Sysco Is Not "Ruining Restaurants"

Summary

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: “I...