Investors may have already placed their orders in the consumer food delivery space, but there’s still a missing recipe for solving the more than $250 billion business-to-business foodservice distribution problem that’s begging for venture firms to put more cooks in the kitchen.
Stock prices for Sysco and US Foods, the two largest food distributors, are up by more than 20 percent since last summer, when Amazon bought Whole Foods. But, these companies haven’t made any material changes to their business model to counteract the threat of Amazon. I know a thing or two about the food services industry and the need for a B2B marketplace in an industry ripe with all of our favorite buzz words: fragmentation, last-mile logistics and a lack of pricing transparency.