Producer
Sysco Corporation
Sysco Corporation (Houston TX; NYSE: SYY; ~$79B revenue FY2024) is the largest US food service distributor — delivering food and related products to 700,000+ restaurants, healthcare facilities, educational institutions, and hospitality customers across North America. Sysco is the largest single buyer of Mexican fresh produce in the US food service channel, purchasing tomatoes, avocados, cucumbers, peppers, onions, and berries from Mexican growers and through produce brokers. Sysco's produce procurement operation sources directly from growing regions in Sinaloa, Sonora, Michoacán, and Baja California. Because Sysco serves both restaurant chains and independent restaurants — which depend on Sysco deliveries without the supply-chain redundancy of large retailers — a disruption in Mexican produce imports disproportionately affects food service: Sysco cannot easily substitute Mexican tomatoes or avocados with domestic supply on 24-48 hour timelines without significant price and availability impacts for its restaurant customers.
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Inputs supplied
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Goods downstream
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Facilities
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Stories
What they make
1 input Sysco Corporation supplies
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Goods downstream
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What else they do
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US Foodservice (Broadline)
62%International Foodservice
20%Specialty Produce & Fresh
10%Sysco Ventures & Healthcare
8%
Intelligence
What's known
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Did you know2020
Sysco simultaneously supplies US restaurants, US hospital food service, US school cafeterias, and US military base commissaries — the civilian, healthcare, educational, and defense food supply chains all run through the same Sysco distribution network and refrigerated trucks. During COVID-19, when restaurant orders collapsed by 60%+, Sysco pivoted its entire distribution infrastructure — warehouses, trucks, cold storage — to emergency food supply: supplying hospitals at surge volumes, distributing food boxes to food banks, and serving drive-through food pantries. The same company whose revenue depends on Applebee's and Olive Garden staying open was simultaneously a critical node in the emergency food supply chain when those restaurants closed. No other entity in the US food supply chain has equivalent reach across all four sectors simultaneously: Sysco's deliveries determine whether your restaurant dinner is available, whether the hospital cafeteria serves hot food, whether the school lunch program has vegetables, and whether the military base mess hall is stocked. A Sysco distribution center strike or cyberattack cascades simultaneously through all four supply chains in its service area within 48 hours.
Sysco Corporation ↗Origin2023
Sysco Corporation was founded in 1969 in Houston, Texas by John Baugh, who had a radical idea: consolidate the fragmented local food distribution industry using computers. The company name "Sysco" stood for "SYStems and COmputers" — it was a technology play on a fundamentally analog business. Baugh merged nine regional food distributors into a single entity, went public in 1970 at $1/share, and began a 50-year acquisition campaign that created the largest food distribution company in the world. The founding moment was the US restaurant boom of the late 1960s: fast food chains (McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's) were expanding nationally, and chain restaurants needed supply chains that could operate at national scale — something no regional distributor could do. Sysco was built to be the infrastructure layer for the national restaurant industry. The company that started as nine regional distributors merged in Houston now serves 700,000 foodservice locations and handles approximately 16% of US food service distribution. Its annual revenue of $79B is larger than most countries' food and beverage GDP; its fleet of refrigerated trucks covers more annual miles than most domestic airline networks.
Sysco Corporation ↗