SYSCO Food Expo!
Last week I partook in a rite of passage of the food service industry, when I attended the SYSCO Metro Area Food Expo at the Meadowlands Expo Center in Secacus, NJ.
SYSCO, for those of you outside the biz, is the largest food service distributor in the United States. If you ever eat in a restaurant, cafe, cafeteria, hospital, airplane, catered event, summer camp, or anywhere else for that matter, you have eaten SYSCO food and used SYSCO products. They OWN food.
They have some competition, but they basically win. They sell almost everything you eat, everything it’s made and served in, and everything in between, from the dish soap to the toilet paper to the little stir sticks for your coffee. The company formed in 1969 in Houston Texas through a merger of eight other small-time distributors. Since then they have gobbled up distribution companies in cities across America, employing a warehouse-saturation strategy similar to our lovely all-American Big Box store, contracting wholesalers and manufacturers to work exclusively through their network, and homogenizing the food supply so that anything you want can be brought to your establishment in neat cardboard boxes from a nearby warehouse.
Anyway, this delightful corporate behemoth supplies the cafes I manage with many of our supplies and ingredients. Therefore I was invited by our delightful sales representative to attend the annual Expo, where wholesalers who distribute their products through SYSCO gather to market their newest wares, spend face time with customers, win new establishments for their products, etc.
Imagine, if you will, a huge corporate expo center, wall-to=wall with cubicles bathed in eerie neon light, no windows anywhere, and at each stall is a little restaurant giving away free samples of their yummiest goods, with stacks of packages behind them. Many people are wearing suits, some are wearing silly chef hats. One can consume an egg roll, antipasto sampler, cookie, small cup of the latest all-natural juice, breakfast sausage, pancake, sandwich, fried shrimp, or hunk of fancy cheese every 10 feet. Luckily, I was not very hungry and had eaten breakfast, so I took it easy.
We were given bags to fill with our marketing swag, from pamphlets to business cards to small sample-sized packages of things like Craisins, Goldfish and Gruyere cheese. We were also given a magnetized card, which could be swiped at every expo station into an electronic console. Every swipe would be recorded and sent to our sales rep, who would then follow up with us on the products we were interested in, and presumably continue trying to sell them to us.
We consumed San Pelligrino sodas as we walked the sprawling aisles of corporate food distribution Christmas. Salespeople hocked their ware, pitched their pitches, made eye contact and smiled. They had all sorts of tricks up their sleeve to make you stop and try a bite.
All told, we spent about an hour getting there, and 1.5 hours getting through all the aisles, making sure to try stuff that looked good without pigging out too seriously. By the time I got to the part where all the awesome desserts were, I was too stuffed to care that there was free cheesecake everywhere.
It was sort of fun, this SYSCO expo. It was weird, it was exciting, people were EXCITED and they were doing business. The ectoplasm of commerce was collecting in the nooks and crannies of the expo center, and the smell of magnetized plastic was heavy on the air. People whose lives center on doing business, buying and trading and selling food, were very happy. But the whole experience strikes me as very unreal, totally bizarre and pretty upsetting.
I’ve always known that most consumers experience a disconnect from the reality of the food supply, but the disconnect between what food actually is, where it comes from, and how it transitions from raw plant or animal material to the thousands of commodities it is made into is also experienced by people at higher levels of food service work. Even the people who sell and cook and market food don’t really seem to know or care what that food really is, or where it came from.
One man we spoke with at length was exclusively selling pre-made guacamole, and frozen, peeled, halved avocadoes. Plastic bags of avocado halves, lime green, bearing little resemblance to the fruit with a peel and a pit. They’ve done all the work, i.e. taken all the nature out of it, and what is left can be preserved, packaged, shipped from a warehouse, manipulated and commodified even further before it hits your, the customer’s, plate. Cha-ching.
