Important Message from Guest Supply

Dear Valued Customer,

At Guest Supply, we deeply appreciate your business and take great pride in supporting your success and delivering the products you need when you need them.

We are encouraged to see the strong “snap back” in demand since COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, fueling a robust industry recovery. As part of an overall Sysco strategy, Guest Supply also took early action to prepare and invest in products and people. Still, local and global challenges exist related to labor availability, transportation capacity, and supply continuity.

While we are generally well staffed nationally, certain areas across the country are more challenged by the labor shortage and, in isolated locations, exacerbated by COVID-related absences. In these locations, our volume of orders is regularly exceeding our capacity. This has, unfortunately, led to service disruptions for some of our customers. We understand how frustrating this situation is. It is frustrating for us as well and we want you to know we have a strong sense of urgency to improve.

Guest Supply associates are working very hard to maintain service levels to the greatest extent possible, and we are also continuing to take action to reduce the impact on your business. For example:

• Many suppliers are experiencing product shortages and backorders. The greatest impact of these is in textiles, which are suffering from factory raw material shortages, labor and shipping container shortages, as well as other transportation impacts. We continue to work closely with current and new suppliers to improve product availability of the most critical items you need. This includes placing our orders 60-90 days in advance of typical lead times, increasing quantities ordered and proactively sourcing alternative products that work best for your business.

• Like you are experiencing, labor has become a challenge in factories, warehouses and for delivery transportation. For our own warehouses, we have aggressively expanded our hiring efforts by ensuring our wages are competitive in the marketplace and scaling our labor workforce based on peak demand levels. We also continue to evolve our safety protocols to keep our associates and customers safe and have recently re-implemented requirements for face coverings, launched vaccine incentives, and will offer onsite vaccine clinics.

While we’re confident these actions will make a difference, we also expect these challenges are likely to remain in the near term. For that reason, you can expect to receive more and better information from us about impacts to your business. You have our commitment that we will continue to adjust our operations and find new ways to support and minimize the impact on our customers to the greatest extent possible.

Thank you for your continued partnership, and most importantly, your patience as we work hard to work through these impacts and improve service to you.

Be safe and well!