In 1946 Tillman J. Keller founded the Institutional Jobbers (IJ) Company as a small family business that delivered food products to the fraternities and sororities of the University of Tennessee. Today, still owned and led by the Keller Family, IJ has become a fully integrated supplier ranked among the top ten largest foodservice distributors in the United States providing over 10,000 food service and related items including produce, dry and frozen groceries, non-foods and disposables, equipment and supplies, sanitation and janitorial products, beverages, boxed beef, and center of the plate proteins.

IJ has played in important role in the industry through its participation in a number of influential trade associations. IJ was a co-founder of the Nugget buying group and later joined All Kitchens buying group in 1983. IJ joined the Markon Produce cooperative in 1986 and was one of the first members of Distribution Market Advantage (DMA) in 1990. More recently, IJ co-founded the Independent Marketing Alliance (IMA) in 1998 and IJ earned the historic and prestigious Great Distributor Organization Award (GDO Award) from ID Magazine in 2003.

The distribution area for the company covers seventeen states, primarily in the Southeast region of the United States in addition to serving export markets overseas. At the present time, IJ has over 125 marketing, sales, and customer service specialists which contribute to superior customer service support. The fleet includes over 100 trucks capable of handling frozen, refrigerated, and dry products. Additionally, with newly acquired state-of-the-art software, IJ employs industry leading technology within distribution operations and customer service.

Being family owned and operated has allowed IJ to be more flexible, faster to react, easier to communicate with, and more committed to exceeding customer expectations than most of its competitors. Driven by its core values, IJ is, and will be, the best choice for food service distribution in the Southeast.