To SYSCO, this care in delivering products to the food-prepared-away-from-home market is an essential part of the distribution process. It is prevalent in every tiny link from farm to table, beginning with selecting products in the field and including on-site inspection of manufacturing and processing plants, as well as monitoring production lines, with every process attuned to maintaining the brand's integrity with our customers. This chain of service is a complex system of developing, tasting and refining foods that will one day become selections on a customer's menu. In recent years, the increasingly sophisticated tastes of consumers, their growing awareness and knowledge of nutrition and its effect on health, and their increasingly global mobility are significantly influencing consumers' eating habits and fostering new food trends.

As these trends emerge, SYSCO arranges customer/supplier group forums that provide a receptive environment for customers to voice their "wish lists" and create the foundation for new product ideas. In response to the requests of customers at such forums, SYSCO works hand-in-hand with suppliers to develop specific lines of product that meet the requirements of certain market segments. Examples of foods that have emerged from these creative sessions include ethnic product lines, such as Italian, Mexican or Greek food families, as well as fruits and vegetables that have been chopped, sliced, diced or blended to save labor in food preparation.

As products manufactured for the SYSCO Brand are in production, members of SYSCO's quality assurance team will be in place on-site to ensure that SYSCO's rigorous quality standards that meet, and often exceed, USDA and FDA standards, are enforced. Each product packed under the SYSCO Brand has detailed specifications that set the standards for quality and consistency factors including size, color, net drained weight, tenderness, shelf life, packaging and other characteristics. The objectives of quality assurance are obtained by agreeing upon detailed product specifications with every SYSCO Brand supplier and enforcing those specifications on a daily basis. All existing SYSCO Brand suppliers are audited for compliance with our requirements, and products are routinely evaluated for conformity with all specifications as well as for performance against competitive products.