With over $35 billion in annual sales, US Foods is nearing 100% customer adoption of ecommerce with digital tools designed to ease how chefs and commercial kitchen operators acquire the best mix of ingredients to run their businesses.
Gene Carbonara, vice president, ecommerce and digital, US Foods
Gene Carbonara, vice president of ecommerce and digital, says the Rosemont, Illinois-based food products distributor gathers customer feedback to learn how to build out its digital technology to address their most critical needs. In a recent interview, he said that strategy has brought more than three-quarters of customers into online ordering through the company’s MOXē ecommerce platform, which offers tools that let customers do things like instantly check food costs and profit margins, track incoming deliveries, and get personalized menu recommendations.
Driving innovation with customers’ comments
“We have a comprehensive customer feedback program integrated into our agile development methodologies,” Carbonara said. “This year alone, we’ve taken in over 10,000 pieces of feedback and comments from our customers and internal associates — and we’re using it to drive innovation.
“We take all that information, and it goes into our agile product teams to consider what we will take on next. We’re constantly evaluating this feedback and figuring out whether we need to build more strategic capabilities or if it’s more important for us to focus on technical refinements to our applications.”
For example, in recent years US Foods learned that 72% of the food establishment operators among its customer base cited managing food costs as their most pressing challenge.
The new US Foods food calculator provides restaurants with real-time data for monitoring costs and profitability.
The distributor responded with a digital food cost calculator integrated with its inventory management applications. Using data that it already has on its customers’ purchase activity, including purchase volume, prices and invoices, US Foods combines that information with the records in a customer’s inventory management and tracking system to estimate their food costs and how it relates to profitability.
“We have real-time information on prices, invoices, order volume, so we can take that rich data set and use that to really help our customers understand their food costs and how that relates to profitability,” Carbonara said. “This is a tool that helps a customer understand their food costs in relation to their sales.” He noted that US Foods provides the calculator free of charge as a value-added service.
An AI-enhanced omnichannel strategy
The MOXē ecommerce platform — MOXē stands for “making operators’ experience easy” — is available via phone, tablet or computer and supports US Foods’ omnichannel strategy of selling through three core channels, such as:
⦁ Broadline distribution of large orders via large truck deliveries.
⦁ The Pronto service for delivering smaller orders, and the US Foods Direct endless aisle service.
⦁ US Foods Direct endless aisle service, which lets customers order from among the company’s 400,000 products for direct shipment via FedEx to their facilities.
Among the ecommerce platform’s other features are AI-enhanced site search and product recommendations. Carbonara said the platform’s online merchandising efforts have increased average order volumes by adding about “1.5 cases of products on every single order.”
Chefs and kitchen staff can use the digital platform to develop menus with advice from US Foods’ online food experts, calculate the costs of each item, modify the product mix to boost sales and profits, and then manage and pay invoices online for ordered food items.
“You have access in real time from your mobile device to all of your invoices, so at any given moment, you can pull up any PDF of any invoice, see who signed for that invoice at your operation, and share it with whomever you might need to, like your accounting department or finance department — all from your mobile device,” Carbonara said.
A tool for asking, Where’s my truck?
Other digital tools US Foods has developed and made available through its MOXē ecommerce platform include an AI-backed tool for tracking the status of delivery trucks. The “Where’s My Truck?” tool factors in such information as inclement weather and road accidents to provide estimated delivery times.
“We’ve improved our delivery times accuracy by 20% with this model,” Carbonara said.
US Foods, which operates more than 70 distribution centers and has more than 6,500 trucks in its fleet, has also deployed Descartes digital routing technology, which increases the volume of cases delivered per month and replaces paper delivery invoices with a more accurate and accessible mobile system.
Carbonara noted that the company developed its ecommerce platform in-house and, with the full support of top management, constantly upgrades its technology.
Driving toward 100% online adoption
“We continue to enhance the user experience of our proprietary leading digital platform MOXē,” CEO David Flitman said on a recent earnings call. He added that customer service tied to digital commerce was among the company’s four strategic pillars along with corporate culture, growth and profitability.
For the nine months ended Sept. 30, US Foods said net sales increased 6.5% year over year to $28.39 billion as net income grew 19.2% to $428 million. In 2023, its full-year net sales rose 4.5% to $35.60 billion.
Going forward, Carbonara said, US Foods will continue investing in digital improvements. He noted that 84% of customers now place orders through the MOXē platform. “It’s not 100%, but we still see an opportunity” to bring more customers online.
“As we continue to innovate, you’re going to see more and more features that are really mobile and text-based, just because of the ease and convenience and the immediacy that our customers are really looking for.”
Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.
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