Sysco is a $50 billion global leader in food service distribution that serves a diverse customer base, ranging from small street vendors to large restaurant chains, hospitals, and even military institutions. Sysco’s e-commerce platform, Sysco Shop, processes a significant portion of that revenue, enabling restaurant owners and food service professionals across the United States, Canada, and the Bahamas to order and receive products through a seamless digital experience across web and mobile platforms.
Sysco faced the challenge of orchestrating data and services across multiple digital touchpoints while maintaining a seamless customer experience. Their journey shows how modern API orchestration can transform a complex e-commerce operation and enable business growth.
The challenge: Data bottlenecks and long-term scalability
As Sysco’s e-commerce platform, Sysco Shop, grew, managing its multiple digital touchpoints became increasingly complex. Like many companies, Sysco had built their integration layer the traditional way: with separate procedural code bases for web and mobile experiences. This approach created two significant business problems:
- Maintaining separate integration code at the orchestration layer for each platform required nearly twice the development resources
- As code bases diverged, discrepancies emerged between web and mobile platforms
“We started noticing errors in production where our API changes were breaking system integrations,” explains Chandima Jayawickrema, Associate Director of Architecture at Sysco. “We wanted to improve our mobile experience and enhance our ability to deliver quality service to customers.
This situation became particularly critical as Sysco prepared to expand into the Canadian market. Each new region would require duplicating integration efforts across platforms, potentially delaying market entry and multiplying maintenance costs.
The solution: Declarative API orchestration with Apollo
After evaluating multiple options, Sysco knew that its API strategy was incomplete without addressing the orchestration problem. They adopted Apollo’s standards-based approach to API orchestration, moving from writing procedural code to a declarative graph-based approach that preserved the independence of development teams while maintaining the enterprise-grade security and reliability.
“Apollo is playing that orchestration role in our architecture,” says Jayawickrema. “We have different layers in our architecture – the orchestration layer first, then the core services layer, and then the enterprise layer behind it. Each service plays the role of a domain aggregator for a cohesive group of functionality.”
Sysco consolidated eight domain-specific orchestration services, or subgraphs, for ordering, product, pricing, delivery, and accounts. This graph-based orchestration approach allowed Sysco to:
- Define relationships between services declaratively instead of with imperative code
- Centralize orchestration logic while keeping service implementation distributed
- Automatically optimize API request patterns for performance
- Create consistent data flows across web and mobile experiences
Results and key benefits
Accelerated Market Expansion
With Apollo, Sysco successfully expanded into the Canadian market more efficiently than planned while maintaining their infrastructure integrity. The ability to reuse existing integrations rather than rebuilding them for a new region meant the expansion team could focus on market-specific requirements instead of recreating technical infrastructure.
Unified Customer Experience
By streamlining their API orchestration, Sysco removed the need to duplicate work for web and mobile platforms. Both now run on the same implementation, ensuring a consistent experience across channels. This improvement has enhanced the mobile experience and boosted customer satisfaction, with new features launching simultaneously on both web and mobile.
Improved Developer Productivity
Apollo makes it easier for Sysco’s team to scale and deploy updates without disrupting other services. Developers can work independently, which means faster releases and easier scaling.
Instead of 100 developers working in one shared repository, they now contribute to 8 domain-specific services. This has reduced PR conflicts and deployment bottlenecks. Developers now focus on domain-specific subgraphs, reducing the complexity of orchestration and making their workflows more efficient.
Accelerated Feature Delivery
By eliminating duplicate orchestration work, Sysco has achieved approximately 20% reduction in new development costs. Features can now be deployed once and immediately be available across both web and mobile, providing a more consistent user experience and directly supporting Sysco’s revenue streams.
Looking ahead
Sysco’s journey with Apollo is just beginning. Sysco is now working on extending their modern API orchestration approach across Sysco’s broader ecosystem of applications.
“Our division has many other applications, not just Sysco Shop. We see a future where we have a strong core services layer that will require an orchestration layer spanning the entire suite of products,” says Jayawickrema. “We intend to extend our graph-based API orchestration strategy with multiple entry points to support different applications, ensuring a consistent and scalable architecture across the division.”
The transition to Apollo has transformed how Sysco orchestrates its complex network of APIs and services. By moving from manual, code-based orchestration to a declarative, graph-based approach, Sysco has not only improved their e-commerce platform but has also paved the way for a more modern, agile, and scalable approach to software development.
Explore other customer stories to learn how Apollo can help your company streamline its API orchestration today!
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