CompanyGraph
Us Foods Holding Corp.
USFD · NYSE Arca · United States
Delivers fresh, frozen, and dry food to 250,000 restaurants through 70+ warehouses and uses live inventory costs to show operators which menu items actually make money.
Us Foods picks up fresh, frozen, and dry ingredients from manufacturers, stores them in separate temperature zones across 70+ broadline distribution centers, and consolidates everything into a single customized delivery per restaurant — so the warehouse is the physical point where every order has to be assembled before it can move. Because all that inventory flows through the same facilities, the MOXē platform can read live ingredient costs across every product in stock and run them through the Menu IQ engine, which tells each of the 250,000 restaurant customers which items on their menu are actually making money before they place their next order. That feedback loop is what a competitor cannot easily replicate — a software company has no live cost feed without the warehouses behind it, and a plain distributor has no profitability hook to embed inside the ordering cycle. The fragility runs along the same seam: a sustained MOXē outage would cut the live cost data, revert delivery routing to manual across all 70+ centers at once, and erase the order history and profitability records that keep restaurants from switching to someone else.
How does this company make money?
The company earns a markup on every case of food delivered through its warehouses. It collects additional revenue from sales of its own brands — Chef's Line, Rykoff Sexton, and Stock Yards — where margins are typically higher than on branded goods. It also charges technology service fees for access to the MOXē platform and Menu IQ analytics subscriptions.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Switching means losing the order history and profitability tracking built up inside the MOXē platform, which is connected directly to each restaurant's point-of-sale system. Proprietary brands like Chef's Line and Rykoff Sexton are not available elsewhere and require a new supplier qualification process to replace. Moving to a different distributor also means starting over on route optimization and delivery scheduling for that restaurant's specific location.
What limits this company?
Each warehouse can only reach restaurants within a fixed driving distance before perishables spoil. Building more capacity means constructing a new refrigerated facility, passing local food-handling permits, and waiting for construction — not just adding software licenses or delivery routes.
What does this company depend on?
The company cannot run without its temperature-controlled truck fleet for last-mile delivery, refrigeration systems across all 70+ warehouse locations, the MOXē platform technology infrastructure, supplier production for its proprietary brands Chef's Line and Rykoff Sexton, and food safety documentation systems that satisfy traceability rules.
Who depends on this company?
Independent restaurants would lose the ability to order fresh, frozen, and dry goods in a single delivery and would lose access to Menu IQ profitability tracking. Healthcare facilities and schools would lose specialized foodservice procurement through broadline consolidation. Grocers would lose access to foodservice-grade product assortments and the delivery scheduling that comes with them.
How does this company scale?
Route optimization software and the MOXē platform can be extended to new territories and new customers at relatively low cost. What does not scale cheaply is the physical infrastructure — every new region requires a new refrigerated warehouse, local permits for food handling, and the time to construct and certify the facility before a single delivery can go out.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
USDA food safety rules require detailed traceability records across every temperature-controlled shipment, and tighter rules would force changes across all 70+ facilities at once. Diesel fuel prices move directly with delivery costs across the entire truck fleet, so a price spike hits margins immediately. Shortages of CDL-qualified drivers — the licensed commercial drivers needed to operate those trucks — can cap how many deliveries the warehouses can actually push out each day.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
If the MOXē platform went down for an extended period — whether from a technology failure or a government food-safety regulation forcing a complete rebuild of its traceability system — the live cost feed to Menu IQ would stop, delivery routing across all 70+ warehouses would fall back to manual work, and all 250,000 customers would lose their order history and profitability tracking at the same moment.
Supply Chain
Seafood Supply Chain
The seafood supply chain is shaped by three root constraints: wild catch uncertainty where ocean fisheries are biological systems whose yields depend on weather, migration patterns, and stock health — none of which are controllable; extreme perishability where seafood degrades faster than almost any other protein and the cold chain must begin on the vessel and cannot be interrupted; and traceability gaps where seafood passes through auctions, processors, and distributors across multiple countries, making origin verification structurally difficult.
Processed Food Supply Chain
The processed food supply chain is shaped by three root constraints: ingredient sourcing complexity where a single product may contain 20 to 50 ingredients from a dozen countries with each ingredient carrying its own supply chain, food safety regulation where every facility, process, and ingredient must meet standards and a contamination event at any point triggers recalls across the entire distribution chain, and shelf life engineering where formulations are designed to last weeks to months but require specific preservatives, packaging, and storage conditions — making the recipe itself a supply chain constraint.
Beef Supply Chain
The beef supply chain is shaped by three root constraints: a biological growth cycle that delays production response by 18 to 24 months, a cold chain dependency that requires unbroken refrigeration from slaughter through retail, and processing concentration where four companies handle roughly 85% of US beef — a structure driven by the capital intensity and regulatory burden of large-scale slaughter facilities.