alt Hacker NewsTonight's restaurant dinner fell off the Sysco truck
Comments
Somehow this has been in the news recently but it’s been happening for a long, long time. There are some foods I just kinda dread and don’t order because they’re the same everywhere. If they’re the same everywhere, it’s because they’re little more than frozen bags and boxes shipped in from Sysco, and I can make the same thing at home.
An interesting psychology of restaurant menus is when they use the term ‘house made’ for an item. My assumption then is that all the other items came from the Sysco truck and will be suitably generic.
Is it not just these are two entirely different target markets? While I'm not familiar with sysco as I'm not in the US, these are just chain-y generic and cheap eateries that are frequented by families/people that just want something predictable and cheap? Conversely people that like food or are a bit better off eat at restaurants that actually cook stuff from scratch?
Bonus points - investigate WHY people/families are after cheap eating out, and not cooking at home.
It's awe-dropping the lengths at which societies go repeating errors of avoiding market dominance because they are detrimental to consumers.
> There’s even been consolidation among owners of chains. A large number of food options in and around American malls trace back to one private equity firm named for the main character in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead.
I don’t know why the author avoids naming the firm here, but it’s Roark Capital Group.
I just saw a YouTube video on a similar topic, with the host noticing that jalapeno poppers seemed to be the same no matter what restaurant he went to, and then it dives into the struggles of NOT using Sysco as your distributor if you want to have local goods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXXQTzQXRFc
Most restaurants these days are just serving unique presentations of various Sysco food, or other mass market food distributors.
I don't think this is correctly capturing the issue. It's just price. Sysco is maximally scaled and cheap. Local weird stuff isn't. It's that simple.
Like, there actually isn't a "shortage" of the kind of local fare the article is remembering. It's just concentrated in higher end fancy places in urban cores. Hipsters love it. We live on that stuff, and there's a huge market to serve it to us.
But the market conditions that produced a hand pie or cheese steak or whatever as a genuine local Food of the People just don't exist anymore. Those things were cheap before, they aren't now. But they aren't gone, or even going anywhere.
The value proposition for restaurants is almost completely gone for me, by now. Why would I travel out of my house, sit down some place full of people, pay 3X-5X what I would for an equivalent meal from the grocery store, for commoditized Sysco Slop that every other restaurant serves, and then pay an additional 20% because the restaurant won't pay its workers properly? And getting it delivered with DoorDash? Even more of a waste of money, even more extortionate tipping, and on top of it you have to worry about it arriving cold or the driver eating it. There's almost no upside to eating in a sit-down restaurant anymore.
It's funny to see the same type of criticism come up elsewhere too: https://www.economist.com/china/2025/09/22/a-restaurant-scan...
Given that nobody is buying the US soybean glut, I'm surprised that a mass 'back to tofu' marketing campaign aimed at restaurants isn't taking place. The Sysco distribution network is already in place - 'Soy for Strength' maybe? Or has the carnivore culture made that impossible?
Just more evidence that the American corporate food pipeline is mostly slop - optimized for long shelf life, minimal labor costs, maximal prices via monopolistic coordination. Human health and nutritional value comes last. It usually tastes not so great, so restaurants compensate with butter, salt and sugar to cover up the low quality.
You can eat twice as well at home for half the cost, but the payment is time and energy: learning cooking techniques, especially high-speed strategies suitable for quick meals, cleaning up, washing dishes, sourcing and buying ingredients, etc. Some areas have local farms, but they're not so easy to buy from often, and consumer prices are pretty high through middlemen - but still far cheaper than a 'decent' restaurant. Some high-end restaurants are great quality, but you pay a lot for that.
Also 'farm-to-table' turned into a big scam, hard to trust any of those companies, some have been caught filling the 'farm boxes' straight from the corporate giant's pipelines. Some are OK. All in all, it's a bit of a cognitive load, a constant cost, to find good food in these rather opaque markets.
Good health and nutrition is hard to put a price on, though - it's worth the effort.
Tangentially, one dimension by which I can divide my friend-groups is when I say "I do a lot of work with Cisco(Sysco)" is the group that by default thinks "he's a network guy" and those who think "he's in food service".