In a fiercely competitive industry, how do you deliver relevance at scale when every customer expects to find exactly what they need, instantly?
With $37B in annual revenue, 30,000 employees, and service to more than 250,000 customer locations across the country, US Foods powers much of America’s foodservice industry — from independent restaurants to healthcare facilities and hotels. In such a competitive space, delivering fast, seamless digital experiences has never been more important.
At the heart of this effort is Lauren Amundson, Product Owner for Search at US Foods. With over eight years at the company and a career spanning digital merchandising, product strategy, and data-driven optimization, Lauren brings both a strategic perspective and a practitioner’s lens to AI-powered product discovery. Recently, she shared the US Foods story at a Coveo’s Relevance 360 event in Chicago, highlighting how intelligent search is transforming the digital foodservice experience.
Too Many Ingredients, Not Enough Relevance
At US Foods, the challenge was scale. With a massive catalog of thousands of SKUs, both customers and sales reps often struggled to quickly find the right products. The company’s legacy rule-based search engine, Endeca, simply couldn’t keep up. Instead of making ordering seamless, it produced inconsistent results, was costly to maintain, and created customer frustration.
“Search was too rigid, too literal, and it didn’t account for how our customers actually think or type,” Lauren explained. “Imagine a chef searching for ‘rolls’ or ‘short rib’ and getting irrelevant results, or a rep spelling something slightly wrong and hitting a dead end.”
These challenges are magnified in a B2B environment. Customers expect their contracted products to appear at the top of their master shopping lists, but manual rules could never reliably deliver that. And on mobile — where half of US Foods’ users search — a tiny misspelling like “roles” instead of “rolls” often meant no results at all.
The outcome was costly: more calls to support, more frustration for sales reps, and lost opportunities with customers who needed fast, intuitive ordering. “This wasn’t just bad UX,” Lauren added. “It slowed down ordering and created unnecessary service calls.” It became clear that a rules-driven approach had reached its limit.
The Coveo Recipe for Success
When it came time to rethink search, US Foods launched an RFP process to find the right partner. What the team needed was a solution that could go beyond rules and guesswork, one that could scale relevance across millions of searches.
“We really liked what we saw in Coveo’s AI expertise and machine learning capabilities — plus their ability to handle the data complexity behind the scenes.”
Coveo offered a recipe for success: AI-powered relevance that learns from real user behavior, automated handling of data complexity, and machine learning models that continuously optimize the experience. With Coveo, US Foods saw a way to move past the limitations of rules and finally deliver the intuitive, scalable search their customers demanded.
From Overcooked Rules to Fresh AI
At first, the US Foods team tried to bring their old habits into the new platform. They imported thousands of rules from Endeca into Coveo, hoping to preserve familiar outcomes. But the result was disappointing.
“During testing, relevancy actually got worse,” Lauren recalled. “We had pilots where users would search for red potatoes and see blueberries at the top of the results. Our sales team gave us very clear feedback — the results just didn’t make sense.”
This became a turning point. Instead of clinging to manual rules, the team stepped back and leaned into Coveo’s strengths: Automatic Relevance Tuning (ART) andDynamic Navigation Experience (DNE).
“We reminded ourselves that we chose Coveo for its proven AI capabilities. So we said, let’s trust the model. Once we did, the relevancy significantly improved.”
Once ART took over, the right products surfaced immediately. Dead-end searches dropped, customers found what they needed faster, and sales reps spent less time fielding basic questions. Perhaps most importantly, Coveo provided the transparency and reporting US Foods needed to build trust internally — reassuring stakeholders that the AI was making explainable, measurable improvements rather than acting as a “black box.” For Lauren, with her background in merchandising, the impact was clear: less friction in the buyer journey, more efficiency for sales, and more orders completed without rep intervention.
Tracking the Impact: Metrics That Matter
With Coveo’s AI models powering search the results have been clear to see:
- With Coveo’s Automated Relevance Tuning (ART), the average click rank dropped from 8.9 to 1.6 on influenced results — surfacing the products customers actually wanted at the top of the page instead of buried deep in the results.
- Zero results were nearly halved, dropping from 4.6% to 2.4%.
- Conversion rates improved, particularly for new cases, not just reorders.
“With Coveo’s dashboards, we finally had clear visibility into search performance,” Lauren said. “Click rank improved significantly and dead-end zero result queries reduced — we could clearly see the AI models were working.”
One of the biggest drivers behind the drop in zero-result searches was Coveo’s ability to automatically catch misspellings and typos in customer queries. Instead of leaving users stranded when a typo occurred, Coveo’s query correction feature stepped in to smooth the experience, addressing a huge pain point for US Foods’ customers — especially mobile users, where typos are common.
As Lauren explained, “Misspellings that used to cause dead ends were being caught and corrected, which not only reduced frustration but also improved customer satisfaction.”
The benefits go beyond metrics. Customers are spending less time struggling with search. Reps are freed from routine support calls. And the business is gaining an edge in an intensely competitive industry where buyers often “comp shop” between multiple distributor websites.
At US Foods’ scale, even small improvements in search translate into major business outcomes — from reduced cost to serve, to higher customer satisfaction, to greater market share.
In addition, these results reinforced a larger point: Coveo wasn’t just a technology vendor. They were a trusted partner with the expertise to shepherd a large, complex organization through a delicate transition — minimizing risk, preserving continuity, and delivering value faster than expected.
Serving Digital as a Main Course
For US Foods, search is no longer just a feature, but the main course of their digital strategy. By trusting AI to handle the heavy lifting, the company has been able to eliminate thousands of manual rules, improve efficiency, and deliver faster, smarter results.
“Search isn’t just a feature for us anymore, it’s core to our AI and digital experience strategy. Faster, smarter results mean less friction for customers and less manual effort for our teams.”
With Coveo as a partner, US Foods has turned a recipe for frustration into a recipe for success. The result is a digital experience that scales with their catalog, empowers both customers and reps, and positions them to win in a highly competitive market.
This evolution highlights an important reassurance for companies facing similar transitions: modernizing search doesn’t mean starting from scratch. With Coveo, organizations can move confidently off legacy platforms, knowing they have a partner who understands both the risks and the rewards of change.
Practical Advice From the Frontlines
Based on our experience, here are four practical lessons that made the biggest difference and they’re the same ones we’d recommend to any organization on a similar path.
- Get the Basics Right
A powerful search engine is only as good as the data behind it. Strong taxonomy, accurate metadata, and consistent product tagging are essential foundations. Prioritize data quality by eliminating abbreviations, fixing misspellings, and ensuring consistency across the catalog. Equally important: listen to users. They interact with search every day, and their feedback is a critical driver of long-term success. - Trust the AI
According to Lauren “Our CIO always says trust the machine and it’s true. AI only works when you give it space to learn. Instead of over-engineering or second-guessing, we’ve learned to lean on Coveo’s AI and let it do what it does best: continuously optimize relevance and surface the right results.” - Focus on the Right Metrics
Dashboards and reporting are the difference between guessing and improving. Invest in visibility to understand what’s working, what’s not, and where to fine-tune. Tracking metrics like click rank, zero-result queries, and conversion rates gives you actionable insights to continuously refine the customer experience. - Embrace the Journey
Search optimization is never one-and-done. It’s an ongoing journey that evolves with customer needs. While product search may be the starting point, consider how to extend search into operational questions — like delivery updates or inventory planning. Expanding into these non-product areas not only reduces support friction but also creates more value for customers and internal teams alike.
From Early Wins to What’s Next
US Foods’ work with Coveo has already delivered meaningful results, but it’s only the beginning. Product recommendations are in place, yet there’s far more potential in creating dynamic category and landing pages that drive personalized experiences. With detailed B2B customer profiles, the company can tailor relevance based on unique purchasing behaviors — whether a customer is a Mexican restaurant or Chinese restaurant, their needs are different, and Coveo can surface the right products accordingly.
Looking ahead, US Foods also wants to expand search beyond product queries to operational questions like “When will my truck arrive?” or “How many more cases should I buy?” Enabling those capabilities will enhance the customer journey and reduce support friction. Internally, search insights will also empower its sales teams with a clearer understanding of customer behavior. In short, the foundation is set — and thanks to a trusted partnership with Coveo, the most exciting part of the journey is still to come.