US Foods

US Foods is the kind of wholesaler restaurants and cafeterias lean on when they need broad food distribution rather than a consumer-facing brand. By our assessment, its strength is the plain, unglamorous job of moving a lot of staples, produce, meat, and kitchen supplies through a supply chain that buyers can plan around. The trade-off is that this kind of business is only as good as logistics, pricing, and fill rates; it does not have much of the sparkle people associate with food brands. In practice it is a back-office name, the sort procurement teams notice more than diners do. It sits in the same world as other large foodservice distributors, where reliability matters more than image, and the country tag says it is American.