I’ve been doing a detailed thought experiment which involves purchasing large quantities of food items. Food is one of those weird things where prices in most places becomes cheaper when purchasing a large quantity - to a certain point. No doubt restaurants, caterers, cruise ships, old age homes and the like take advantage of this.
I can go to a cheaper grocery store and find a good price for an item in my area. I could go to Costco to get a cost for a bigger quantity for selected goods which may or may not be cheaper. I have seen similar stores which supply small business.
I understand prices, demand, delivery and laws are local. Exact answers not required.
Is there a reputable place restaurants can approximate wholesale costs for common goods?
To pick a few items of different categories. how could one best buy cases or bigger quantities of different theoretical goods? To make it more specific I have chosen a few from different categories.
A) liquid coconut milk, canned or otherwise
B) frozen shrimp, 20-40 per pound
C) black peppercorns
D) frozen chicken breasts
E) fresh chicken thighs
F) salad spinach
G) sandwich bread
H) individual packets of ketchup
I) commercial quantity of butter
For small and medium businesses, is Costco or similar really the best option? Do suppliers offer a big discount to big companies?
Please feel free to offer your own experiences with wholesale prices.
You could go to the Sysco website, sign up and get prices for many of these things. I don’t know if the prices will be better than Costco, but I doubt it.
The problem you might run into with actual restaurant supply places is a case is 4 or 6 institutional sized cans, gallons when you want quarts or pints.
For the purposes of this thread, say the volume distribution (small cans, ten pounds, etc.) does not matter much if this helps. Of course it does in real life.
We call up our distributor (or, these days, use a portal) and ask them. All the big food service places have websites we can log on to and get pricing. Plus there’s Restaurant Depot, but with them, it’s often easier to just glance at the price while you’re there. If you have a GFS (Gordon Food Service) store nearby, they’re open to the public and I believe they sell things to anyone off the street at, more or less, our wholesale prices.
If you’re just walking through a store, look at a price, multiply it by 0.65 and that’s going to be in the neighborhood of what the store is paying. Might be more, might be less, depends on the store, depends on the deals they got, but 30-40% is the typical margin grocery stores operate on (multiplying the selling cost by 0.65 will tell you the stores cost based on a 35% margin). This would be for (mostly dry) items on the shelf or likely frozen items and cheese. Milk tends to run at a lower margin because people watch milk prices, deli runs WAY higher (cost is closer to a 1/3 of the selling price). Beer runs considerably lower as well. Bread is a different animal. Most/many bread vendors work on a ‘guaranteed sale’. The vendor loads up the shelf and the next time they’re in, they pull everything out, credit the store for all the old products and load it back up. The store is guaranteed to sell every item they buy. Due to that, they’ll run a much lower margin on it, typically around 20%ish. Plus, in addition to being a guaranteed sale, the vendor normally stocks the shelves on their own. Since we don’t have to spend any time on that shelf, beyond maybe straightening it out when we walk past it (which can be ignored as the bread man will be back tomorrow), there’s very little labor involved with it either.
Looked up a couple of random things because someone’s computer was logged on to a vendor website…
These are just the first item I saw that remotely matched what you said and rounded prices. I didn’t dig into the details at all so there may be much better pricing if I scrolled around a bit.
24 x 13.5oz cans of coconut milk, $45
26/30 raw shrimp, peeled, 10# $65 (FWIW, there’s about a bazillion different ways to buy shrimp, even narrowing it down to size, you still have cooked/raw, peeled/shell on, tail on/tail off, brown/gold/white, deveined/not deveined, farm raised/wild caught and it goes on and on and on)
Whole Black Peppercorns, 6# for $85, or maybe just get 18oz for $15.
Frozen cooked chicken breasts, 10#, $50
Frozen raw chicken thighs, 40#, $100
Spinach 10#, $20
Sliced white bread, 7/32oz loaves, “14 usable slices per loaf” $35
Ketchup GFS brand, $30 for 1000 7 gram packets
36# block of butter, $90.00
My store sells them at $6.39 for 8oz and that’s with a considerable markup on them. Two things to note, however: First, club stores (ie Sams/Costco) can afford to sell things for a much lower price due to how much of their income comes from your membership fees.
Second, it’s not uncommon for things to be cheaper at other places than they are through food service vendors. The food service places know that restaurants/stores that are big enough aren’t going to make runs to, for example, Sams Club. So at my small place, we can go and get peppercorns and save a few bucks. But the owner of a high end, very busy restaurant isn’t doing that. They’ll just pay extra. It’s faster and more reliable than sending someone on a grocery run.
Also, we’ve never bought black peppercorns (or most of the items on that list) from GFS. If we wanted them, our rep can almost certainly get a better price or point us towards something cheaper. But that’s just the first one I saw and at their ‘regular’ pricing.
They (GFS) do just that: retail sales to ordinary retail schlubs like me who’re paying sales tax. At one time I lived in the distribution area for Sysco and they also had similar stores. I don’t know that Sysco still does that.
I shop at a GFS nearby for a few things they do that’re especially good and aren’t in excessively oversized containers for home use. Within that set of sizes some of their prices are a big cut below ordinary mainstream groc stores and some are pretty darn close to mainstream grocery prices. It seems to vary a lot by product and it’s not all down to unknown (to me) institutional brands vs well-known consumer national brands.
I don’t use Costco or the like so I can’t compare GFS to them.
That’s always been our issue with the GFS stores. Some of the stuff we bring in from GFS gets put in our store without much modification. But if you can run up to the GFS store and get it cheaper, I can’t sell it, or as much of it. Or, for example we sell (hot) soup, but if you can get that same soup from the GFS for half the price, even if you have to get a gallon, you might not get it from me anymore. I remember my dad (the owner here) having the same problem when Sam’s opened up to the public. It’s the same issue we have when Restaurant Depot lets anyone off the street walk in (with nothing more than a card you borrowed from someone).
On the other hand, there are local wholesalers in the area that also have retail shops. However, they sell products in their store at a heavily inflated price. For example, they’ll sell us something for $10/lb, we sell it for $15/lb and they’ll sell it in their store for $25/lb. If you want to spend your money there, they’ll take it, but by not undercutting us, they drive customers to their wholesale customers. We make more, they make more (because we can sell more than them), the customers pay less, everyone is happy.
I have the June Restaurant Depot flyer here for the southeast. I’m limited as to what’s in the flyer, but these are representative:
Shrimp, 21-25ct, $4.61 pound, raw/easy-peel
Shrimp, Gulf (so wild caught I’d think), 16-20ct, $6.99, tail-on not sure on shell
Chicken: whole cut-up $1.09 pound; leg quarters $0.55 pound; drumsticks $0.59 pound [ETA: they have chicken breast, but not in the flyer; it’s usually around a buck a pound]
Spinach salad: $4.19 for 2.5 pounds
I don’t see ketchup packs but Gulden’s mustard is $15.89 for 500.
I do a fair amount of shopping at US Foods Chef’Store. Some of their prices are better than Costco, others are about the same. But they carry a massive amount of products and sizes, from home sizes to huge.
For some reason I was under the misimpression that restaurants paid lower prices for common items plus a fee for delivery and service. Although this seems to be the case by 30%+, and this discussion does not account for important things like quality, in many cases it would be cheaper to go to Econo-Mart charging low prices. Of course, this is not convenient or always practical. I did not know how the grocery store bread market worked. One Canadian grocery owns several bread companies and was recently dinged for unfair competition. People were eating less bread until they weren’t.
If you had told me a pandemic would lead to yeast and toilet paper shortages two years ago, I’d have probably said “Yeah, right. And we’ll all be wearing masks and waiting in line for staples, too, I suppose.”
