Restaurants order from food distributors in four basic ways: through the distributor's online portal or app (Sysco, US Foods, and Performance Food Group all have one), through a sales rep by phone or text, by email to a customer service desk, or — for the small local vendors — however that vendor happens to work, which is often a text message before a cutoff time. Most restaurants use several of these at once, because most restaurants buy from four to ten vendors: a broadline distributor for the bulk of it, plus produce, protein, bread, dairy, and beverage specialists.
This guide explains how the whole system works — accounts, order guides, cutoffs, pricing, delivery, credits — for operators setting up purchasing for the first time, and for anyone who inherited "how we've always ordered" and wants to understand it before improving it.
The vendor lineup
Broadliners (Sysco, US Foods, PFG, Gordon Food Service, plus strong regional houses) carry tens of thousands of SKUs — dry goods, frozen, chemicals, disposables, and a passable version of almost everything. One truck, one invoice, one account rep. Most independents put 40–70% of their purchasing through one broadliner.
Specialty vendors beat the broadliner where it matters to your menu: a produce house that delivers six days a week, a protein supplier that cuts to spec, a local bakery, a coffee roaster, a linen service. Each is another account, another cutoff, another ordering channel, another invoice.
Cash-and-carry (Restaurant Depot, wholesale clubs) is the escape valve: no delivery, no minimum, same-day, and someone has to physically go.
The structural fact that shapes everything downstream: every vendor is its own workflow. Nothing about a Sysco account helps you order from the produce house.
Getting set up with a distributor
Opening an account with a broadliner is straightforward: they'll want business details, a resale/tax certificate, and either COD terms at first or a credit application for net terms (net 7/14/30 are all common in the industry). You'll be assigned a sales rep — the industry still calls them DSRs (distributor sales reps) — who sets up your initial order guide: the subset of the catalog you actually buy, with your negotiated prices.
Two things worth negotiating on day one, because they're much harder to change later:
- Pricing basis. Distributor pricing is quoted item by item, and the same case can be priced very differently across accounts. Ask what's contracted versus market-priced, and get your highest-volume 20–30 items on fixed or formula pricing where you can.
- Delivery days and windows. Fewer, reliable deliveries beat frequent unpredictable ones — your pars and your labor schedule are built around them.
The weekly ordering rhythm
The mechanics at almost every restaurant look like this:
- Count. Someone walks the walk-in, freezer, and dry storage with an order guide — per vendor, in shelf order — writing down what's on hand.
- Decide. Par minus on-hand, rounded up to whole cases, adjusted for what the weekend looks like and what's already inbound.
- Place, per vendor, before each cutoff. The broadliner order goes into their portal or app; the produce order is a text by 9 PM; the protein order is a call to the rep; the bread order is a standing order you only touch to change. Cutoffs are typically evening for next-day delivery.
- Confirm — or not. Portals confirm instantly and show shorts against real-time stock. Text-and-phone vendors confirm if you're lucky. Substitutions and price changes often surface only when the truck arrives.
- Receive. Check the delivery against what was ordered: count cases, weigh catchweight items, check temps, refuse or note damaged goods, and get shortages and rejections written on the invoice with the driver present.
- Chase credits. Shorts, rejects, and mispicks become credit memos — if someone requests them, tracks them, and verifies they land on a future invoice. Unchased credits are pure margin leakage.
Multiply that by five to ten vendors, and purchasing consumes 5–10 manager-hours a week — mostly not deciding what to buy, but shepherding orders through per-vendor channels and reconciling what came back.
Portal ordering: better, and still per-vendor
The big distributors' portals and apps (Sysco Shop, US Foods' MOXē, PFG's and GFS's equivalents) are genuinely good at their slice: your order guide with live pricing, real-time inventory so you see shorts at order time instead of at the truck, order history, and invoice access. If a vendor has a portal, use it — it's strictly better than the phone for accuracy.
What the portal can't do is see anything outside its own catalog. It doesn't know your sales, your other five vendors, your inbound orders, or your pars. So even in a fully-portaled restaurant, the deciding still happens on a clipboard or in someone's head, and the record of what you've ordered this week is scattered across four apps, two text threads, and an email chain.
Where the whole thing leaks
The per-vendor system fails quietly in the same places at nearly every restaurant:
- Ordering from memory instead of from counts — the Sunday-night order placed from the couch is how you get three cases of what you didn't need
- Price creep nobody sees — line prices drift week to week per vendor, and without a written baseline per item, a two-point food cost slide has no visible cause
- Confirmations that live in one person's phone — when the manager who texts the produce order goes on vacation, the restaurant's supply chain goes with them
- Credits requested and never verified — the distributor's error rate becomes your food cost
- Receiving against nothing — if the person checking the truck doesn't know what was ordered and confirmed, every short is a surprise and every substitution is accepted by default
None of these are solved by ordering harder. They're solved by giving the loop one system of record across all vendors: counts and sales drive suggested quantities, each vendor still gets their order in their channel (portal, email, text, EDI), replies and substitutions update a living purchase order, receiving checks against the confirmed state, and the reconciled result lands in accounting. That's the closed loop LineNow runs for restaurants across every vendor at once — the broadliner, the produce text thread, and everything between; the category breakdown is in Restaurant Vendor Ordering Software.
If you're setting up purchasing from scratch: open the broadliner account, build one order guide per vendor, use every portal your vendors offer, and put one person in charge of counts and credits. That's a sound manual system — and when it starts eating a workweek of management time, you'll know exactly which parts to hand to software.