As one of the largest foodservice distribution companies in the country, Illinois-based US Foods helps 250,000 foodservice clients across the country succeed every day.

Over 30,000 employees at more than 70 distribution centers nationwide handle about 400,000 different products. They have been named the Refrigerated & Frozen Foods’ 2024 Distributor of the Year. Read the cover story. 

US Foods became the first U.S. broadline distributor to offer a single tool for ordering, delivery and payments through its e-commerce platform, MOXé.

Customers using MOXé have a 5% greater retention rate and buy 10% more, the company said. US Foods expects to secure an extra $1.5 billion in incremental sales through digital as part of its long range plan.

The application allows foodservice operators to more easily observe and predict operations. 

US Foods, Distributor of the Year, on Using Tech to Help Foodservice Operators 'Make It'

As one of the largest foodservice distribution companies in the country, US Foods, Refrigerated & Frozen Foods’ 2024 Distributor of the Year, helps 250,000 foodservice clients across the country succeed every day.

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The restaurant technology space on track to be over $50 billion in the next few years, said Gene Carbonara, vice president of ecommerce and digital, at US Foods.

MOXé is an acronym for “making operator experiences easy,” Carbonara said. “That's really our focus. It is an all in one platform for our customers to be able to order their groceries, track their deliveries, pay their bills and manage their inventory, all in one simple application. And they can do that on desktop tablet or mobile.”

The platform has evolved over the last two years to be the “center” of the company’s digital transformation.

 “We have three pillars in our transformation. It's really focused on, one, increasing utilization engagement of our tools. The second pillar is focused on driving revenue growth and the third is really around improving productivity, not for only our customers, but for our internal associates as well.”  

The platform includes a food cost calculator designed for operators to track and manage food costs over time to better manage inventory and menu prices. 

“It has thresholds for them to monitor when their food prices are in range and out of range to keep them profitable. But really, at the end of the day it is, the heart of the matter is us helping our customers make it and manage their food costs, which is the biggest one of the biggest costs to any restaurant,” Carbonara said. 

Carbonara’s team is also using AI to personalize user experience and to optimize truck delivery times – increasing on-time accuracy by 20%.

“There's a thousand reasons that a truck can really go out of sequence for their routes and what we found is that we could build an AI model that really looked at the historical patterns of all of our routes and do a better job anticipating about the delivery time for our trucks than any off the shelf model could,” he said. 

“When I started in this role a few years ago, you know, B2B companies really focus primarily on making reordering as easy as possible. But we also know that our customers are looking for familiar B2C experiences that make it easy to discover new products,” Carbonara said. “We're really excited to be the industry leader in digital innovation.”

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