Food distributors in Miami

This is the thing that catches out anyone buying here for the first time. Our Miami listings carry addresses in Hialeah, Doral, Medley, Opa-locka, Miami Gardens and Coral Gables as often as in Miami proper, spread across 20 distinct areas and sub-markets. The trade sits in the warehouse belt north and west of the airport, not downtown and not near the water.

So we draw the line at Miami-Dade County rather than at the Miami city limit, and we say so on every category page. A city-limit rule would throw out most of the actual supply base, and a South Florida rule would pull in Broward companies that are an hour away in traffic and are somebody else's local market. The county is the unit that matches how the trade is really organised.

For a buyer, the question that follows is about routes rather than distance. A supplier in Medley and a supplier in Kendall may quote the same delivery area and mean completely different things by it. Ask where the trucks already go and at what time, not whether they can reach you.

Miami currently has three researched category pages: coffee, meat and seafood. Only 2 of the companies we list appear on more than one of them, so the lanes here are unusually clean. A meat house is a meat house, and the broadliners are the exception rather than the pattern.

That cuts both ways. It means a supplier is likely to know its own category properly, and it means you will run more accounts than an operator in a city with fewer, broader distributors. 9 of the companies we list sell walk-in or cash and carry, which is the useful third leg: it covers a Friday gap without an account, a minimum or a delivery window, and Miami has more of it than most metros because so much of the trade grew up serving small independent kitchens.

43 of the 46 suppliers here publish a phone number and 43 publish a street address, which is unusually complete. The 3 that publish no phone number are listed without one rather than with a number taken from a third-party directory, and the same rule covers every other blank field on this site.

Across the three categories we found 34 distinct product lines, which is what the filters on each page are built from. Those are the categories the companies name on their own sites, not categories we assigned by looking at a company name.