless sources for humanely-raised meat. And, as always, as a consumer, if you want to be really sure: stop eating meat, and tell everyone you know to do so as well.

Did Sysco lobby to deregulate the trucking industry, causing wages to go down 40% since 1980?

There is no record I can find that Sysco lobbied to deregulate the trucking industry. Zero results on Google. Zero results anywhere. This appears to be hearsay.

The most recent trucking deregulation was the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Wages going down was an industry-wide phenomenon following that, not something that Sysco caused.

Is Sysco foisting their low-quality products onto restaurants?

The video claims: “Sysco and their competitors are flooding restaurants ultra-processed food like this.” There is no flooding to be found.

Restaurants have a choice of what tier of Sysco food to buy, and that choice is a rational response to consumer demands. With recent inflation and consumer preferences shifting towards delivery (where food quality always declines anyway by the time it reaches consumer mouths), more and more restaurants are opting for cheaper foods and cutting costs.

Consumers can act concerned about which restaurants are “using Sysco” in their city, but I doubt they’ll change their behaviors. Revealed preference shows that American eaters value price above all-else.

It’s not like Sysco’s poor quality offerings are hidden, either. The video tells the story of a diner whose owner found that their patties now contained soy protein filler. Why didn’t he check the ingredients before he ordered?

Is food quality in the United States decreasing?

Access to tasty, healthy, and high quality foods has vastly improved in our lifetimes. I remember what eating at food establishments was like in the 1990s. The average was not nearly as good as it is today. The 1980s and 1970s were even worse. When we criticize Sysco, we romanticise stepping into a rural diner 30-50 years ago and them serving delicious farm-to-table fare. That just wasn’t the case.

Instead a free market and standardization has increased quality across the board offering rural restaurants access to the same food lines as urban ones. This is a good thing!

Ironically, the foods analyzed in the video as a sign of “quality” are fried pickles, jalapeño poppers, and funnel cake fries. These are inherently low-quality processed foods that no one in their right sobriety should be eating. Wherever you go in the United States, frozen appetizers have always been frozen appetizers, and they’ve always been same-y and poor quality. Expecting every single piece of finger food to have its own special regional taste misunderstands the inherent purpose of these products: mostly to give drunk people something to eat at a low cost.

(Hilariously, the video’s analysis even concludes their bowling alley food didn’t taste the same across states, defeating their entire thesis.)

Have you magically been eating low-quality Sysco food this whole time?

Though the video doesn’t say this directly, that’s what it’s fear-mongering about. That’s why so many people are suddenly flooding their local subreddits to figure out how to “avoid Sysco”.

The reality is if you’re an informed consumer, you probably aren’t. Sysco’s frozen food line is incredibly easy to spot, and is only available at low-quality establishments.

At a restaurant of quality, you may be eating Sysco raw ingredients, but they’ll put their own spin on them to give you quality food. If that’s not good enough, you’re welcome to pay the price premium for farm to table.

Is Sysco a monopoly?

The More Perfect Union narrative stops just short of calling Sysco a monopoly. They’re not. They only control 35% of the market, and the video doesn’t even mention other large competitors like US Foods and Performance Food Group, who have the same low-quality frozen foods as part of their offerings.

Sysco is a large corporation, and they are prone to all the coordination problem and negative externality issues that other large corporations are prone to, but they are not some sort of unique evil force.

So, is Sysco ruining restaurants?

No, if anything, modern American consumer preferences are “ruining” restaurants.

If you’re concerned about modern food quality, stop ordering delivery slop, stop giving your money to those that prepare said slop, be willing to spend more of your paycheck for better-quality prepared food, and/or perhaps learn to cook again, which increasingly seems to be a lost art in these days of convenience.