Lance Reynolds has spent his entire career in restaurants, and he has the scars to prove it. Before becoming Director of Restaurant Operations Consulting at US Foods, he owned and operated restaurants for about 10 years, running four locations, a catering company, and a commissary. He walked the line of failure more than once before he figured out how to run the business side. On this episode of Behind the Numbers, hosts Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney talked with Reynolds about adaptation, technology, and the people decisions that decide whether a restaurant survives.
Reynolds opened with a warning that operators may not want to hear. When he speaks at restaurant conferences, his first question to the room is how many people are intentionally using AI to cut costs and grow revenue. At one Florida conference with a couple thousand people in the audience, roughly 20 hands went up. At a Houston event with executives from 33 large organizations, about one and a half hands went up.
His point is that restaurants have always been slow to adopt new technology, and that hesitation now carries a real financial cost. Reynolds framed the urgency in plain terms: what worked yesterday does not work today, and operators who do not adapt are going to be in financial trouble.
Cohen pushed back gently, noting that restaurants proved during COVID that they are one of the most adaptable industries around. Reynolds agreed, but pointed out that it took a global pandemic to force the shift. He recalled begging operators to take a demo of online ordering tools before 2020. One early US Foods partner in that space was ChowNow, a pioneer in online ordering. Operators wanted nothing to do with it until March, April, and May of 2020, when demand was so high the team could not keep up. Customer behavior changed just as fast, with diners suddenly preferring to order from an app rather than talk to anyone.
The hosts landed on a sharper description of the industry: innovative and adaptable, but stubborn, and intimidated by the prospect of learning something new while the kitchen is on fire.
The conversation turned to the scale of US Foods itself. It is a business approaching $40 billion a year in revenue, serving 250,000 customers nationally with 30,000 employees, whom the company calls associates. Its corporate heritage stretches back roughly 150 years, with roots in supplying wagon trains headed to the Western frontier. US Foods was also one of the first vendor groups to work with Restaurant 365 on EDI, automating the invoicing process for shared clients from day one.
Reynolds started where most restaurant people start, as a dishwasher, working at a golf course restaurant in Utah at age 12 for about two dollars an hour, with free golf as the real perk. He fell for the restaurant side over golf course management, then discovered as a server and bartender that he could make twice what his nine to five peers earned working four nights a week.
After selling his restaurants, he took a year to decompress and tried to write a book about his experience. That effort accidentally became a curriculum. He partnered with the Art Institute in Arizona, offered free access to his school in exchange for space, and built Food Biz Today into a chain of restaurant schools with seven locations across three states, teaching operators how to make money. His first book carried the cleaned-up title It’s Not About the Effing Food, built around the idea that business acumen, not just hospitality and good recipes, is what separates the operators who succeed.
The US Foods relationship began as an accounts receivable problem. Operators who had been slow to pay were suddenly current after going through his school and crediting that experience. US Foods saw both an AR play and a retention play: helping operators succeed kept them as customers and kept them buying. After Reynolds sold Food Biz Today in 2013, US Foods recruited him to help build its Restaurant Operations Consulting team, known internally as the ROCs. The program grew to 80 consultants before COVID, then was right-sized. In October of last year, the consulting team was absorbed into the new business structure so that consultants could finally earn commissions on the business they helped win.
Reynolds and a colleague designed what became the CHECK business tools program, sketching out how restaurant technology solutions could connect until the diagram looked like the human genome. They piloted it with a couple of partners on no budget to test whether it mattered. It did. Customers stayed, and they bought more product, meaning more cases on the trucks.
What sets the vetting apart, in Reynolds’s view, is its difficulty. Where some competitors offer a link on a website, US Foods runs a two-year vetting process followed by a full year of piloting. Most partners do not make it through. The goal is to confirm a partner will answer the phone when something breaks, because in this industry things break constantly, down to trucks that cannot deliver groceries on a given day.
He sees Restaurant 365 as a strong fit because the product makes sense to a busy operator. Reynolds described it simply as a restaurant profitability tool, and noted that many restaurant technology solutions are built by brilliant engineers with no restaurant experience and end up over-engineered. The new phase of the partnership closes the loop: Restaurant 365 already automates accounts payable, invoice capture, pricing, recipes, and inventory, and now ordering flows directly from Restaurant 365 into US Foods with no middleman. Integration like this is sticky for both companies, but the bigger benefit is for operators tired of running 27 separate solutions that do not talk to each other.
Reynolds tied this directly to survival. The operators who come to workshops in tears, on the verge of losing everything, almost always have the same profile: they have not onboarded any technology, and they are working the line or serving tables themselves. Cohen described them as flying blind. Speed of support matters here too. Restaurant 365 targets onboarding in about 45 days rather than a year, and Sweeney noted that operators are taught how to use the software rather than handed a login, since garbage data in means messy reporting out.
The economics of labor came up repeatedly. Minimum wage in Flagstaff, where Reynolds is a partner in restaurants, is $18.35, among the highest in the nation.
At that level, he argued, operators cannot simply throw people at every problem or staff full-time HR and marketing directors. Profitability has been pinched from multiple directions at once: inflation, minimum wage, insurance, and real estate. His view is that operators can expand margins back toward pre-COVID levels by committing to technology that increases productivity, since in a restaurant productivity translates directly to profitability.
Reynolds is direct about his own habits. He moved from being a ChatGPT user for two years to using Claude, and a year-end report placed him in the top 3 percent of users globally. He turned 60 in July, well outside the demographic people expect to be diving into AI, and uses that as his argument that anyone can learn it. He is finishing a book on the subject, titled Learn AI or Lose, and predicts 2026 will be remembered as the year everything changed.
The most personal story of the episode concerned retention. Reynolds described a near-perfect employee, always early, never sick, training others without being asked, who did not want a management role but quietly took on those responsibilities. During a period when Reynolds was panicking about money and obsessed with cutting costs, she left a short note and quit. He had stopped developing people.
He convinced her to return, and this time paid her a weekly consulting fee, on top of her server job, to mentor him on why she and others had felt the way they did and what needed to change. That led to a three-legged stool philosophy: protect the employee experience, protect the guest experience, and protect the bottom line, in that order. The results were measurable. Annual employee turnover fell from a range of 170 to 200 percent down to 42 percent, with major savings on hiring, onboarding, and training. She later became his business partner at Food Biz Today.
Asked whether hiring or keeping great staff is harder, Reynolds chose keeping them, with a caveat: he had been hiring the wrong people, leaning on resumes and experience while ignoring his gut read during interviews. Retention takes discipline, balancing genuine appreciation for staff with high accountability.
Cohen noted that Reynolds had essentially already delivered his hot take, that 2026 will be a world-changing year because of AI. Pressed for another, Reynolds went a different direction entirely: go see a band at the Sphere. He saw U2 there, found the tickets outrageously expensive, and decided within five minutes of sitting down that he would have paid double.
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