San Antonio in September is hot, and the IFDA Solutions Conference filled the convention center anyway. More than 1,500 food distribution leaders, better than 170 exhibitors, and the theme: Forward in Focus. Macedon sponsored the Wellness Lounge to help attendees cool down.
Walk the expo floor, and Forward looked like one thing above all else: agents. A routing tool that reroutes itself against live traffic. A pricing engine that resets with the commodity market. Forecasting that reads consumer demand earlier. A compliance agent that chases expiring driver credentials by text and checks the photo that comes back. Each one impressive on its own. And each one solving a single slice of a much larger job.
The operators doing the buying kept circling a quieter question: what happens in the space between the agents? That is the shape of the job now, and it is worth writing down what the floor actually made clear.
Every tool on display automated one step well: intake, routing, pricing, forecasting, compliance, the warehouse pick. The trouble is that no distributor has a routing problem or a pricing problem in isolation. The problem is that an order placed by phone at four o’clock has to become a route, a pick, a loaded truck, an invoice, and a clean record, moving across five or six systems that were never built to talk to each other. The agents make each end of that chain faster, but they leave the handoffs in the middle untouched, which is where the time, the cost, and the errors live.
Buy ten agents and you have ten faster steps and the same broken seams between them. The work that decides whether a distributor makes money is the work nobody was selling: the orchestration that carries an order all the way through and leaves proof it happened.
The most useful sessions were not selling anything, but were operators describing the same failure in different words:
A route plan built once a quarter that looks right on paper and drifts by the second week
Prices set by hand that cannot keep pace with daily cost swings
A forecast built on history that lands after the buying decision is already made
One routing session put a hard number on what every dispatcher already feels: a large share of stops run more than ten minutes off plan. The plan was not wrong; it was made once and never corrected against what actually happened on the road.
That is the pattern under all of it. Decisions made a single time, in a single system, that never learn from the day they were meant to run. Closing that gap is a discipline, and it sits above the systems of record rather than inside any one of them.
The sharpest hour at IFDA was the innovation keynote from Jeff Berry, Director of Innovation at DOT Foods, and he ran it with three brightly colored boxes. The first held Skittles, and volunteers had to identify the candy three ways: by reading the word, by seeing a photo, and by actually tasting one. The answers got better each time they moved closer to the real thing.
The second box held a random object, and the room had to invent new uses for it, a quick shove past the obvious answer.
The third held spaghetti, string, tape, and a marshmallow, the classic tower challenge, and it carried the punchline: the teams that win are the ones that keep iterating, which is why kindergarteners beat executives at it. Executives plan, they do not iterate.
The boxes were set up for a practical argument: define the real problem before you buy the tool. Electric trucks were never the point, Berry said, lower fuel cost was.
The same logic runs straight through to AI. The goal is a shorter, cleaner process, and the agent only earns its place if it delivers one. Teams that skip that step pay what he called the project tax, the scope creep that quietly kills the effort before it ships.
His build-versus-buy point carried the whole thesis in miniature. His bias was to build vertical capability now and connect it later, because the technology is moving faster than any multi-year integration plan can survive. DOT proves its own point here: the driver-compliance agent that texts its drivers before their credentials lapse and checks the photo they send back was built in-house, one vertical solved well.
Put those ideas together and you have the orchestration case made by an operator instead of a consultant. The edge lives in the connective layer that turns a shelf of agents into one process, the part that lets you swap any single piece without re-plumbing the business.
None of this is abstract, because the pressure is already on. Consolidation was in the room and on half the badges. The majors keep buying up independents, and the choice facing a regional distributor is to scale or to modernize, and to do it now rather than eventually.
Labor is the next force. Lean teams cannot hire their way out of rising volume, so the only path is to take the manual load off the people already there and let the same team carry more.
Margin is the third. Chargebacks and deductions bleed points that rarely surface until year-end, and for beverage distributors, excise and TTB filing swallows days that should belong to customers.
The fourth force came through plainest in a panel called The CISO Perspective: Navigating Cyber Risk in Foodservice Distribution, with security and IT leaders from Ben E. Keith Foods, Van Eerden Foodservice, and The Palmer Family of Companies, moderated by DOT Foods. The threat has shifted from locking up your systems to stealing your data and threatening to publish it, and one line from that room stayed with me:
Disaster recovery is an action, resilience is an outcome.
The distributors that come through an incident are the ones who can prove operations keep running and stay documented under stress, not the ones with the thickest binder. Every one of those forces rewards the same capability: the ability to run the work end-to-end and show that it held.
This is the layer we build, so I will be concrete.
For one national foodservice distributor, a company north of twenty billion dollars in revenue, we turned phone, text, email, and photo orders into structured records for more than 1,500 sales reps. We put a modern interface over a catalog of more than 500,000 items still running on the legacy ERP. We automated close to 90 percent of the dispute lifecycle. And we cut customer onboarding from three weeks to eight hours.
None of that replaced the system of record. The ERP stayed exactly where it was. What changed is that the work now moves over it in one connected flow, corrects itself as conditions change, and produces its own audit trail as a byproduct of running rather than a project someone dreads at quarter-end. That is the distance between buying an agent and orchestrating the work.
Forward in Focus was the right theme, and the honest read of the floor is that the industry already has the tools and is still working out the wiring. IFDA returns next September, the 26th through the 28th, in Louisville. The distributors who pull ahead between now and then will not be the ones who bought the most agents in San Antonio. They will be the ones who decided which problem actually mattered, connected the pieces into a single process, and can prove it runs.
If that is the work in front of your team, it is worth having the conversation before next September rather than at the booth. We help operations-led distributors pick the one workflow that pays for itself first, then build the layer that carries the rest.
Want to continue the discussion? Schedule a chat with Tom.