Dentsply Sirona, maker of CEREC, the digital system that mills crowns chairside, has handed sales of its digital equipment to Midwest Dental, a dental distributor based in Texas. The two companies' dealings, previously centered on consumables, will expand starting November 1 to cover the full technology portfolio: CEREC milling units, the Primescan intraoral scanner, and imaging equipment.
According to the trade outlet Orthodontic Products, the two companies announced the agreement in early October. Mark Bezjak, Dentsply Sirona's group vice president of the Americas Group, said the deal would let more practices access the company's technology through a distributor dental professionals already trust, while Midwest Dental CEO Matt LeVasseur said the company would exceed customer expectations by adding regional service technicians and training.
A Southern Sales Network Despite Its Name
Midwest Dental is an independent distributor headquartered in Wichita Falls, Texas. Despite its name, the company's sales, service, and technical staff are based not in the Midwest but across the South, in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arkansas. Dental practices in this region can now bring in CEREC milling units or intraoral scanners through a familiar local channel, without going through a large national distributor, and call on a local technician when something breaks down.
The Seventh Regional Dealer This Year Alone
This is Dentsply Sirona's seventh North American regional dealer technology agreement signed in 2026. The company has struck new deals in succession with Benco Dental Supply, Burkhart Dental Supply, Nashville Dental, Atlanta Dental Supply, and Medline Sinclair, and also revised its existing agreement with national distributor Patterson Dental this year. Rather than relying on a handful of national distributors, it is building out its network one independent regional dealer at a time.
Amid Two Wavering National Distributors
Coincidentally, the two pillars of the dental distribution industry are wavering at the same time, each for different reasons. Henry Schein accepted a stake investment from private equity firm KKR under pressure from an activist fund, while the acquisition financing to hand Patterson Companies to a private equity firm has been stalled for more than three months by tariff shocks. It is hard to draw a direct line between this backdrop and Dentsply Sirona's growing string of direct regional dealer agreements this year, but the move reads as an effort to avoid concentrating its supply chain in one place at a time when both national distributors' ownership structures are in flux.
This agreement is limited to four states in the southern United States. In South Korea, Dentsply Sirona Korea runs its own sales and service organization out of Songpa, Seoul, and deals directly with dental practices, so this shift in distribution structure has no immediate effect there. Still, since completing crowns chairside via milling has become the standard approach domestically as well, practices using CEREC may find it worth watching how the US service network is being restructured.
Following last month's FDA clearance for a dental-specific MRI developed with Siemens Healthineers, this regional dealer expansion shows Dentsply Sirona broadening both its technology portfolio and its distribution network at the same time this year.