Why we built this

Search for a food distributor in your city and you get three kinds of result. Aggregator pages with phone numbers scraped years ago. Listicles ranking the “top 25” national distributors with revenue figures nobody can trace. And the distributors’ own sites, which are the only reliable source but which you have to find one at a time.

None of that answers what an operator actually asks: who near me carries this protein, will they deliver to my zip code, will they take an account my size, and can I walk in when Friday goes wrong. Those questions need a directory built from primary sources and filtered on real attributes.

A researched directory of US food distributors. It covers the national broadliners with revenue taken only from their own filings, and local suppliers city by city, each one verified against the company’s own website and dated.

Today that is 10 national distributors and 13 live city pages, with 51 markets planned. We would rather ship a small number of pages that are right than a thousand generated from a template, which is the reason this is going slowly.

This directory is published by VoiceOrder Solutions, a company that sells voice and web order-entry software to food distributors. That is a real commercial interest and you should know about it before you read a listing, so we say it on every page rather than burying it here.

Here is what that does and does not mean. It funds the research. It does not decide who is listed, in what order, or what we say about them. No distributor has paid to appear, there are no affiliate links to any of them, and there is nothing a company can buy to move up a page. The relationship is disclosed in the footer of every page, in the homepage FAQ and in our terms.

The honest tension: the distributors listed on this site are also the people VoiceOrder wants as customers. We think a directory that is useful whether or not you ever click through to VoiceOrder is the only version worth publishing, and the research rules are written down so you can check we are keeping to them.

• Sources over summaries. If we cannot capture it from the company, it does not ship.
• Gaps stay visible. A missing minimum order is reported as missing, not estimated.
• No invented scores. We have not audited anyone's cut quality, so we do not rate it.
• Free, and free to leave. No listing fee, no removal fee, no upsell to a company on the page.
• Slow beats scaled. One researched city is worth more than fifty generated ones.

Corrections, removals and additions all go to hello@usfooddistributors.com. If you run a distribution business we have missed, tell us and we will research it properly rather than adding a row from a listing site.