Sysco Corp, the $20 billion (£10 billion) US food service giant, is to go head to head with Archie Norman and Blackstone in the bid battle for Brake Bros, The Times has learnt.

It is understood that Sysco has tabled a preliminary offer for Brakes, the British food service company that was put up for sale in March with a price tag of £1.2 billion by its private equity owners.

US-listed Sysco is the leading food service distribution company in North America, servicing a $200 billion industry in the US and Canada.

It had record revenues of $36 billion in its fiscal year 2006 from 400,000 restaurant and fast-food chain customers.

But with rising pricing pressure in the food service industry, analysts have said that Sysco’s geographical reach is too narrow and it needs to expand overseas, to Asia and Europe.

At a recent investor presentation, Rick Schnieders, the chief executive of Sysco, said that acquisitions remained a priority.

The emergence of a large US company in the auction for Brakes, which is owned by the US buyout firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice, will concern the shortlist of private equity buyers.

Corporates can typically pay much higher prices for assets because of the synergies they can derive from an acquisition.

This month Brakes’s bankers, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank, selected five bidders to go through to the second round of bidding, including the former Asda chief Archie Norman, who is bidding with the US buyout group Blackstone; CVC Capital Partners, Cinven, BC Partners and Bain Capital.

The bidders have been given access to Brakes’s books for due diligence and are meeting management.

No date has been set for second-round bids, although it is believed that Brakes will ask for binding bids at the next round and select one bidder for exclusive negotiations.

Buyout firms, awash with cash, have been active in the food distribution industry.

KKR and Clayton Dubilier & Rice recently paid $7.1 billion for US Foodservice, the food distribution unit sold by Ahold, the Dutch supermarket group.

One source questioned Sysco’s ability to pay more than private equity because its bid was more about global expansion than synergies from merging the two companies.

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