The technology behind the food on your table: Inside Sysco

“Running a restaurant is a tough business. Statistically, one in three restaurants fail after three years. So it’s a difficult business. That’s not good for our customers and it’s not good for us. So we use all the knowledge we’ve amassed to help them succeed,” says Wayne Shurts – Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Sysco. I had asked him why Sysco, on top of being one of the world’s largest food suppliers also offers a variety of other services to their clients.

Wayne Shurts - Executive Vice President and CTO of Sysco (L) & Wesley Story - Vice President - DevOps & Enterprise Technology Services at Sysco (R)

Wayne Shurts – Executive Vice President and CTO of Sysco (L) & Wesley Story – Vice President – DevOps & Enterprise Technology Services at Sysco (R)

The $55 billion multinational based in the US is well known as a supplier of fresh food and ingredients for restaurants and other institutions. But on top of this, Sysco also offers a variety of other services such as menu design, marketing, and even WiFi. Across all these many varied operations of Sysco, technology plays a key role. Ensuring this technology meets and surpasses expectations is the role of Sysco LABS.

How Sysco uses technology to bring food to your table

“We’ve been doing IoT before it was called IoT,” says Wesley Story – Vice President – DevOps & Enterprise Technology Services at Sysco. He says that with great pride as he speaks about the technology that ensures Sysco’s global food supply chain runs smoothly. And this is a massive supply chain.

From the farmers to the warehouse

“To be a Sysco supplier requires meeting very high standards,” states Wayne when asked about their supply chain. Across this entire chain, technology plays a key role. Every shipment from these suppliers is tagged with barcodes and tracked.

Sysco | Sysco Labs | Food | Technology

Inside a Sysco warehouse (Image credits: SG Systems)

This gives Sysco the ability to trace any produce back to its exact origins and the journey it took. So in the event, there’s a recall they have the ability to quickly pinpoint soiled produce. But on a more regular basis, they play a role inside the Sysco warehouses. These barcodes tell the warehouse workers the exact specific location where the produce needs to be stored.

Some of this will be frozen, some refrigerated, and others would be dry. Irrespective, once stored, every variable inside the warehouse is monitored. From temperature to humidity, there’s a myriad of embedded sensors that work together with Sysco’s warehouse management system. This is what Wesley meant by Sysco doing IoT before IoT was a buzzword. And this also happens in transit.

From the warehouse to the restaurants

Once the produce leaves the warehouse, the strict monitoring process continues while in transit. Wesley shared with us that the same embedded sensors in the warehouses are also found in Sysco’s trucks. So while en route, the conditions inside the trucks are also strictly regulated and monitored.

Everything inside these trucks is monitored (Image credits: Sysco)

Everything inside these trucks is monitored (Image credits: Sysco)

But the technology inside Sysco’s trucks goes beyond simply monitoring the condition of the produce. The devices in the truck also monitor the condition it’s in. Furthermore, the location of the truck along with its speed is monitored as well. This allows Sysco to inform its customers exactly where their orders are at any given time.

The technology also allows them to meet regulations. Particularly those regarding limits that drivers can be on the road for. However, the trucks Sysco uses tomorrow might be completely different.

The future of Sysco’s supply chain

Following the Elon Musk’s grand unveiling of the Tesla Semi, Sysco placed an order for these trucks. To be precise, Sysco has ordered 50 Tesla Semi trucks. Whereas DHL has only ordered 10 according to Wikipedia.

Wayne describes the Tesla Semi saying, “It’s a computer on wheels!” He went on to explain that this decision was taken for a bunch of reasons. One of them being driver safety with the software and its unique interior. Another reason was that it was an electric truck, which he emphasized was an important tenant for Sysco.

Elon Musk unveiling the Tesla Semi which Sysco has ordered 50 trucks

Elon Musk unveiling the Tesla Semi. Sysco has ordered 50 trucks (Image credits: Transport Topics)

Yet, if we look even further towards the future, we can see self-driving trucks. Many companies known for building self-driving cars are looking towards bringing that technology to trucks as well. This is because, in large countries like the US, long-haul trucking is an important piece of logistics networks. As such, there’s a massive market to utilize this technology.

But this technology won’t replace drivers overnight. Wayne believes it will begin slowly. One area he sees this technology could be immediately applied to is reversing. “There’s a lot of accidents that occur when trucks are simply backing up and they hit something or someone,” he shares with us.

So for a company like Sysco, simply allowing the drivers to step out of their trucks and use a joystick to reverse safely is the truck they hope to use tomorrow.

Inside the restaurants: Where Sysco LABS shines

Throughout the entire Sysco supply chain, there’s a massive trove of data being generated. Sysco LABS offers the technology to collect and analyze this data. For most people this is invisible. But inside the restaurants where you go to get your food, the products built by the team here in Sri Lanka become far more visible.

The app to prepare for tomorrow

“Most restaurants wait until a sales rep arrives to place their orders. It’s fine for those that are okay with it. But for those that work all day, this can be inconvenient. You might start work at 4 AM and then close up at 11 AM. It’s only when you get home to relax that you can start thinking what you need to run tomorrow,” says Wesley.

This is why Sysco offers a mobile app called Sysco Mobile. “We’re a broad line distributor. We carry everything a restaurant may need. So we can deliver it all at once without sending multiple shipments,” adds Wayne. So at the end of the day, a restaurant owner can just place an order for what they need for tomorrow. And then they can track the order in real-time with the GPS devices in trucks.

CAKE: Built to survive the battlefield of a restaurant

Once the produce arrives, the food is prepared, and then served to the customers. This is likely where you’d have seen the products by Sysco LABS firsthand. Even in Sri Lanka if you visit a coffee shop or a restaurant, chances are that you’ve seen the CAKE Logo. Likely displayed on the point-of-sales systems when paying the bill for your food.

This is the system that Sysco LABS has been famous for since its early days. But to simply call it a point-of-sales system now might be inaccurate. Alongside the POS system, it also offers a guest management suite, analytics, and more. “It’s all about giving end-to-end support for restaurant owners. From labor management to wait-list management, all of those are in CAKE,” explains Wesley.

Furthermore, CAKE includes an actual physical computer. This is designed from scratch by the teams here in Sri Lanka. The goal here being not to merely build a pretty computer, but one that can survive the dangers that occur inside a restaurant. “It’s a completely sealed design. So if you spill soup or oil or whatever on it then it’ll still work,” adds Wesley.

Data: The secret ingredient to profitability

Amongst the variety of services Sysco offers its clients, it also helps them design their menus. This starts from the menu itself. To be precise, the graphic design and the layout “We need to make sure the customer’s eyes are drawn to the right things that might be profitable for the restaurant. At the same time, you make sure that they’re likely to order an appetizer, main course, and a dessert,” explains Wesley.

Sysco | Sysco Labs | Technology | Food

Most people are likely to glance at the top right corner of the menu first. This is why menu layout matters (Image credits: Sysco)

The next step is analysis. This involves identifying the dishes that are selling well and those that aren’t. Afterward, it also involves identifying what ingredients are used to create particular dishes. So if a food item isn’t performing well then it can be removed from the menu.

Elaborating on this Wayne said, “The more ingredients a restaurant carries, the less profitable and more problematic it is. You have things that spoil, go out of date, or simply get lost. So we work with restaurants to decrease the ingredients that they need. Maybe you can find that one ingredient, which can be used across dishes.”

Data can help kitchens reduce the number of ingredients they need and in turn make them less chaotic (Image credits: Craig Mattson)

Data can help kitchens reduce the number of ingredients they need and in turn, make them less chaotic (Image credits: Cleavers Edge)

Wesley then went onto say, “There’s a lot of data here. There’s a lot of technology that underpins this. We take data about food recipes, consumer behavior, habits, trends, and analyze it. So data science is a big thing for us. But a lot of the opportunity is leveraging this data using advanced capabilities, which is some of the exciting work the folks here in Sri Lanka are doing.”

What the future holds for Sysco LABS

To understand the future of Sysco LABS it helps to look at why Sysco originally invested in the company. When asked about it, Wayne said, “We believe that there is tremendous engineering talent here. We don’t see that in every offshore country. Most are about quantity and not quality. We’ve tried that and it’s not as good as quality.”

Another reason he cites is innovation. Wayne shared that Sri Lanka is building a reputation for innovation. Furthermore, Sysco has collected a multitude of complex systems over the years. Maintaining these systems is the task of the Business Technology Group. Meanwhile, Sysco LABS is tasked with innovating and reimagining the business.

The team at Sysco LABS, which Sysco plans to invest in for the future (Image credits: Sysco LABS)

The team at Sysco LABS, which Sysco plans to invest in for the future (Image credits: Sysco LABS)

Wayne went onto describe the partnership between these teams saying, “The Sysco Business Technology team knows the business really well. They pass that knowledge onto Sysco LABS. And Sysco LABS knows Agile, DevOps, Full Stack Engineering and innovation. They in turn, pass that along to the team in the States. We’re better together by leveraging the strengths of both.”

Wayne went onto confirm that Sysco would be expanding its investment in Sri Lanka. As such, they’ll be looking at hiring more people in the coming months. Wesley described these people Sysco LABS is looking for saying, “We want people that are intellectually curious, that always want to learn something new, and aren’t afraid of experimentation.”

Ultimately, Sysco’s vision for Sysco LABS is a simple one. To quote Wesley, “It has a digital native capability like a Silicon Valley startup. We want to take that same capability and apply it to a $55 billion company, and more importantly, towards a $300 billion industry. The big opportunity is to transform this industry worldwide and to figure out how technology can do that. Sysco LABS has a big role to play there.”

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