Food-Service-Manual-for-Health-Care-Institutions

Food Service Manual for Health Care Institutions
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issues, commodities, market trends, inventory control, conditions influencing costs, availability
of products and supplies, and promotional and recipe ideas. All DSRs have a thorough
knowledge of their accounts and of their company’s product lines. In effect, they provide valueadded
services as a strategy to increase customer loyalty.
Food Marketing and Wholesaling
The food distribution and marketing system is part of the food and fiber system, the largest
industrial system in the United States. Using inputs of technology, capital, machinery, fertilizers,
chemicals, petroleum, and labor, farmers produce the nation’s supply of raw food and fiber
products. They then wholesale these basic raw products to the marketing sector of the food and
fiber system.
Transporting is a vital link from farm to table. The use of modern transportation systems
and the continuing application of new transportation systems play vital roles in meeting the
volume and quality demands of food service operations and customers.
Another factor in food marketing involves processing. Today many of the major food manufacturers
are subsidiaries of large industrial corporations that deal in many industries other
than food. Because of this factor, the level of concentration in any particular industry has been
reduced. Other major industries have become more concentrated through the horizontal integration
of their activities. Horizontal integration occurs when a large corporation purchases a
company that manufactures and distributes products that often are totally unlike those of the
larger company. Modern food-processing companies have also become vertically integrated
into a wide range of activities other than processing. Contract production for processors is a
more common means of integration than ownership of production facilities.
Marketing System
The American food-marketing system serves the country’s population by supplying farm products
in the desired forms and at the appropriate times. The system assembles, grades, stores,
processes, packages, transports, wholesales, retails, prices, takes risks on, controls the quality
of, merchandises, exchanges ownership of, brands, regulates, develops, and tests most of the
food products—old and new—consumed in the United States.
Food processors and manufacturers are a direct-market outlet for vast quantities of raw
farm products and the source of supplies for hundreds of thousands of distributors. This large,
complex system must mesh smoothly to overcome problems of food perishability, seasonal
availability, volume, and logistics. To remain dynamic and responsive, the system must provide
not only a means for product flow from producer to consumer, but also a communication system
for the flow of information about consumer preferences and demands from consumer to
producer.
The food-marketing system includes more than half a million businesses that employ the
equivalent of more than five million full-time employees. Persons employed by restaurants and
other food service facilities make up almost half of that total. The output of farms in the United
States, combined with food products from other countries around the world, is gathered by
wholesalers and distributors within the marketing system and processed to various degrees by
the nation’s food manufacturers and processors.
Wholesaling
Wholesaling is the link in the marketing system responsible for distributing food from the producer
or processor to the retailer. The principal wholesaling activities involve gathering foods
from many sources and distributing them to retailers, hotel and restaurant operators, and other
institutions.