IFDA – International Foodservice Distributors Association Research Library

The research operation of the only US trade association dedicated to foodservice distribution. IFDA represents the broadline and specialty distributors that deliver to restaurants, healthcare, education and other professional kitchens, and its Research Library is where the industry publishes to itself: Benchmarking (including the Cross-Industry Compensation & Benefits Study), Infographics, the Monthly Economic Update produced with Sage Policy Group, Quarterly Briefs co-authored with Technomic, and standalone Reports.

Recent titles read like a syllabus for the channel: The Role of Distributor Brands in Foodservice, briefs on convenience-store foodservice and full-service restaurants, the Technomic U.S. Foodservice Industry Wallchart of market size and forecast, and the Peck Fellowship Report. Alongside them sits an Industry Facts statistics block that fixes the channel's dimensions in one place: $382 billion in annual sales, 431,000 employees, 168,300 vehicles in combined fleet operations, roughly 17,100 facilities, and 12 billion cases delivered a year - about 33 million per day - supporting another 487,000 supply-chain jobs.

Within Datadory's food-distributors pool this is the one record native to the industry itself. Government neighbors count wholesale dollars by NAICS code; none of them publishes what a driver earns or how many trucks back up to a loading dock. Get a sample of this dataset and the rows arrive typed instead of transcribed.

Four real listings captured across late June to mid-August 2026, exactly as they arrive:

# report listings - captured 24 June through 18 August 2026

report_title     : IFDA Monthly Economic Update

publication_date : 2026-08-18

category         : Monthly Economic Update

topic            : Operations & Finance



report_title     : IFDA-Technomic Quarterly Brief: The Role of Distributor Brands in Foodservice

publication_date : 2026-07-29

category         : Quarterly Brief

topic            : Marketing & Sales



report_title     : Technomic U.S. Foodservice Industry Wallchart: Industry Market Size and Forecast

publication_date : 2026-07-01

category         : Reports

topic            : Marketing & Sales



report_title     : 2026 Cross-Industry Compensation & Benefits Study

publication_date : 2026-06-24

category         : Benchmarking

topic            : Workforce & Compensation

Read together they map the library's whole geography. The economic update carries the Operations & Finance tag and lands most often; the Technomic briefs own Marketing & Sales; the Wallchart sits under Reports as the market-size reference; and the Compensation & Benefits Study anchors Workforce & Compensation, the tag pay-benchmarking work starts from. Every row resolves to the same four-part key - title, date, category, topic - so a filter on any one axis rebuilds the reading list without parsing free text.

Nine fields form the core dictionary: four that catalog every publication (title, date, category, topic) and five that carry the Industry Facts statistics block ($382 billion in annual sales, 431,000 employees, 168,300 fleet vehicles, roughly 17,100 facilities, 12 billion cases delivered annually).

Definitions were mapped during the August 2026 research pass from what the library actually displays - no data dictionary is published upstream, which is precisely why the survey-derived remainder folds under additional fields on request instead of being invented here. The benchmarking program's medians and compensation detail (2.9% net profit margin, $757,277 sales per employee, $1,191 sales per square foot, $30.02/hour Class A CDL pay, the 135,000-driver and 181,000-warehouse-worker splits) are real, quoted figures; they confirm into typed columns with your sample.

Geography - the United States, aggregated to the national channel. This is the industry talking about itself in aggregate: no state or metro cuts, and no establishment directories.

Temporal - a multi-year report archive, visibly reaching back to at least 2025 in the captured listing, with the newest issues running through August 18, 2026. Statistics blocks carry their own reference years - the performance medians date to 2023 - so two clocks run at once and joins should pin the vintage, not assume one.

Granularity - two tiers that never mix: one row per publication in the catalog tier, and industry-level aggregates in the statistics tier. There are no company-level rows anywhere; the association publishes the channel, not its members.

Against the wider catalog - mean quality score 7.81 across 1,744 datasets - this record scores 7/10: verified recent captures and a clean two-tier shape, marked down honestly for aggregate-only grain and survey-based methodology on the derived figures.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Your cadence is decoupled from how often new titles land - take a snapshot when the Compensation & Benefits Study drops, or keep a warehouse table current so each new economic update diffs cleanly into yesterday's rows. Deliveries arrive normalized to the field dictionary above with the category and topic enums intact, so filters and joins behave identically whether the slice is one quarter of updates or the full archive. Name the report families and topics you want when you request the sample; the sample ships first either way.

• Market sizing and consulting decks - anchor US foodservice distribution TAM on $382 billion in sales, 17,100 facilities and 12 billion cases, attributed to the industry's own association rather than a vendor's extrapolation.
• Pay and labor benchmarking - test driver and warehouse compensation against the $30.02/hour Class A CDL average and the role splits (31% drivers, 42% warehouse) before setting bands or modeling labor cost inflation.
• Investment timing - read the economic-update sequence issue by issue as the timeliest funded read on the distribution economy, ahead of quarterly prints from public distributors and suppliers.
• Fleet and network planning - size the physical channel - 168,300 vehicles moving 33 million cases a day - before proposing any last-mile, cold-chain or consolidation play.
• Supply-chain and labor journalism - cite named studies with built-in attribution instead of unattributable secondhand arithmetic.
• Demand-model features - convert the update-and-brief stream into a foodservice-demand indicator that leads downstream restaurant and grocery volume models.

Market researchers and consultants (relevance 3/3) get the pool's only native foodservice-distribution evidence - see market researchers use cases. Sales and growth teams (2/3) get territory sizing and pay benchmarks before outbound into the channel - see sales growth teams use cases. Investors and quant researchers (2/3) get the monthly pulse of the distribution economy for timing positions - see investors quants use cases. Journalists, academics and students (2/3) get citation-grade industry facts and named studies - see journalists academics use cases. E-commerce operators (1/3) gauge wholesale-tier economics upstream of their demand (e-commerce operators use cases), and data scientists and ML engineers (1/3) parse the update stream into demand features (data scientists use cases).

Within food distributors data, this record owns distributor economics - what the channel earns, employs, drives and delivers. The neighbors own different jobs. The U.S. Economic Census - Wholesale Trade (NAICS 424) counts official dollars and payroll by code across a 442,035-row basic table with grocery wholesalers detailed at 4244, but names no wage and no truck. The Monthly Wholesale Trade Survey tracks all of merchant wholesaling back to January 1992 without isolating foodservice. The USDA ERS Food Dollar Series splits the wholesale stage's share of every food dollar across 47 spending accounts for 2007-2024 - margin structure, not operator economics. RangeMe – B2B Food & Grocery Product Discovery owns the brand-and-SKU discovery layer on the retail shelf.

If the question is what it costs to run a foodservice distribution business and how big the channel actually is, this is the record; if it is which products are fighting to get onto shelves, it is RangeMe.

Three honest caveats. First, aggregates only: every row describes the channel or its publications - there are no company-level distributor records, so entity-level screens need a companion dataset keyed to firms. Second, two clocks: the report archive advances continuously while the statistics block carries fixed reference years (the medians are 2023 figures), and the association's own headline for industry size appears as $382 billion in one place and $400 billion in another - pin the vintage before anything goes in a deck. Third, survey-based derivations: the performance medians and pay averages come from the association's benchmarking program with unpublished sample composition, so treat them as trade-association estimates rather than audited data - directionally strong, audit-grade no. Name the categories, topics and statistics you want, and the sample returns in exactly the schema shown above.