Worse on Purpose: Restaurant prices keep climbing. The food keeps getting worse. There’s a reason for both. “A truck pulls into the alley behind two restaurants. Same truck, same hand cart, same flats of frozen jalapeño poppers walking through two different kitchen doors that share a back wall. Two different menus, two different price-points… the exact same food supplies. The truck is Sysco. They deliver to more than 400,000 of the ~749,000 restaurants in America. Roughly one in every two. The steak and eggs at a diner in the Texas Panhandle and the steak and eggs at a breakfast joint in northern Maine taste functionally identical because they came off the same pallet at the same distribution center, processed against the same private-label spec, on the same line, by people who never knew which restaurant the boxes were headed to. This is what the system was built to produce. The same dinner, served to 400,000 different rooms, by people who think they are running their own restaurants…”

See also Washington Post: “As restaurants struggle with costs, a major food supplier deal raises new fears Restaurant Depot is a lifeline for small businesses. Many hope its sale to industry giant Sysco falls through…Daniel is among the countless independent operators who rely on Restaurant Depot’s 167 low-cost warehouses to stock their pantries and walk-ins every week. But since the Iran war started in February, Daniel has experienced sticker shock at the wholesaler: She paid 63 percent more for ground halal lamb compared with last year, according to receipts forwarded to The Washington Post. She saw a similar percentage increase in the price of canola oil. The cost of fresh tomatoes soared from $17.94 for a case in April 2025 to $76.92 a year later, a more than 400 percent surge…In March, food service distributing giant Sysco announced plans to buy Restaurant Depot for $29.1 billion in cash and stock. Like many small-restaurant owners, Daniel is dubious that Sysco, which controls about 18 percent of the market and relies on high-volume accounts, will have her best interests at heart. She expects further wholesale increases — with ripple effects on restaurant prices and budget-conscious diners who ultimately pay those costs. Daniel’s dire forecast is based in a kind of contemporary cynicism: The Egyptian native has listened to President Donald Trump’s promises to lower costs, only to face continued rising gas prices. She’s lost trust in a system where the big just get bigger…”