US Foods is turning artificial intelligence from a pilot project into everyday infrastructure — and it’s paying off. The food distributor said sales for the third quarter reached $10.2 billion, up 4.8% from the same period last year, while net income climbed 3.4% to $153 million, as the company continued to gain share among independent restaurants and specialty accounts. Executives said AI and automation are now key drivers of those gains, helping improve ordering, routing, and service quality across its nationwide network.
Inside the company’s MOXē ecommerce platform, a new AI-powered search engine “delivers significantly faster and more intuitive results,” according to US Foods’ third-quarter earnings presentation. The upgrade has already produced a 3% higher conversion rate for products added to cart and purchased — equal to 1.3 million additional cases sold annually.
AI is also transforming the company’s delivery network. A nationwide rollout of Descartes routing software, which uses predictive algorithms to optimize truck routes, improved delivery efficiency by 2.3% from a year earlier. The system analyzes data such as traffic, distance, and order volume to reduce miles driven and improve on-time performance.
CFO Dirk Locascio said on the company’s earnings call that US Foods is using artificial intelligence “pretty broad-based” across its business. “It informs our online recommendations to customers of either products that they haven’t bought or others have,” he said. AI also supports digital marketing and “a lot of the models behind our routing or letting customers know where their truck is, when it’s supposed to arrive.” One of the biggest changes, he added, is how AI is helping sellers prepare customer proposals: “They can basically pull together the proposal for a customer in 15 or 20 minutes for something [that] used to take them two or three hours.”
AI is equally visible in the company’s operations. Its UMOS quality-management platform improved performance by 24% year over year by reducing errors and boosting accuracy in warehouse and delivery processes. US Foods also began shipments from a new semi-automated facility in Aurora, Illinois — the company’s first to pair robotic systems with human workers to speed order fulfillment and strengthen service consistency.
CEO Dave Flitman said in the company’s earnings release that “our third-quarter performance reflects our team’s ability to consistently deliver earnings growth through share gains and margin expansion.” He credited “operational excellence” and continued investment in digital and AI initiatives as central to that performance.
With AI now embedded in ecommerce, logistics, and warehouse operations, US Foods is building a data-driven foundation for its next stage of growth. The company’s quarter underscored that, in food distribution, technology is fast becoming as essential as the trucks that carry the goods.
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