Company Foodservice · Logistics · Rosemont, IL
The truck is the least interesting thing US Foods owns
The trucks are the boring part. The second-largest food distributor in America is really a menu consultant, a private-label factory and a fintech-for-restaurants wearing a delivery company's coat.
Picture the last excellent plate you ate at an independent restaurant - the one with the specials board and the owner working the room. The chef made it. But the mozzarella, the short rib, the fryer oil, the to-go clamshell and quite possibly the recipe idea behind the dish arrived on a refrigerated truck at 4 a.m. There is a decent chance that truck said US Foods on the side, and an even better chance you have never once thought about the company that keeps roughly a quarter-million American kitchens stocked.
US Foods Holding Corp is the second-largest foodservice distributor in the United States, behind Sysco and ahead of Performance Food Group. Headquartered in Rosemont, Illinois, it reported $39.4 billion in net sales for its 2025 fiscal year and employs about 30,000 people. On paper that makes it a logistics business: buy food at scale, warehouse it across 70-plus distribution centers, sell it, drive it to the door. That description is accurate and it misses the point entirely.
The interesting parts of US Foods are the parts that have nothing to do with driving. It develops its own products. It ships restaurants a menu strategy. It built an app with a food-cost calculator in it. Distribution is the coat; underneath is something closer to a supplier, a consultant and a software company stitched together.
Who it feedsA quarter-million kitchens, most of them independent
US Foods sells to a very broad slice of the places Americans eat when they are not eating at home. Its own FY2025 breakdown splits the business four ways: independent restaurants at roughly a third of sales, chain restaurants at just under a quarter, healthcare and hospitality - hospitals, senior living, hotels, resorts - at more than a quarter, and a remaining slice of education, government and other institutions.
US Foods FY2025 sales by channel
That independent-restaurant weighting is the strategic tell. Independents are the hardest customers in foodservice - they open and close constantly, they order in small quantities, and they have no procurement department to negotiate with. Serving them well is expensive. It is also where the margin and the loyalty live, because an independent operator who trusts a distributor to help run the business does not switch on a two-cent price difference.
The problem it solvesRestaurants don't die of bad food. They die of math.
Most restaurants that fail do not fail because the cooking is bad. They fail on food cost, labor and menu decisions - the unglamorous math of running a kitchen. US Foods has spent years turning each of those pain points into something it can put on a truck.
Food cost gets a calculator. Labor gets labor-saving, pre-portioned and prepared products. The menu itself gets a research-and-development pipeline aimed at what diners are asking for next. The company's entire pitch to operators condenses to two words it stamps across its marketing: "Make It." The customer is the restaurant trying to survive; the product is a survival kit.
The productsPrivate labels you've eaten and never seen
The clearest evidence that US Foods is more than a logistics company is its Exclusive Brands portfolio: more than 20 proprietary private-label lines the company develops itself. Stock Yards covers premium meats. Chef's Line handles restaurant-quality prepared foods. Metro Deli does deli meats and cheeses; Rykoff Sexton covers specialty and global ingredients; Cross Valley Farms, Molly's Kitchen, Glenview Farms, Monarch and Harbor Banks fill out the pantry. These are the products operators put on menus without the US Foods name ever appearing. You have eaten them. You have never seen the brand.
Then there is Scoop, which is the most quietly theatrical thing a distributor does. Roughly twice a year, US Foods releases a batch of about 50 brand-new, on-trend products built around labor savings, profitability and menu innovation, and stages the launch like a runway show. It is CPG-style product development wearing a distributor's apron. A related effort, the "Unpronounceables List," went the other direction - stripping or avoiding more than 80 additives across 1,000-plus Exclusive Brand products.
The newest headline product is not food at all. In 2022 US Foods launched MOXe - short for "Making Operator Xperiences Easy" - an all-in-one ordering app spanning desktop, tablet and phone that surfaces more than 400,000 items, sends AI-powered real-time delivery alerts, and includes a built-in Food Cost Calculator. The company bills it as the most advanced e-commerce app in foodservice distribution. Whether or not that claim survives scrutiny, the direction of travel is obvious: the truck is becoming a piece of software.
How the money worksThin margins, big volume, better mix
The core model is broadline distribution: buy in bulk, warehouse, resell, deliver. Revenue rides on case volume and on passing food costs through to buyers, which means margins are thin by design. FY2025 gross profit was about $6.9 billion on that $39.4 billion of sales, with an adjusted EBITDA margin near 4.9%. Net income landed at $676 million, up nearly 37% on the prior year.
The lever that lifts a thin-margin business is mix. Every case of an Exclusive Brand product, every operator who leans on the technology and menu consulting, nudges profitability up without adding a single truck. That is why the private-label push and the app matter more than they might seem: they are how a distribution company earns a distribution-plus margin.
Where it sitsThe clear number two in a fragmented map
American foodservice distribution is dominated by three names and still deeply fragmented beyond them. Sysco leads with roughly $81 billion in annual sales; US Foods is second at $39.4 billion; Performance Food Group is third around $63 billion in a broader mix of businesses. Together the big three hold only about 38% of the total market, which tells you how much of the country is still served by regional players and cash-and-carry outlets like Restaurant Depot.
Annual net sales, the big three (approx.)
US Foods differentiates less on being the cheapest and more on being the most useful to the operators who need the most help. Its footprint is leaner than Sysco's several hundred distribution centers, and its cash-and-carry chain, CHEF'STORE - picked up in the 2020 Smart Foodservice deal - has been under strategic review for a possible sale as the company concentrates on its core broadline business. The recurring theme is focus: do fewer things, do them for the customers who value them most.
The backstoryA blocked merger, a buyout, and a very long exit
The company's roots run back to John Sexton & Company, an 1883 Chicago food business, though the modern corporate entity dates to 1989. Its recent history is a case study in things not going to plan and working out anyway. Royal Ahold bought the business in 2000. Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and KKR took it private in a $7.1 billion leveraged buyout in 2007. In 2013 Sysco agreed to buy it for $8.2 billion - a deal a federal judge blocked on antitrust grounds in 2015.
That block turned out to be a gift. US Foods went public on the NYSE under the ticker USFD in 2016, raising about $1.02 billion, then grew through acquisitions - SGA's Food Group for $1.8 billion in 2018, Smart Foodservice for $970 million in 2020. Its private-equity owners took an unusually long road to the exit, finally divesting their remaining stakes in 2025, eighteen years after the original buyout. Under CEO Dave Flitman, who took the job in early 2023 after leaving Performance Food Group, the company has laid out multi-year targets and, in late 2025, explored - then walked away from - a merger with PFG pushed by an activist investor.
The quiet winA billion-dollar sustainable menu nobody noticed
One number captures what distribution scale can do when a company decides to point it somewhere. US Foods' sustainability-oriented product lines, Serve Good and Progress Check, together crossed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time in 2024. A billion-dollar sustainable-products business grew up inside a company most people think of, if they think of it at all, as trucks and warehouses. That is the recurring surprise of US Foods: the boring exterior keeps hiding businesses that are not boring at all.