A History of Ordering at Sysco—From Payphones to Ecommerce
Founded in 1969, Sysco is the world’s global foodservice leader. For 50 years, Sysco has been supplying restaurants with fresh ingredients, whether it’s delivering aged American Wagyu beef to Chef Thomas Keller’s luxurious Per Se kitchen in Manhattan, or chuck roast for a self-taught cook in San Antonio.
Today, chefs can order their supplies from Sysco in a few clicks. Ecommerce is a $26.7 trillion global industry, and Sysco is bringing that same ecommerce experience to restaurants through our digital ordering platform, Sysco Shop.
Chefs can click, order, and watch their delivery en route. But it hasn’t always been that way. Before ecommerce, before the internet, before computers, Sysco’s sales team took orders the old fashioned way—by hand.
”We would walk through their freezers, their coolers, their storeroom,” said Richard Dachenhausen, a former sales consultant who worked for Sysco for 35 years. “We would physically write down their order as they went through it.”
Here’s a brief history of ordering at Sysco.
1980s & 1990s
“At about noon, when people were cooking lunch, you would take orders and physically punch them into this box. Then you would go to a payphone, call a 1-800 number, hold up the thing to a receiver, and it would send that information to a warehouse.” —Richard Dachenhausen
In the late 1980s, when Dachenhausen was just starting his career at Sysco, sales consultants drove around their territory to take orders and meet customers.
“I probably drove 40,000 miles a year,” he says with a laugh. After walking through a restaurant’s kitchen and taking down orders, sales consultants would type all of the information—the customer number, delivery date, SKU, and quantity—into a Telxon, transmitting the order to a Sysco warehouse for fulfillment. “That was a weekly routine.”
It was a hands-on job, says Todd Ballhaus, a deployment manager at Sysco LABS who started as a sales consultant 22 years ago.
”You had that big, giant binder which was the catalog,” Ballhaus remembers. “You’d take the customer’s order, and then you had to go find a payphone where you would transmit the order off to the Sysco office. We didn’t have cell phones. We had a pager.”
Sysco Order Catalogue
Dachenhausen remembers carrying that binder to some pretty unlikely places.
“I used to manage a ski area that was an hour outside my normal route,” he said about his territory near Seattle, Washington. “I’d get there at 1:00 pm and walk through the entire operation, three restaurants and three bars, taking orders. You’re clunking around through the snow with your binder and your Telxon. I spent the entire afternoon taking their orders and driving back down in blizzards sometimes, driving reflector to reflector because that was all you could see.”
2000s
Later, Sysco sales consultants used laptops to log into a program that allowed them to take orders digitally, saving a hard copy of the order on their machine.
”You still had to plug that laptop into a phonejack to transmit the order,” Ballhaus remembers.
Today
Today, Sysco is at the forefront of digital ordering. Sysco’s innovation office, Sysco LABS, is working to create a personalized ecommerce experience for Sysco customers.
“Our focus is to personalize your ordering experience and anticipate your needs to make ordering even quicker,” Sysco Chief Information and Digital Officer Tom Peck said in a January interview.
New features within Sysco Shop will include relevant recommendations suggested while shopping, custom lists to track recurring orders, out of stock substitution suggestions, and reminders for forgotten items.