COMPANY FOODSERVICE · DISTRIBUTION
A one-van produce hustle in Louisville turned into a 16,000-restaurant food-distribution machine by doing the one thing the national giants would not: picking up the phone and asking the chef.
In the late 1980s, a retired Louisville school superintendent named Bob Holmes started growing edible flowers, baby vegetables and artisan salads for a handful of restaurants. He drove them around town himself. That one-van produce route, later named Creation Gardens, is the seed of a company that now moves produce, meat, seafood, dairy and paper goods to more than 16,000 independent kitchens across roughly a dozen states. The business is called What Chefs Want! - and the name is not marketing. It is the entire operating manual.
Most food-distribution stories are about scale: bigger trucks, bigger warehouses, bigger minimums. This one runs the other way. What Chefs Want built a nine-figure business by being willing to do the small, unglamorous things the national broadliners avoid - split a single case, deliver the same day, source from the farmer down the road, and let a chef order exactly what a Thursday menu needs and nothing more.
The company traces to two separate Louisville lineages that eventually merged. One is Grocers Ice & Cold Storage, a cold-storage and ice business that dates to 1904 and still ties the company to the same historic building. The other is Bob Holmes's specialty-produce route. In 1991 Ron and Mollie Turnier took over the aging ice house; in 1997 they bought the one-van Creation Gardens and ran it out of that cold-storage space. The philosophy that would later become the company's name - ask chefs what they need, then get it to them fast - started almost immediately.
On paper, What Chefs Want is a broadline wholesale food distributor - the kind of company that keeps a restaurant's walk-in stocked from one order sheet. It carries fresh produce, USDA-compliant meats, daily-fresh and boat-direct seafood, dairy, gourmet and specialty items, restaurant staples, and paper and to-go goods. A chef can build most of a menu from the catalog.
The difference is in the terms. There are no minimum orders. Cases can be split, so a kitchen that needs three pounds of something is not forced to buy thirty. Delivery runs daily. A prep-kitchen operation pre-cuts and processes produce so line cooks spend less time breaking down cases. It is the convenience of a specialty purveyor bolted onto the range of a full-line distributor.
That range has been assembled deliberately, one category at a time. Produce came first, then paper and to-go goods, then meat through the 2015 Mattingly Foods deal, then seafood through Bluefin Seafoods in 2017. Each addition let a restaurant consolidate more of its buying into a single relationship without giving up the flexibility that made the relationship worth having in the first place. For a chef, fewer supplier logins and one delivery window is not a small thing - it is time back on the line.
The customer is the independent restaurant and the working chef - operators spread across Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Missouri and Colorado. These are exactly the accounts that get flattened by national distributors' order minimums and standardized SKUs. A 40-seat bistro and a national chain do not want the same thing, and What Chefs Want built its whole model around the former.
Serving that customer well is less about logistics software than about knowing the menu on the other end. A chef building a spring tasting menu wants ramps for two weeks and then never again; a barbecue joint wants the same brisket cut every single day. A distributor organized around the smallest useful order can say yes to both without renegotiating terms each time. Retaining the regional produce buyers who came in through acquisitions is part of how the company keeps that knowledge close to the ground.
Running an independent kitchen means fighting two enemies at once: waste and stockouts. Order too much to clear a distributor's minimum and product rots in the walk-in. Order too little and the line runs out mid-service. National distribution economics push operators toward large, standardized orders - efficient for the truck, punishing for the small kitchen.
What Chefs Want's answer is to absorb that friction itself. Split cases, daily routes and no minimums mean a chef can order close to actual need. The local-sourcing program, Local Food Connection, goes a step further, connecting restaurants directly with regional farmers for pasture-raised proteins, produce, dairy and honey - and publishing guides like the Kentucky Local Foods Guide so buyers can find them.
The clearest way to see the strategy is to line it up against the national model. The giants win on price-per-case and truckload efficiency. What Chefs Want wins on flexibility and proximity - and in the independent-restaurant segment, that trade is often the one chefs actually want.
The expansion engine is a roll-up - but an unusual one. Since acquiring Creation Gardens in 1997, the company has folded in more than twenty family-owned regional distributors: Melvin's Produce, Mattingly Foods for meat, Bluefin Seafoods for seafood, ReFresh Produce (now Prep Kitchen), and many more. Crucially, it kept the local knowledge each business carried rather than flattening it into a single faceless network.
That approach reached a milestone in 2024, when the company acquired Atlanta's Phoenix Wholesale Foodservice and opened a 140,000-square-foot distribution hub in Austell, Georgia - a move that made it the largest independently owned wholesale food distributor in the South. In 2025 it added Premier Produce and Puzycki's Produce to deepen its Florida footprint.
Distribution at this scale is also a compliance business. What Chefs Want folds food-safety work into the offer - HACCP-based practices, GFSI-aligned standards, and FDA/USDA-compliant handling - alongside chef-support services and an online ordering platform. For a small operator, having a distributor that also helps navigate food-safety programs turns a supplier into something closer to an operating partner.
The cold chain itself is the oldest expertise in the building. A company with roots in 1904 ice and cold storage has spent more than a century learning how to keep perishable product at temperature from dock to delivery. That heritage matters most on the categories where a broken cold chain is a health risk, not just a quality one - boat-direct seafood and fresh proteins that move daily rather than sitting in inventory.
In a market dominated by Sysco, US Foods and Performance Food Group at the top and specialty players like The Chefs' Warehouse at the edges, What Chefs Want has claimed the independent middle across the Midwest and Southeast. It is large enough to carry a full broadline catalog and regional enough to still answer the phone. In a commodity business, that combination is the moat - and it is why the estimated billion-dollar operation still describes itself, first, by what a chef on the other end of the line is asking for.
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