Price spreads
Same item, same week, different price: what invoice spreads look like
· by the Candor team — operators auditing real restaurant invoices
The most useful number in restaurant purchasing isn't a price — it's a spread: the gap between what you pay for an item and what the same item sells for across town the same week. Spreads are where the recoverable money lives. Here's what real ones look like, from our own restaurants' 2026 invoices and quotes in Phoenix.
What does a real price spread look like?
| Item | Best price found | Highest quote | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken breast, boneless (per lb) | $3.20 (Restaurant Depot) | $3.60 (broadline quote) | 12.5% |
| Soybean oil (per gallon) | $13.00 (negotiated) | $15.00 (list quote) | 15% |
| Soy sauce, Lee Kum Kee (12-gal case) | $28.00 (negotiated) | $35.00 (list quote) | 25% |
Three observations from living inside this data:
- The spread is invisible from inside one relationship. Every one of those "highest quote" numbers looked normal on its own invoice. It only looks expensive next to the alternative.
- "Negotiated" is doing heavy lifting. Two of the three best prices exist because someone asked. The list quote is the price of not asking.
- Boring items hide the biggest spreads. The 25% spread isn't on a exotic ingredient — it's soy sauce, bought by the case, forever.
How much is a spread worth per year?
Take the chicken line: a $0.40/lb spread. One of our restaurants runs about 150 lbs a week. Annualized on a deliberately discounted $0.35/lb rather than the full gap, that single line item comes to about $2,730 a year — one SKU, one location. That discount is a judgment call, not a derivation: the $3.60 is the highest quote we saw and the $3.20 the best price we found, so the full spread is the widest reading the data allows (here's how we annualize, and why we shade it down). That's the arithmetic that made us build the audit in the first place.
Your items and spreads will differ. That's not a hedge — it's the point. You should know yours.
Why do spreads exist at all?
Because every operator's price is set separately: contract type (cost-plus-fixed vs cost-plus-percentage), volume tier, rep discretion, and — the quiet one — how long it's been since anyone at that account pushed back. Distributors don't publish a standard price sheet for your city; the price is the relationship. If you're weighing two specific broadliners rather than the mechanics of a spread, Sysco vs US Foods prices takes that question head-on. When industry costs spiked, the big broadliners passed increases straight through — Sysco reported passing along 13.4% "with little pushback" (Restaurant Business) — and prices that drift up under cover of "the market" rarely drift back down on their own.
How do I find my spreads?
The manual method, honestly: pick your top 10 items by spend. For each, collect one second data point — another distributor's quote, a cash-and-carry shelf price, another operator's invoice. Compute the gap. Anything over ~10% on a high-volume item is a rep conversation (here's the script structure).
The catch is time: operators who do this well describe elaborate vlookup spreadsheets maintained at midnight. If that's not your idea of a third shift, it's exactly what we do instead: email your last 3 invoices, and in 48 hours the free benchmark shows your top 3 overpaying items against real invoice data — every finding cited to your own invoice lines, invoice #, date, SKU. No citation, no claim.