Sysco’s A Seat At Our Table: How One Story Carried a National Brand Across Cities and Years
- Always Build
- Sep 11
- 3 min read
Some campaigns run on strategy. The best ones run on soul.
When Sysco Canada launched A Seat At Our Table, it wasn’t about selling food—it was about inviting the country to see the food system differently. Not as trucks and pallets. Not as supply chains. But as relationships. Generations. Sweat. Skill. The stories behind the plates.
That’s what made this campaign work. And it’s what made it last.
We were lucky to help tell those stories—not just for one city, but across multiple years, geographies, and business types. Winnipeg. Chilliwack. Kelowna. Vancouver. Farm, warehouse, restaurant.
What carried it all was a story spine built to travel.
A Seat At Our Table
The Setup
The average person probably doesn’t think much about Sysco.
And that’s the point.
When food systems work, they’re invisible. But when we zoom in—on the family-run restaurant, the farmer at dawn, the truck driver pulling a long-hours shift to meet the next delivery window—we see the human touchpoints over every plate.
That’s where A Seat At Our Table starts.
Our job was to translate that Unique Story Proposition visually.
The Work
Across locations, we leaned on what we always do: real moments, earned emotion, and story-driven cinematography that lets people speak for themselves.
We started in Winnipeg, filming behind the scenes with the legendary Doug Stephen of 529 Wellington steakhouse along with chef/entrepreneur Bobby Mottola at his grocery. This wasn’t just a shoot—it was a study in hospitality culture.
Bobby talked about what it meant to keep the doors open during hard seasons, and how a partner like Sysco made that possible. And, Doug spoke about how Sysco was there for him during hard times in his startup phase and how he never forgot that.
In Vancouver and Winnipeg, we went deep inside the supply engine—capturing the mechanics of how Sysco gets the right food to the right place at the right time, no matter the scale.
Picture: industrial coolers. Pick-and-pack precision. Hands-on team dynamics. It reminded us that behind e is a whole operation keeping it sharp.
And then Chilliwack. We visited Cascades Long-Term Care, an assisted living centre that was cut off from supply chains during major BC floods. Supplies were tight. But thanks to rapid coordination from the Sysco team, essential food deliveries made it through. It wasn’t a headline moment—it was a human one. And that’s exactly what this campaign was built to honour.
The Payoff
A Seat At Our Table turned into a long-run national narrative—anchored in a clear idea, but flexible enough to reflect the people, businesses, and places it featured. That’s the power of narrative infrastructure. Set it up right, and the story carries itself.
The videos earned national distribution. B2B credibility and emotional resonance all at once. But most importantly, they helped Sysco show up differently in its own industry–a reliable enabler of everything from gourmet cuisine to late-night diners.
The Takeaway
A lot of national campaigns suffer from scale. They try to do too much, say too little, and end up with copy that reads like warmed-over mission statements.
But this one worked because it started with the right question:What seat does Sysco bring to the table?
Then it followed the real answers. Wherever they went.
If you’re a marketer, brand lead, or producer working with legacy infrastructure—especially in B2B—this is a case study to bookmark.
When you tell the right story, people stop seeing what you sell—and start seeing what you mean.
Want to learn how story systems like this one are built?
That’s what our book Move Your Story Further is for.
One idea. A hundred expressions.
DM us for the first chapter.
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