Robert Fany didn’t set out to build a career in foodservice. In his last semester of college, he was waiting tables at a restaurant in Southern California, when a regular customer — a Sysco distributor sales rep — asked what he planned to do next. Fany mentioned something entrepreneurial. The customer told him he was already in the business. “I’m a waiter,” Fany said. “You’re in it,” the man replied. Weeks later, Fany was hired at Sysco Los Angeles. It was 1993, and he was 22 years old.
Today, Fany is CEO and Founder of Gladiators of Hospitality, a foodservice manufacturer representation agency based in Ontario, California, and a member of the Independent Broker Alliance (IBA). With a partner and office based in Livermore, the agency’s combined operations provide coverage throughout the State of California. Gladiators of Hospitality represents 17 manufacturer lines and calls on distributors, chains, and operators across California’s distinct regional markets — from Los Angeles and the Inland Empire to San Diego, the Central Coast, and the Bay Area.
From the Ground Up
At Sysco, Fany crossed paths with people on the brokerage side of the business and grew curious about it. That curiosity led him to John Beck and Don Brokop, the owners of Food Service Associates. Fany refers to both of them as the “General Schwarzkopf’s of foodservice” — strategists, mentors, and true leaders who invested significant time in teaching him the business from the ground up and helping shape the foundation of his career. He started on mom-and-pop accounts and worked his way through second- and third-tier distribution, broadline distribution, and large leveraged operators, eventually building the firm’s first national account department.
After fourteen years, he joined Nasser Company, where he built a highly respected foodservice division from the ground up over the next six years. It was during this chapter of his career that Fany met another extraordinary mentor, Bill Nicholas. Nicholas played a pivotal role in taking Fany’s career to another level — helping develop him from a talented foodservice professional into one of the most respected executives in the business. He then joined Affinity Group, where he spent fifteen years as Vice President of National Accounts, reporting directly to the CEO.
A Different Kind of Sales Call
“I don’t sell,” Fany says. His approach is to bring evidence, not opinion, into every conversation with a customer. Rather than open with a manufacturer’s brand story, he builds his pitch around gap reports and category data, showing an operator where their menu has voids against competitors and the broader market, then walking through what similar menus are doing well. The goal is to get the customer “in the mood” for a category before the brand ever enters the conversation. He’ll say it plainly: he could know a buyer for fifty years, and without data behind him, the answer is still no — just a nicer no. It’s an approach built for an industry he believes has leaned too long on legacy relationships and glossy point-of-sale materials instead of information that actually moves a decision.
Room to Do It Right
In January 2025, Fany left the comfort of a fifteen-year career to start his own firm. He’s building Gladiators of Hospitality deliberately smaller than the shops he came up in, aiming to top out around 30 manufacturer lines rather than the 100-plus he says stretches most agencies past what any team can truly master. The idea is to stay close to the data and close to the customer, rather than spread thin across product lines no one has time to learn.
What His Father Taught Him
Fany traces much of his outlook back to his father, who built a clothing business from nothing in Beirut after leaving school in the fourth grade to support his family — eventually operating more than 20 retail locations and exporting internationally before the Lebanese Civil War took nearly all of it. Fany’s family left Lebanon in 1979 and, after a year in Cyprus, arrived in California in 1980, where his father started over once again. “Culture isKking,” Fany says of what he took from watching his father rebuild. It’s the advice he gives anyone entering the industry today: choose culture and mentorship over money and title and find the best mentor you can find early.
Talking with Robert, it’s clear his father’s example still shapes how he leads — the insistence on starting from the ground up, the discipline around data over relationships, and the belief that “people quit people, not companies.” Gladiators of Hospitality is, in its own way, Fany’s way of building something that honors what his father built and carrying it forward.
