Your Restaurant Order Guide: How to Read It, Export It, and Cost From It

Your order guide is the list of every product you buy from a distributor, with the prices you actually pay. Sysco calls it an order guide, US Foods calls it an order guide, GFS calls it a shopping list. Same thing: your personalized catalog with your negotiated pricing. It’s the single most accurate price source your kitchen has, and most operators never do anything with it except place orders. Here’s how to read it, get it out of your distributor’s portal, and turn it into food costs that update themselves.

What’s on an order guide

Strip away the portal’s styling and every order guide is the same handful of columns:

The columns that matter for costing are item number, pack/size, and price:

• Item number (SKU) is the distributor’s unique code for that product. It never changes, even when the price does. This is the anchor that lets software match a re-uploaded guide to the right ingredient.
• Pack/size tells you what’s in a case. “6 / #10 can” means six #10 cans per case. “4 / 5 lb” means four 5-pound bags, so 20 pounds per case.
• Price is almost always the case price, not the unit price. This is where most costing goes wrong.

How to read pack size and unit price

The case price is useless in a recipe. Your lasagna recipe doesn’t use a case of tomatoes, it uses two cups. You need the cost per usable unit:

Take the diced tomatoes at $42.60 for a case of six #10 cans:

A #10 can holds about 12 cups, so that’s roughly $0.59 per cup in your recipe. The mozzarella at $48.00 for 20 pounds works out to $2.40 per pound, the number that actually drives your pizza cost. Costing a recipe off the $48.00 case price instead of the $2.40 per pound is how a dish that looks profitable on paper quietly loses money.

You can break any case price down to a usable unit with our ingredient cost calculator, then use those numbers to calculate food cost per dish.

How to export your order guide

The exact button labels move around as these portals get updated, but the path is always the same: open your order guide, find the export or download option, and choose Excel or CSV.

Sysco. Log into Sysco Shop (or the older eSysco site), open your order guide, and look for the export option to download it as a spreadsheet. RRG Consulting has a step-by-step walkthrough with the exact click path for both the Sysco Shop and eSysco versions.

US Foods. Log into US Foods online ordering or the Moxē app, go to your order guide or product list, and export it to a spreadsheet. The export usually lives under a “manage” or list-options menu.

GFS, BEK, and regional broadliners. Same idea. Gordon Food Service, Ben E. Keith, and most UniPro distributors all have a web ordering portal with an export or download button on the order guide. If you can’t find it, your sales rep can send you the file directly, and many are happy to.

Turn the order guide into live recipe costs

Exporting the guide is only useful if the prices end up in your recipes. Retyping a few hundred line items by hand is why most operators never do it, so they cost dishes off prices from last spring and wonder why their margins slipped.

This is what order guide import solves. You upload the CSV, map the columns once per vendor (which column is the item number, which is the price), and save it as a template. Every time you re-export and upload, the importer matches on SKU and updates prices in place. No duplicate ingredients, no manual cleanup, and every recipe that uses an updated ingredient recalculates on its own. The same flow works for Sysco, US Foods, BEK, GFS, or a private-label guide.

That price-feed automation is the core of what recipe costing software does, and the reason it beats a spreadsheet: update cheese once, every pizza using it reflects the new cost. For the full picture of what’s worth paying for and what’s overkill, see recipe costing software: what you actually need.

For distributor reps

If you sell for a broadliner, your order guide is a retention tool, not just an order form. A customer whose recipe costs are wired to your guide reorders against accurate margins instead of eyeballing them, and they have one less reason to shop your prices line by line. We built a program around exactly this (bulk account provisioning, co-branded onboarding, and order guide feeds) for foodservice distributors who want to put a lightweight costing tool in their customers’ hands.

Start with one guide

Export your current order guide today. Even before you import it anywhere, sorting it by price and breaking your top 20 items down to cost per usable unit will tell you where your money goes. Then bring those numbers into your recipes so every dish reflects what you actually pay this week, not last quarter.