How to Compare Supplier Prices When Pack Sizes Don't Match

A pack size describes how the product is shipped. On a Sysco or US Foods invoice it shows up in a column you might not even see at first, usually written something like 6/5 LB or 4/1 GAL. The first number is how many units are in the case. The second is the size of each unit.

So 6/5 LB means six 5-pound bags in the case. The case contains 30 pounds. If the case price is $90, you are paying $3 per pound.

The format is not always clean. Common variants:

• 6x5 lb (multiplier "x" instead of slash)
• 6×5 LB (typographic "×")
• 6/#10 (six #10 cans, foodservice can size, roughly 6.6 lb each)
• 4/1 GAL (four 1-gallon containers, 4 gallons total)
• 12 CT (12 count, no weight given)
• 1 EA (a single each)
• 25 LB (a single 25-pound bag, no case)

Some products are listed by weight only, with no count. Some are listed by count only, with no weight. Both are valid foodservice notation, and both make case-to-case comparison impossible without a conversion.

Pack sizes change. They change because suppliers run out of one configuration and substitute another. They change because manufacturers reformulate. They change because distributors renegotiate upstream contracts quarter to quarter. The case price is supposed to track those changes, but it often does not.

Here is a real shape this takes:

Last month, pulled pork, 4/10 LB case, $164 case price. That works out to $4.10 per pound. This month, pulled pork, 4/8 LB case, $164 case price. That works out to $5.13 per pound.

The line on the invoice looks identical. Same item description. Same case price. The change is hidden in two characters in a column most people ignore. Per-pound cost went up 25%. If you order 200 lb a month, that is an extra $206 a month, $2,472 a year.

Multiply that across 80 to 200 line items per month and you start to see why food cost drifts upward without any single line item looking suspicious.

Pick a base unit per category and stick to it.

For a 6/5 LB case at $90, total weight is 30 lb, total price is $90, so $3.00 per pound. For a 4/10 LB case at $130, total weight is 40 lb, total price is $130, so $3.25 per pound. The first one is cheaper per pound, even though the case price was lower for neither.

A few common conversions that trip people up:

• A #10 can is roughly 6 lb 10 oz drained, or about 6.6 lb gross. Six #10 cans is around 39.4 lb of product.
• A "case" of eggs in foodservice is usually 15 dozen (180 eggs) or 30 dozen (360 eggs). The difference between them is enormous and is rarely on the invoice line.
• A "bunch" of herbs has no fixed weight. Compare bunch to bunch only with the same supplier.
• A "clamshell" of berries can be 6 oz, 8 oz, 11 oz, or 1 lb depending on the grower. Clamshell count alone does not let you compare prices.

When the unit is ambiguous (case, piece, box, bag, bunch, sack, clamshell), the only honest way to compare is to ask the supplier for a weight or a count and convert. If they cannot tell you, you cannot compare.

Distributors layer in charges that don't appear in the line items. Fuel surcharges, delivery minimums, small-order fees, and seasonal upcharges show up between the subtotal and the total. They might be 1% to 3% of the invoice, sometimes higher. If two suppliers quote the same per-pound price but one charges a 4% fuel surcharge and the other charges 1.5%, you need to add that to the comparison or you will pick the wrong one.

The same goes for accessorials: returns, credits, and adjustments that hit a separate invoice and never get matched back to the original case.

A restaurant gets quotes from three distributors for extra-virgin olive oil. The case prices look like this on the quote sheets:

• Distributor A: $89.50 per case, pack 6/3 L
• Distributor B: $62.00 per case, pack 4/3 L
• Distributor C: $148.00 per case, pack 4/1 GAL

The case price is lowest at B and highest at C. Without the pack math, B looks like the obvious winner.

Convert each to dollars per liter.

• Distributor A: 6 × 3 L = 18 L per case. $89.50 / 18 = $4.97 per liter.
• Distributor B: 4 × 3 L = 12 L per case. $62.00 / 12 = $5.17 per liter.
• Distributor C: 4 × 1 gal = 4 × 3.785 L = 15.14 L per case. $148.00 / 15.14 = $9.78 per liter.

Now the order flips. Distributor A is cheapest per liter, even though A had a higher case price than B. C is dramatically more expensive per liter despite having the largest case (which is what people anchor on).

A restaurant going through 60 L of olive oil per month would pay $298.20 with A, $310.20 with B, and $586.80 with C. The difference between picking A and picking C is $3,463 a year on a single SKU. The difference between A and B is small enough that delivery reliability or quality might justify either choice. The difference between A and C is not.

Comparing two quotes at one moment is one job. Watching prices for the same item move over time is the harder one. Three things tend to drift, and all three matter.

The base unit price. Track $/lb or $/gal week over week. A 5% rise quarter over quarter on a high-volume item is easy to miss on a single invoice and impossible to miss on a chart.

The pack size. If a supplier substitutes a smaller pack at the same case price, the line will look unchanged but your real cost will rise. This is the most common failure mode in independent operations.

The fee structure. Fuel surcharges and small-order fees creep up quietly. Compare the percentage on each invoice, not the absolute dollar amount, because the dollar amount changes with order size.

The National Restaurant Association's 2025 Operations Data Abstract puts median food and non-alcohol beverage costs at 32.4% of sales for limited-service operators and 32.0% for full-service. Most operators target 28% to 32%. If you are four points off the median, that is roughly the entire margin of an independent restaurant.

A lot of operators try to keep this in a spreadsheet. It works for a while. Then it doesn't.

The first failure is volume. A restaurant doing 60 to 200 invoices a month has 10,000 or more line items per year. Hand-typing pack sizes and unit prices into a spreadsheet is two to three hours a week of someone's time, and the someone usually has a kitchen to run.

The second is normalization. Suppliers describe the same product three different ways. "Mushroom, Button 10#" and "WHITE MUSHROOMS 10 LB BX" and "Mushrooms-button-fresh-10lb" are the same line. A spreadsheet has no way to know that. Your "track this item" column becomes three rows that don't match.

The third is the pack size column itself. When the case description says "Mushrooms 5#" but the pack column says 4/5 LB, the per-pound price depends on whether you read the description or the pack. Distributors are inconsistent about this within their own systems. A human can usually figure out which is right. Doing it 10,000 times a year is the problem.

CostCreep was built around exactly this comparison. It reads every line and every pack size off your supplier invoices, computes the actual per-unit price, matches the same product across suppliers and across weeks, and surfaces the changes that matter. When a pack size drops without the case price moving, you get an alert. When a fuel surcharge climbs from 1.5% to 4%, you see it in the trend. The math is the same as what you would do by hand. The volume is what changes.

If you want to stop losing margin to pack size drift, you can start a 60-day free trial. No POS integration. No contract.