Sysco Is Not "Ruining Restaurants"
liamrosen.com
liamrosen.com
I've thought quite a bit about revealed preference in the context of recommendation algorithms. It's tempting to believe what people do in a given situation reveals what they actually prefer despite claims to the contrary, but psychology has long theorized it's more complicated than that. There's a complex interplay of conscious preference, subconscious impulses, information availability, and executive function.
The hard part is quickly convincing someone of the value proposition when there's an option that will ultimately be more satisfying than the quick and familiar.
Like - consequentially, one can see that before Walmart there were more locally owned stores in small towns. And I think we can argue about whether or not people were happier then. I would guess most people, particularly younger people are just happy to have a place where they can buy more stuff cheaper.
But all those negative externalities still happened. We can still be mad about that; and I think to a certain extent, like fundamentally is our goal to optimize dopamine hacking at the cheapest possible price point? Is there ever an argument to be made that maybe we design a system that doesn’t entirely feed into this pattern? Antitrust law is almost entirely a set of laws that exist to stop the system just doing its thang. Anti-drug and anti-smoking laws as well. Should we stop praying to the altar of consumer preferences in more cases? especially in the growing metaverse/character ai/brain-computer interface era.
Except that’s not even true—Walmart doesn’t merely sell products, it does plenty of anticompetitive tactics itself, like opening a store in a town, waiting until smaller retailers nearby go out of business, then close that Walmart and open a new one in the next town over. People in the first town have no choice but to drive to the next town for products, since the local businesses are gone. Rinse and repeat.
It all discards way too much of the real world complexity to human systems. Analyzing economic systems in only short (quarter/year) time scales without looking at how one quarter or year affects the ones around it is a massive assumption that I don’t think most people generally have nearly enough respect for.
I don’t think the person you’re replying to actually believes that—they’re speaking ironically.
You could likely order the things that local restaurant/pub does make in house, rather than go for the variety of items on the menu that are simply there to appease customers' fancies.
Or you could go to a proper restaurant that makes the majority of their dishes in house. You have this choice.
If Sysco and these other companies didn't offer pre-made jalepeno poppers and the like, they simply wouldn't be on the menu in the first place.
And I think Sysco acquiring other local suppliers does suggest that more menu items might be from them than were in the last at least
I think the original video is misrepresented, it argue that Sysco is a local monopoly for restaurants in rural areas, not a global monopoly. And it does absolutely mention its two big competitors, especially when Sysco tried a merger with one, and the two of them are in a merger themselves.
I won't argue point by point since i really, really dislike this argumentative method, but to me, the main argument from OP is: consumer have choices, and chose low-quality (the part about the frozen line especially is interesting). The video argues that Sysco is a local monopoly and that in reality, few restaurant truly have a choice of what they serve, so they serve shit even if they don't want to , more and more expensive shit as Sysco's earnings are rising, and people are just now starting to notice.
Living close to an agri co-op, and being raised near a farmer's market (not in the US though), it does track, but local monoply power is not where i think those companies truly make their money. It's their local monopsony power. Coop like working with global logistic companies at first, since they propose the lowest prices and can buy in bulk, and work well with futures. But as soon as the local competion dies, restrictions start to happen on what the coop can do until even local restaurant have to use the logistic food companies instead of the local coop (luckily, here we have regulations and this was banned 25 years ago)
At worst, the original video inform consumers, and given Op's belief in information:
> 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.
i don't understand why he argues against it. Yes, the fact are presented in an ideological manner, but isn't the consumers more informed after?
I also find it ridiculous to counter "they abuse animals in factory farms" with "well they also sell free range eggs if you're willing to pay". Okay so you admit that they are abusing animals in factory farms, though. The latter doesn't in any way excuse or absolve the former.
- It opens with clear derision of its opponents’ main point as a “meme”. Not a good look out of the gate.
- It slips from talking about ‘them’ to talking about ‘you’, and ends with a direct challenge to the ego of those it disagrees with, suggesting their ability to provide, to “cook”, for their household is more at fault than Sysco.
- It is oblivious to the continuous decrease in effective household spending power and increase in household hours worked since Reagan, suggesting that, regardless of the author’s intent, that the resulting post is either a corporate shill or a capitalism evangelism piece.
- It uses a variety of conversational warfare tactics of argumentation that I don’t view as acceptable for submissions to HN. Rhetorical styles are not exempt from judgment, etc. (This alone would be sufficient cause for me to consider flagging it.)
I hate that outside the probably 5 biggest US cities it's all so boring. Maybe I'm getting old and have rose-colored glasses but I feel like this wasn't the case 20 years ago.
What makes you think this is the case? Just last week I had tasty Vietnamese food on the lakeshore of a tiny rural Vermont town: https://www.yelp.com/biz/pho-farm-morgan
It was both delicious and unexpected, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't there 20 years ago. I think there's still lots of good food to be found outside those cities than you might think.
Since I brought it up, I guess I might as well ask: is pineapple common in Vietnamese noodle dishes? I had their "House Vermicelli" with grilled pork, and was pleasantly surprised by the pineapple. Is it a regional thing, or a substitute for something they didn't have available? I don't think I've had it this way before.
Tonight's restaurant dinner fell off the Sysco truck
> 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.
"feel bad about being poor"
> 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.
"feel bad about eating meat"
> 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.
"feel bad about food choices"
> The More Perfect Union narrative stops just short of calling Sysco a monopoly. They’re not. They only control 35% of the market
"only 35%"
I mean, c'mon.. was this written by a real person or Adam Smith come back from the grave?
It does smell a little AI-assisted.
Getting rid of Sysco isn't going to magically make them able to afford pricier options either.
>"feel bad about eating meat"
Feeling bad about eating meat feels bad, but if meat production is ethically and environmentally questionable why should we let the consumers off the hook? Should we let gas guzzling SUV drivers off the hook as well for their choices because it might make them feel bad? Better blame a faceless corporation instead so we can feel smug while not changing our lifestyles at all. After all, ExxonMobil could have theoretically synthesized carbon neutral gasoline, rather than pumping it out of the ground (never mind the cost), so the blame lies with them.
>"only 35%"
What's your preferred market share then?
This is a strawman. Even before "recycling is a lie" entered into the zeitgeist a few years ago, approximately nobody thought people failing to recycle led to greenhouse gas or toxic waste, or that recycling was going to prevent those things. At best they did it out of some vague sense of "environment". If pressed they'll probably say something about landfill space or sea turtles, but I doubt they thought recycling was going to stop global warming, or clean up the polluted rivers in China/India.
>This is the same, it's just reframing corporations cutting costs wherever they can as the fault of the consumer rather than just plain entshittification.
To some extent it is the fault of the consumer. Restaurants are a competitive market with low barriers to entry. If consumers actually want unique local flavors an non-frozen foods, and are willing to pay a premium for it, sysco would have never gotten a foothold. Sure, cheap frozen food is objectively bad and you'd have a tough time finding someone who'd explicitly say "yes, I do want reheated frozen food at restaurants", but if people are willingly choosing it, then it's just demonstrating expressed preference vs revealed preference. The fact that mcdonalds serves cheap low quality food (compared to even something like olive garden) can't be blamed on "plain entshittification".
This is rooted in the assumption that capitalism provides what people want, rather than the worst that they will still accept. Endlessly cutting costs and then blaming the tastes of the consumer is why people put out anti-corporation pieces like the original video. That is not to say that Sysco is not operating logically.. but if the best move in a system leads to an unfavourable outcome for those that should benefit from it, then the system itself is the problem. Or another way to phrase it: there is a reason why that video resonated with many people that goes beyond trying to blame others for your problems.
Can you really say people "want" more expensive/unique/non-frozen food when they choose the cheap one every time? It's like with flights. People complain about how shitty flying is, but most people are also sorting by price and buying the cheapest.
You can go off marketing, but every place will try to present it's food as unique and well crafted even if it's premade.
google flights literally has a legroom indicator.
>Maybe they'll just upcharge me.
the common upchargeable items (eg. baggage) can either be found on google flights, or are easily searchable.
>Same for restaurants if you're a traveler and don't have time to get familiar with the reputation.
That's basically a perennial problem with tourist trap restaurants, no need to invoke "enshittification" or corporation bashing.
Individuals can't reasonably be blamed for systemic problems.
Also I reject using the word "enshittification" because it comes off as childish.
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.