I've had a sense that

lots of restaurants are starting to

taste the same.

And maybe you, too, have had a sense that

something is amiss.

So I wanted to test a hypothesis

with my coworkers:

that you can be served the same exact food —

[Alec, reporting] Can I just get the jalapeño poppers?

[Alec, hosting] — from totally different restaurants —

The fried pickles....

Can I get the fried pickles?

[Alec, Hosting] — but made in the same factory,

whether you wanted it or not.

Can I get the funnel cake fries?

Here's the question behind this test.

Are we trapped

into eating the same mediocre food

from New York to Alaska?

And if so, why?

And who's behind it?

Alright, moment of truth.

That’s the mystery we're going to unpack today.

To get to the bottom of it,

first I went to Harlan, Iowa.

Woke up at 5 a.m.

to talk to a restaurant owner

about how they get their food.

[Ellen] I'm Ellen Walsh-Rossman,

and I own Milk and Honey.

[Alec] The thing is,

Ellen’s restaurant does it

differently than most restaurants in 2025.

She showed me how she makes something from scratch:

her French toast.

She uses a distributor to get most base ingredients:

the milk from a local dairy,

and the eggs from a local farm —

Ellen’s.

The bread is brioche

that the restaurant makes from scratch.

From there, the brioche gets baked,

cut, dipped in homemade custard,

griddled, and served to you,

the customer,

or, luckily enough, me.

It’s very good.

It's not just the French toast.

Ellen tries to work with

as many local producers as possible.

[Ellen] This is our country skillet.

And this is the local

sourdough bread from

a bakery in Omaha.

But for many restaurants,

sourcing local ingredients like this

is getting harder and harder.

Ellen's distributor is regional

and employee-owned.

But if you're a restaurant owner,

especially in a rural area,

you might just have

one or two distributors to choose from.

There's a good chance

one of them is a company called Sysco.

And they are suspect number one

for my deep fried mystery.

To hash out that suspicion,

I spoke to Austin Frerick,

author of the book Barons,

who explained the profound way

Sysco is shaping the way we eat out.

The innovation of Sysco was that it was

the first national company

to essentially offer everything a restaurant needs.

[Alec] Back in the day, someone like Ellen

might have one distributor for butter

and another for eggs.

But Sysco is what's called a broadliner, supplying

everything from paper products

to meat and produce.

[Claire Kelloway] Sysco was a merger of nine different

wholesale restaurant distributors

with kind of the explicit goal

of making a national player.

[Alec] That was in 1969.

Fast forward to today,

and Sysco has grown so much

that it really only has

two other competitors in the national space.

Among them, Sysco is the largest,

and even a decade ago

controlled an estimated 35% of the market.

And this year,

their gross profit hit $15 billion.

The scary thing about Sysco was

it didn't become this giant through organic growth,

but instead it became a giant

through relentless acquisitions that went unchecked.

[Claire] They've acquired over 150 companies

to become really one of the only

national broadline distributors for restaurants.

[Alec] And this growth I learned,

is deeply changing the way we eat

from farm to table.

Let's start with the farm part.

Ellen tries to work with as many

local producers as possible,

even when it’s more expensive.

Sysco, on the other hand,

operates with the biggest producers

at massive scales to eke out savings —

producers that often have

some of the most exploitative production models.

Sysco gets their berries from companies like Driscoll —

Driscoll basically took the Nike sweatshop model

and applied it to berry production.

[Alec] — and chicken from companies like Tyson.

[Austin] Tyson's applied a sharecropping model

to meat production.

[Alec] If you used a national distributor,

could you get the Omaha sourdough?

No.

- No - No?

And why is that?

So a lot of local distributors

or local producers

are not able to tap into regional distribution.

The volume and production quantities is too high.

[Alec] Sysco scours the globe

for a good deal,

and there's reason to be concerned

about how they're getting some of those deals.

Seafood is the best example of this.

Many providers to Sysco

have been accused of engaging in slave labor.

[Alec] That includes forced Uyghur

and North Korean labor in China.

Basically any dark part of the food system

has moved offshore,

which makes policing it really, really hard to do.

But Sysco doesn't just source shrimp and strawberries.

They have their own line of

mass manufactured frozen foods.

Everything from sourdough and brioche to —

as I learned from researching this —

jalapeño poppers,

other fried appetizers,

and desserts.

Frozen food, it turns out,

isn't just a facet of the Sysco business model.

It drives it.

I don't think Americans appreciate that

frozen food allows these long, exploitative supply chains.

[Alec] In the early 2000s,

Sysco was buying jalapeño poppers

assembled in Mexico

for well below minimum wage

and shipped frozen all over the country.

[Austin] It allows a race to the bottom in terms of

labor standards and pay.

[Alec] So the food we ordered

could have come to a distribution center

like this, frozen,

shipped to restaurants across the country

and then dumped into a fryer.

And now, the truckers driving those shipments?

They're also getting squeezed by Sysco.

Sysco's continuously lobbying year after year

to deregulate the trucking industry.

And what we've seen since the 1980s

is trucking wages are down nearly 40%.

After the food is unloaded off of trucks,

it gets cooked up and put on your plate.

And Sysco's dominance means the food on that plate

is increasingly the same

and increasingly worse.

Do you think regional variety is disappearing?

Yeah, I would say so.

[Alec] You've probably had a Sysco meal without even realizing it.

They offer everything from

these sad bread rolls

to wagyu beef burger patties.

If you've ever spent time in a hospital or a prison,

you might have had a meal off of a Sysco truck.

And if you pay attention,

they're everywhere.

And so it's getting harder and harder to avoid

getting the exact same frozen meal

at your local diner or brewery.

It probably won't taste that great either.

If you were to buy pre-made brioche

from one of the big national distributors...

[Ellen] They probably will try to keep things cheap,

so like, they're probably not going to use butter.

[Alec] So they'll use like a canola oil or shortening —

[Ellen] Yeah, shortening or something like that.

And then, like, their sugar might be like,

processed sugar, like a high-fructose corn syrup kind of thing.

[Alec] Austin found a story of a Pennsylvania diner

whose burgers weren't frying the same on the grill.

when the owner investigated

he realized the patties now contained soy protein filler.

Sysco and their competitors are flooding restaurants

ultra-processed food like this.

Now, you might expect that with a

deep-fried cheddar jalapeño popper,

but maybe less so with something like bread.

The irony is you could be at a diner in a small town in Iowa,

surrounded by some of the world's best farmland,

and yet nothing on the menu is coming from around you.

It's low quality products

produced by people being exploited

outside the national borders.

The system isn't exactly working out

for restaurant owners or local distributors, either.

With the competition bought out, Sysco has more leverage

to arbitrarily raise prices.

During Covid for instance,

they used their market power to pass on inflation to their customers

and increase their earnings by 159%.

Sysco’s CEO even said on an earnings call

that they had no intention of competing on price.

[Claire] Smaller restaurants have

almost no negotiating power with Sysco.

And so if you are in a rural area where

there, you know, aren't any other distributors,

then restaurants really don't have many options at all.

As we've lost some of that regional wholesale infrastructure,

we also see the loss of local businesses,

local farms, and a regional food system.

In general,

restaurant owners have little recourse when Sysco screws them over.

Complaints are rampant about

late deliveries, crushed eggs below stacks of boxes,

even swapping ingredients without informing restaurants.

As the industry continues to consolidate,

these issues will only get worse.

Sysco already tried to buy their largest competitor, US Foods,

but was shut down by the FTC.

Now Sysco's two largest competitors are signaling

they might try to merge.

In an environment where the biggest companies

aggressively push out competition,

it makes sense.

It also means restaurants will have

even less choice than they already do,

and farmers will have less bargaining power

when selling their food.

[Claire] The most aggressive, you know, gold standard

thing that an antitrust enforcer could do would be to

look at some of these deals and say, maybe we went too far.

Like, maybe we let Sysco acquire too many companies,

and we should unwind some of those, and break up Sysco.

That's something that we've seen

antitrust enforcers take on

with past deals like, Ticketmaster.

[Alec] The FTC could also block future acquisitions.

And states and federal regulators

could scrutinize discount programs that people like Claire and Austin

suspect Sysco is using to drive out the competition.

But what about my mission to get the same food

in entirely different states?

We ordered a mix of jalapeño poppers, fried pickles,

and funnel cake fries

in Nebraska, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and in Alaska.

All right.

Moment of truth.

Jalapeño popper.

Never been to this restaurant.

Never been to this city, but...

It just tastes like something I've had 100 times.

In Omaha,

I'm pretty sure I got the Sysco

brand jalapeño popper,

though to be fair, their main competitor sells

almost the same thing.

The one that I got in Brooklyn was

clearly different than that one,

and was a little bit better.

Here in New Jersey, I ordered funnel cake fries.

They seem...

exactly the same as the ones I got in Omaha.

A fellow producer also ordered them in Philadelphia

and another in Anchorage.

They look pretty similar.

I also ordered some fried pickles,

which is what my fellow producer ordered in Philly.

They're clearly different.

One is chips, one is spears.

But there's a chance that I got these Sysco pickle spears.

Don't get me wrong. You've probably had a frozen

Sysco meal and thought it was totally fine.

But the point is,

in this giant food system, something is being lost.

Regional variety, local jobs, local businesses,

and just having a unique meal.

A meal that's different.