Metro Inc. (MRU) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Francois Thibault. I'm the CFO of Metro. It's a pleasure to welcome you to our Investor Day, people in the room and people on the webcast. It's been a while since we had an Investor Day, lots have happened since. So today, we'll be talking about key events that happened in recent years. And we'll talk about initiatives that we're currently working on to continue our growth. Today, I'm joined by Mr. Eric La Fleche, our President and CEO, who will be kicking off the meeting, the presentations. I will then do a quick financial overview focusing on capital allocation. And then Carmen Fortino, Executive VP of National Supply Chain and Procurement will talk about all the great investments we're doing in our DCs. And then Marc Giroux, our EVP and COO food will talk about what's happening in the division. We'll take a quick break, 10 minutes, then we'll come back with Alain Tadros, who's our VP Marketing, and he will be sharing some of the key highlights of our new loyalty program, MOi. After that, Jean-Michel Coutu, our President of the Pharmacy division, will be talking about pharmacy and then Michael Bacon, our Vice President of Public Affairs and Communications, will be addressing us. Michael is responsible for our ESG initiatives and strategy. So he will give you an update on where we are on that. Eric will close out the meeting. And then we've dedicated a 30-minute Q&A session and then we'll judge how things go. I think -- schedule permitting, I think we will be able to take a few questions after each presenter, it is live. And then depending on where we are on schedule, then we'll -- we may ask you to park it for the question, then we will address that in the later Q&A session. Okay. A little bit of housekeeping before we begin, and on behalf of those who will be presenting today, I want to remind everyone that some comments may include forward-looking information. A detailed notice regarding forward-looking information appears on the screen and on Pages 26 and 27 of our 2022 annual report. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause them not to materialize. So that's it. I'll now turn it over to Eric La Fleche. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for coming to Toronto for our Investor Day. I hope you enjoyed the tour. I heard good comments, impressive facilities. I know every time I go in them, I'm very impressed. And I think today was a good day, a lot of volume going through our produce DC. So glad you got to see it, and I'm anxious to hear more of what you thought. So I'm just going to lead it off. The intent today is to show you the DCs that you saw, of course, and to introduce our senior executive team. So I've been told or Francois and I have been told in our one-on-ones during conferences or whatever, that we only see you Francois, so it would be nice to see the other guys. So here they are, guys and ladies. And I'm sure you'll enjoy meeting them. So just to lead it off and present the company high level, the last 5 years have been very busy years for us. Exactly 5 years ago, today, we closed on the Jean Coutu acquisition, which was as someone would say, transformational acquisition, a very positive acquisition for us, and we're very happy with the results and the integration of our 2 companies. Jean Coutu, as you know, is the #1 market share leader in Quebec pharmacy. We were in pharmacy with Brunet. We became the clear leader with that acquisition. And if you combine that platform with our #1 food platform in Quebec, it really makes us a strong player -- powerhouse. I don't like to use that word, but we're clearly the leader in Quebec for consumer staples and very, very happy with that. Coutu is a great brand. You've known that, those of you who live in Quebec. I'm still -- I'm very happy to report that 5 years after the acquisition, it is still year in, year out at the top of the most admired companies listed in Quebec. Jean Coutu still known as a company. So it's a great brand that we cherish, and we want to continue to develop. COVID, the bug in the middle of the page clearly is a big event over the last few years. I just want to say that it seems like it's a long time ago, but we went -- all of us through hell and back. And in the grocery and pharmacy retail business, it was a big challenge. I think we lived up to it. I think our teams did a fantastic job, I was really proud to lead Metro during this crisis, our frontline people, especially in stores and pharmacies and our DCs showed up every day in a difficult circumstance, safety issues that we all remember. I think they showed a lot of resilience and a lot of courage, and it was a net-net tough experience, but a positive for our company. E-com surged. We were beginning e-com before that, and it really accelerated e-com for us, and Marc will give you more color. The 2 pictures are the -- on the left, it's the DC here. It's fresh Phase 1. And on the right is Terrebonne, which is about to open at the end of next summer. So that's been a key priority over the last 5 years. Carmen will give you more details on that, but that's clearly taken a lot of time on our side. Results have been strong. This is a 5-year -- last 12 months, 5 years versus 5 years ago, sales up 36%, net income up 67%. Good returns for our shareholders. The stock price is almost double from 5 years ago when we closed Jean Coutu. The Coutu family took a large position in Metro at the time of the transaction, and I can tell you that they're very happy shareholders. Last but not least, on the last 5 years, more recently, we've had changes in responsibilities. I think our executive team has been very consistent and durable over time at Metro, a lot of experience at the table, not just at the senior executive, but throughout the VP, Senior Management. But on October 1 when the new year started, some people changed jobs. So I just want to point out that Marc Giroux you'll hear from EVP, COO for Food, he has responsibility for food and banners, so retail operations and merchandising across Quebec, Ontario in addition to Adonis. Marc led Quebec before, joined Metro in '09 came up through marketing, merchandising and then the Metro banner and then Quebec. And now both provinces. Carmen Fortino, who led Ontario for the last 8 years before that did a fantastic job for us in Ontario, moved on to head up all supply chain, procurement, private label -- we have, as you saw, mega investments, mega projects ongoing and coming. So Carmen has taken the lead on that. Jean-Michel Coutu, third-generation Coutu family member assumed the leadership of our pharmacy business on October 1 also. He's been with Coutu most of his career, a pharmacist by training and with management training, great experience and was the man we called on, in October went to take over. So happy to introduce my colleagues, and I hope you will enjoy their presentations. So a quick word on the market, our strategy and our priorities. Nothing new here. I said it on every call. I'm not going to bore you and repeat. But the value, high inflation is the environment we're operating in, both in food and pharmacy, the discount shift continues. Again, I've been saying it for several quarters. No change there. Penetration of promotion is back to prepandemic. Private label sales are growing at twice the rate of our sales or more. It depends on the categories. But value is the order of the day in this high inflation environment, for sure. Cost pressures. The inflation is largely caused by input costs, cost of goods sold. Again, nothing new here. You've heard it from us and from other players. The pressures are still there, albeit at somewhat lower levels, lower quantities of demand, lower rates of demands, but higher than before and still going on. So inflation is not going away short term. Labor is a structural issue in our home province of Quebec. It's an issue in this market in Ontario, a bit less so. But clearly, a big focus of ours and a worry where we have to invest in technology to address these shortages. Industry square footage, I would call it normal. There is some growth. There is some activity. We're opening a few stores a year. So some of our competitors, some are converting some stores. So there's activity. But on a net-net square footage basis, I would call it normal. Our pyramid or tempo, whatever you want to call it, has not changed over the years. We've been pretty consistent. Our goal is to be a top retailer for over the long term. To do that, we have a "high purpose" to nourish the health and the well-being of the communities we serve. Our mission to serve customers exceed their expectations every day to get their long-term loyalty. That has not changed for many, many years. And we're resting this on 4 pillars. It starts with having the best team. Our key focus on the customer, executing well every day. We call it operational excellence and all the while financial discipline, we are employee and customer focused, but the shareholder is not far behind. And we -- financial discipline is a trademark, and we are proud of that heritage. Corporate responsibility, ESG has always been there. We've always been a responsible corporation Marie-Claude will finish today with some of the work we've done over the last 12-plus years. This is not since last year, but what we're doing for the environment, what products we buy and sell, how we treat our employees and how we invest in our communities is what we call our responsibility plan. Our strategy is pretty simple. We operate community supermarkets, multi-format all focused to different degrees, depending on their markets and their mission of full service or discount or specialty, but convenience, value, fresh and health is what we're focused on. Again, depending on the banner, there's a little more focus on value or a little more focused on convenience, but they're all focused on fresh. I can tell you that. Best community pharmacies, again, community is at the center of patient care. That's the majority of the sales of a pharmacy are drugs and services. So patient care is the clear focus, but we have a front-end business focused on convenience, again, value, again, health, again and beauty. We are omni channel, no surprise there, brick-and-mortar and online, we want to serve the customer where he or she is in all of our banners. We operate a model that is decentralized for store operations and merchandising close to the customer, has been a winning formula for us, supported by a strong central core. So each banner has the Senior VP responsible for the banner. Marc will tell you more about that. And at the center, we have strong procurement, supply chain, logistics, private label, the real estate function is centralized, IT is centralized. So we want to leverage our costs at the central level, but we want to remain close to the customer. So again, that you've heard before from me and from Francois. Key priorities for F '23, the first half has been strong. We're pleased with our momentum. We're pleased with our tonnage or sales, same-store sales, market share, pleased with our performance, and we're on track to deliver our food and pharma business plans for this year. On the supply chain logistics front, the Terrebonne D.C. is the next big project. So after fresh Phase 1 that you saw this morning after the freezer that you saw this morning, the next one is Terrebonne, it's fresh and frozen and one big building in Terrebonne, brand-new sites. So that starts to ramp up at the end of this summer. So busy working on that. The Moi program, which you'll hear from my colleague, Alain Tadros is a big focus for our teams in our banners and in marketing and in loyalty. Digital transformation that's been ongoing for a few years and will continue to happen. Again, efficiencies are required. So it's going digital. So we're on that boat across the business while making progress on our corporate responsibility targets that you'll hear from Metro. M&A and partnerships, it's not just 2023, it's always, we're always on. And if we try to stay abreast of all opportunities and food, pharma, Canada we're interested and willing to do something that makes sense strategically for the long term. Nothing imminent, but always on our agenda. Finally, we remain committed to our long-term financial targets. These have been out and public for a long time, and we remain committed to them. So over the long term, we want to have 2% to 4% sales growth, 4% to 6% operating income and 8% to 10% EPS, thanks to the buyback leverage. So that's Metro in a nutshell, and I will now pass it on to my colleagues. Francois, your turn. Thank you.

Thank you, Eric. So Eric mentioned the annual growth targets. And so I think not necessarily every year, but pretty much -- pretty much every year. And when you look back at a period of 2, 3, 5, 10 years, we certainly have exceeded those targets. You look at the sales growth the last 5 years, over 7% and net income and adjusted EPS a little above 12%. So obviously, the annualization of the Jean Coutu revenues from '18 to '19 certainly helped the top line growth but the test is that the profitability follow and it did. And on EPS, despite having issued some stock to finance part of the Jean Coutu acquisition, we've been able to grow EPS by more than 12%. So we're pleased with that performance. Part of the reason, obviously, all the stuff that Eric mentioned allowed us to do this, but also, we've been able to gradually improve our profitability margin. So I mentioned -- we've been mentioning on the call, our gross margin in the last, let's say, 5 years has been pretty stable. And in fact, in the last year, with the food inflation where it is, our food gross margin has been under pressure because we weren't able to pass on all the cost increases and pharmacy compensated so that overall, our gross margin was relatively flat. But a combination of good top line growth and good cost containment on the OpEx side allowed us to drive good operating leverage, and you see the last 4 quarters, and this is all apples-to-apples with IFRS 16, so the leases all taken care of, see that gradually in the last 4 years, we've been increasing our EBITDA margin, and that's something that we are proud of. So that leads me to our capital allocation. And a lot of you have heard me talk about it, and I will continue talking about it. Basically, there's no change, whether it's pre pandemic, high inflation, we have not changed the way we allocate capital. So we started from a strong cash flow generation of cash from operations. And from that cash from operations, we allocate capital in the following order. The first priority is capital expenditures in our core businesses, dividends and if there is excess cash after these 2 first buckets, then we return cash to shareholders through buybacks. And when we do all this, solving to remain at no more than 3x adjusted debt to EBITDA on a financial leverage, okay? So that's -- I've communicated that, but it's important that we restate that, we are -- that's the way we allocate capital. So let me take each one of these components in turn, and I'll expand a little more. Cash flow generation. So as you can see, the capital profile of the company has increased significantly in recent years. 2019, there was a $200 million tax hit on the sale of Couche-Tard, so that number would have been more like $1 billion. But if you look at our past 3 years, $1.2 billion, almost $1.3 billion of cash from operations, so a combination of better performance on the food side and the acquisition of Jean Coutu has significantly changed the profile cash generation. And in our definition of cash from ops, we remove lease payments. So I know that the accounting standard treats leases now as an asset and debt, so that the lease payments are now found in the investing activities and financing activities, we bring all that back as lease as lease, rent as rent, we have to take -- we have to be accountable for it. So we deduct lease expenses in that definition of cash from us, and we deduct interest expense as well. Cash interest expense is deducted from that. So still, after all this, a pretty healthy generation of cash from operations. CapEx, so this is our job, finding good investments in our core businesses. Spending, investing is easy, but we want to invest to grow, but we want to invest to grow profitably. So this we will talk about in our store network, in our DCs, in technology. We have a very rigorous governance process around capital allocation even though we allocate capital to the divisions as part of our budgetary process, you don't get to invest it until we review the significant projects to make sure that it earns the, first of all, makes business sense, but also earns a healthy cash-on-cash return after tax. So you look at the evolution of our CapEx every year, we've been steadily growing CapEx. In most recent years, that increase is mainly due to the big projects that we have ongoing in our DCs. So 2022 was a record year in terms of CapEx at $621 million. And we expect this year to be roughly around $800 million. And you should expect next year to be at a similar level and then it should start tampering down as we finish the next -- as we ramp up and finish these big 2 projects that we have. So we'll be back to a more normal level. But '24 and '25 sorry '23 and '24 will be the biggest years in terms of CapEx, '25 you should expect to see a taper down. That's on CapEx. Then second order, dividends. So we have a clear policy. We pay out between 30% and 40% of adjusted net earnings of the previous year as a payout ratio. That is our commitment. We've been growing dividends steadily for 27 consecutive years, and we certainly intend to continue growing the dividend. So that's the second priority of capital allocation. And if there is a cash left, then we go to buybacks. When I put all this CapEx and dividends, the red bar now is our definition of free cash flow. So it's after CapEx. It's after dividends. To me, dividend is -- we're committed, not negotiable, we deduct it. So we're now running at about a run rate -- we made some working capital investments. We made some working capital investment in 2022, but we're running a run rate of $400 million roughly of free -- true free cash flow a year for the last 3 years, okay? And that's where we are. As I said, so there's excess cash. And if you look at how we've allocated that excess cash in the last 5 years, so we've generated $5.4 billion of cash from operations. We've invested $2.4 billion in our network, stores, DCs, technology. We've paid out $1.1 billion dividend and we have done buybacks of $1.3 billion. So that's -- it's a balanced capital allocation. We've returned $2.4 billion to shareholders. We've invested $2.4 billion in our operations. And again, the buyback is not a commitment in the sense that, yes, of course, if there's no good projects, good CapEx, good acquisitions, we will return that excess cash. But if there's a good big project or a good acquisition like Jean Coutu case in point, when we did the acquisition of Jean Coutu, we stopped the buyback for a year until we came back to our target financial leverage and then we resumed the buyback. So again, good acquisition, good CapEx is our priority, but we have the discipline to return excess cash when we don't see enough return. As I said, all this with the objective of keeping our target leverage at no more than 3x adjusted -- total debt to EBITDA, so right now, our debt profile is well spread out. So we have $2.6 billion of notes. And we have an unused credit -- revolving credit facility of $600 million. But the $2.6 billion, you can see the spread in maturity, it's very well spread out. We don't have any big refinancing exposure. The next one is end of next year, $300 million and nothing before 2027 after that. So it's well spread out. We have an average coupon of blended coupon of 4.5%, very competitive. And we've been -- and as you can see, we've been able to secure some very interesting long-term financing. We're talking originally a 30-year issuance. The last one, we did a 3.41% all in. I'll take that any time, 30-year debt, very low-cost, long-term capital. So that's our profile. We are committed to remain investment grade. That's important for us. It's important for investors in our noted portfolio. So that's something that we maintain. It leaves us a very strong balance sheet that can take on more acquisition, big projects and remain investment grade, okay? That's our commitment to the debt market. So I think a combination of executing on our business model and maintaining a disciplined capital allocation, I think, has served us well. The stock has performed well. Whether you look at it in 1 year, 3 year, 5-, 10-, 20-year basis, the annual increase have been attractive. We're proud of that. That's the past. But we -- all I can say is that we are committed to continuing executing on our business model and continuing on having a disciplined capital allocation. But that's the past, and I think it served us quite well. So just to finish, when I look at our initiative, when I look at our priorities from a finance point of view, there's really 3 -- I mean there's a lot of stuff that keeps us busy, but there's really 3 key priorities that we're focused from a finance perspective. First is, you saw the big project, big CapEx. These are very important investments, long-term investments. You don't get the return after 1 year, you don't get a return after 2 years. At least we're investing in capacity Carmen will talk about it for the next 15-plus years. These are big projects. So we're going to make sure that we monitor the financial performance, the financial governance around the performance of these sites. Every time we ramp up a new site there's a big hit on our expenses, of course, as you saw with Ontario, right, you got transition costs, you've got ramp-up costs, as you move up the learning curve. You've got duplication of SG&A as you're transitioning from an old warehouse to a new one and you got depreciation when the DC gets live, it gets depreciated. So all this is part of the business case, no surprise, but we're going to make sure that we manage it and we keep on the business plan. So that's the first priority. Second priority, we want to steadily improve our return on invested capital and return on equity. When we did the acquisition of Jean Coutu, we issued debt, we issued equity and we sold our shares in Couche Tard. We had a huge gain on sales. All this increased the asset base and the equity base of the company. So the returns normally the math -- the returns went down. But that -- our focus is now as we move forward, we gradually ramp up, increase -- steadily increase those return on invested capital and return on equity. That's a key focus. And the third one is we've got to contain operating expenses. We're in a high inflation environment. We all expect inflation to get back to more normal levels. So we all expect to go back to a more normal level. And it will be important as your top line gets back to more normal level of inflation, that we contain SG&A because there's a certain lag in SG&A with inflation. Your cost of goods sold reflect inflation pretty instantly but some of the SG&A, some of the operating expenses are either long-term contracts or fixed-term contract when they come due, like transportation or professional services, there might be a catch-up. So our job is to make sure that we contain that increase year-over-year so that we can continue to generate good operating leverage. So that in a nutshell is the 3 things that we'll be focusing on next year and the following years. And I want to thank you for your attention. Thank you. I will now pass it to Carmen.

Thank you. Thanks, Francois. So I hope this is not too repetitive for everybody. But I want to start by welcoming you all here, and I want to say that we're really pleased that you took the time to come and visit us. right? We're really proud of our facilities. And we're happy with the performance thus far, and we look forward to the many benefits that the facilities will support as we continue to grow. So the supply chain challenges and concerns have abated somewhat from what you've heard through the pandemic, and it remains -- but it remains a major item, right, for our senior management team at Metro. The supply chain modernization has been on our radar for the past 7 or 8 years, and we're somewhat fortunate that we started when we did. Our thinking years ago was to create a dedicated team of experienced professionals in the logistics area, right, to sort of carve out the best path forward. And you already know that Metro is a business that's really focused on the fundamentals. So when we're thinking about spending the money that we spent, right, and honoring the past culture of Metro, it was really important to everybody in the supply chain team to make sure that we can deliver, on the promise that Metro holds very dear. In order to achieve the most out of our investments, we would need to collaborate not only with partners from the outside, but internally inside of our business, the supply chain does touch the customer to the farmer, okay? And it's really important that we communicate and collaborate and educate ourselves on what the possibilities are when we're spending the money that we spent to invest in the supply chain. And of course, technology, the data that it creates is the enabler for us going forward. We're constantly learning. When we were touring the facilities there were questions to some of the people in the facility about like, okay, we're here now. Is it going to get better, right? Or is it sort of flatlining? Well, it gets better every day. We learn every day, inside the supply chain across our business really. But -- and the mentality of the people is that there is something to learn, every time we open the door, it creates a new learning for us. And we see that very clearly in what we've already opened inside the supply chain. In terms of the supply chain trends, the global trends, this slide really outlines the imperatives that we've aligned ourselves with at Metro. They're very straightforward, and they shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. I'm going to tell you about how we value our people and how they've helped us improve the resiliency in our network. I'm going to talk to you about leveraging the automation to deliver value and then going to provide insights into our supply chain sustainability here at Metro. So you've seen the gateway to Toronto, on the 427 is now owned by Metro. Both sides of the highway. We're really proud of that. It's amazing, right to see. Several years ago, when we started talking about the need of -- and the investment in the supply chain, we arrived at the decision really quickly that we would try to maintain our location, primarily because we're close to vendors, and we're close to -- we're in the heart of our stores, okay? And it's a very unique position to have compare us to the competition, you'll understand why. So the properties along the 427 became really important. We own the property on the 427 and we took advantage of it. But the real reason, that we wanted to stay where we were was our employee base. We wanted to maintain our employee base. And we got lucky because through the pandemic and through the last really 4 years, it became an issue even before the pandemic, but attracting labor became a real problem, okay? And being in the hub of transportation, easy access right through our facilities, it was a problem, can you imagine the problem it would have been had we moved 30 miles away, okay? It would have been a huge problem. I think we've been -- it would have been a different scenario completely. So we got very fortunate that we stayed where we were and took advantage of our employee base, both unionized and nonunion, the sort of start this transition on the supply chain side. And our employees, I know that you've heard this before, but our -- both our store employees and our distribution center employees really came to the table through the pandemic. They were there, day in, day out, supplying our stores with product. And we hear all the horror stories, but the heroes really, over the last 3 or 4 years have been our frontline people both in the stores and the -- and I just feel like I need to say that because we don't talk about it enough. When you look at our facilities, easy to see this technology that you see is state-of-the-art. We have a very good partner in WITRON that we talked about on the tour. We're really proud of sort of the relationship that we're carving out with them. We have a good relationship and talking through problems, partnerships, present problems, who did this, why did you do it? But we seem to be working well together in driving the business forward. And we wanted to create an environment where we would address some of the concerns of the past, health and safety was a big concern and we've done that. You've seen it inside our facilities, not only by the reduction in staff but the way that we work, the way that the whole facility is laid out so that employees can work in a safe environment. And we've also modernized the facility, the employee areas that we share, the fact that there's EV charging, they feel good going to work. It's a nice clean environment to show up in. You went through the freezer. That's a relatively harsh environment, not too many people in that environment so -- it's -- we've addressed the issues that technology has allowed us to address today in the food distribution network. I think you'll see, if you were to go to many of our competitors, you'll see the same sort of path forward, right, on the back end of the business. This is a representation of our network when you look out to 2025. And the automated sites are highlighted in yellow, you can see that, our perishable network represented by the 4 red boxes are mostly automated. The exception is the facility in Laval, which we've expanded and it was going to come online in its expansion next year. And so having the perishable DCs automated is highly desirable because they are the harshest and most inefficient conventional environments that we work in. Imagine frozen in a conventional environment, people staying in that facility for 8 hours at a time, kind of hard when your finger goes numb, after 5 minutes and you're in there. The pharma network is represented in green, is highly automated and probably our most automated facility and we're adding more automation to eliminate areas where we think there's a repetitive labor and things that we can automate. The pharma import DC is in Hawkesbury. I don't know if that's clear there, but that remains conventional, it's an import DC where all of our imports come into. And our lease automated sites are our dry grocery sites. One of the benefits of the work that we've done on the perishable side of our business is that it's free -- we really had -- what drove the investment was capacity. What we invested in to date was nondiscretionary. We had no choice. We had to build a frozen DC. We had to invest in our fresh DCs. We're just out of capacity. Third parties are handling produce, not a place we wanted to be, we wanted to control our own product. What that did is free up capacity for our grocery DCs right now -- so it's allowed us flexibility, to think about what the grocery future might be, but it's bought us a lot of time. So the freeing up of the consolidation of fresh in our automated DCs is providing us the space and time to think about how we want to handle grocery. And grocery is a less harsh environment. You're working in ambient temperature, it's a lot different than working in a perishable environment. So we really think that we're in a good place, right, to take a breath and think about what the next steps are for supply chain in Metro. And this is our sort of time line. This is -- what you see here and let me just make sure that I get it right here because I can't see it myself. So from a high-level project schedule here, we have covered a lot of ground with our modernization product project already. The yellow chevrons represent construction time lines. And from that perspective, we're almost complete. Across the board, we're almost complete. The gray Chevron's represent automation equipment installation, which you've seen when you're looking at the window in our produce facility, you've seen that going up. So they're in the midst of escalation in both fresh Phase 2 here and Terrebonne in Quebec. When you think of Terrebonne, take the 2 facilities that you visited, put them together, with a nice office complex, that's Terrebonne. It's a phenomenal facility and hopefully, it performs really well. I'm sure it will. The red diamonds represent operational start-up timing. And as you can see, we have 3 sites remaining to start up. We have a really busy next 18 months. We have a fantastic team. I have to tell you, right, our -- I've been in the business for a long time. We've got a great team, but they're going to have a lot on their shoulders. I keep on telling the people behind me or to my left, right, that need to be patient as we sort of work our way through that, but we have a great team, to lean on. The last bar is you see it, SCIP, it stands for supply chain integrated planning. We've been rolling that out for a couple of years. That's really our inventory management system at store level. So what's happened at the store level was that we went from an environment where people at store level had 20, 30, 40 years of experience to an environment where we're missing employees, people are rotating really quickly, they're not -- their career was not 30 years long and they're now -- the people that used to order product that were in our business 30 years, right, could order it blindfolded. The people that are trying to order it today don't have the experience, so they need system support and help. And SCIP is doing fantastic. By the end of this year, we will have rolled out our discount business effectively, there will be a couple of stores left. But effectively, we'll have rolled out our discount business and our conventional business is just starting to roll it out. Our volume, as Eric alluded to, our volume continues to grow. Our tonnage grows and the feedback that I'm getting from stores with that in place, right, is thank god, we have the inventory management system helping us. What we plan to do after we roll that out is feed our suppliers with the information so that they can feed us what we need in a more just-in-time basis so that we can get the full value out of the DCs that were -- that we're operating. So we built DCs for 15-plus years and we like to sweat our assets, we get the most out of it that we can. And that's going to, again, require collaboration and good partnerships, and that includes our suppliers. So the beauty for me having experienced a few environments is that our relationship with our suppliers are respectful upfront, no BS, we know what you want from us. This is what we need from you, and we sort of get to work. It's worked really well for us up to now. And I think it's going to continue to work for us in the future, especially in this environment of this trust, right with a customer. I think it's really important. And the last thing I want to leave you with and I said it to -- said, well, let me just go through the value drivers really quickly. So the value -- the slide represents the various value drivers that helped us justify our modernization investments. We exceeded our expectations in a number of areas, in particular, in our fully automated freezer, you guys seen it, labor savings, where productivity is 2.5x, TAT is better than our business plan. We converted more products to DSD. I think Eric talked about, we went from 75% going through the warehouse to about 95% going through the warehouse, the interesting part about that is that we didn't put one extra kilometer in a truck out to our stores, we just filled our trucks more on each of those stops, so that was a really big win. That's a revenue generator for us. So we've had greater impact than we anticipated, and we think that's going to translate also in -- when we open fresh Phase 2 in the Terrebonne, so I'm really excited. But it involves the capital investment side was building these facilities through the pandemic wasn't the easiest thing to do, while we were close, we were a little bit over on the capital side. And -- but we're confident that we're going to exceed all the financial targets when it comes to the DCs that we have in place today. We haven't lost sight of the environment. Like I said, our focus is to take trucks off the road, which includes our DSD. If you go to Toronto, I'll take you -- I'll drive you to the store in Toronto, at a normal day, I'll have 4 or 5 trucks circling the store waiting to get in to unload, because there's no way to park in Toronto, they're on the road. These are our supplier trucks. I said -- I saw my beautiful office, I sit and watch trucks in my basic store like the lineup. But in Toronto, they got nowhere to go. That's money, it's bad for the environment, it's -- we can do it cheaper. We can create revenue streams that we never had before and we can create more sales for our suppliers. So it's a win-win-win scenario. And -- but it takes a little bit of arm twisting to convince some people that this is a way that we need to go, but who wins in the end is really our customer because we're in stock, so we see -- we hear it anecdotally from -- we don't put it in the business case that we're going to drive sales better because if we're doing everything else perfectly, we would have drove sales anyways, but we don't do things perfectly. This really is a big step in helping us drive sales that we've missed over time. And really, in closing, I said it at the -- with the group that I'm with, I'd like to remind everyone that while we're excited about our new technology, it's our people that make the difference. Our ability to communicate, educate and coordinate is what's going to continue to improve our business and drive sales with our customers. I said it, anyone can buy a Ferrari, you need to know how to drive it. And I think our people are best-in-class. Thank you.

I just want to talk a little bit about returns when it comes to -- obviously, they're labor saving, and that's a big issue. But if you can talk a little bit about returns of these kind of investments we're making, how is Terrebonne going to look like versus what we visited today? And can you talk a little bit about dry grocery, the opportunity maybe above and beyond what we're doing today, how big that can be down the road.

So yes. So I'll start with grocery, you've seen the mechanization in the freezer. You've seen -- that's exactly what a grocery facility would look like. So it's a big capital investment. The environment for grocery is a little different than it was for perishables, easier to hire people in and keep people in the grocery business and if I was -- I had to build a brand-new facility today, it'd be -- it almost looks like the freezer only bigger on the grocery side of our business. But we're in a place where it's not urgent anymore. We can supply our stores with their needs, maybe not quite as efficiently as we would have if we had an automated facility that was paid for in front of us, but our customers are not going to feel the difference, so we can get product to the store when they need it. We can address the DSD opportunity inside of our network because we've created space in our network and while I would like always like a fancy new toy, I know that I can make the grocery area work for a little while longer anyways for our business. That's on the grocery side. In terms of returns, so we don't -- in the business case, we're going to exceed our business case on with the supply chain investments that we're making. We don't really talk about the improvement in sales. It's not really built into the business case and -- but I can tell you that there's an improvement in sales. I have -- and the freezer is a great sort of example because it's live, it's been live for a year almost. And what you hear from everyone concerned, including our suppliers is that the sales momentum is something we didn't expect. We have vendor-managed categories inside of our freezers buying big international suppliers that can't keep up with -- they're projecting the volume based on their history and they can feed us fast enough because as soon as they get it in its out. So they're seeing their sales grow faster than even they had anticipated. Having worked in stores my whole life, it's because getting the product to the store, getting the right product to the store at the right time, is not an easy thing to do. The more we control the better we're going to be. We're not perfect but we're way better than we used to be. And we're taking the -- I think these are lost sales that we're capturing that we really didn't count on, we knew there would be a little benefit, but it's quite significant, right, to have the -- and in frozen, grocery, 90% of your shelf doesn't turn but once a month. Frozen, if you walk in the store, you hit it on a bad day, you're liable to see a lot of holes, holding power is lower. So we've seen a lot of growth there. Taking wheels off the road, DSD, like I said, it's a little bit of arm twisting with some of our suppliers. But I'm a big believer in reducing wheels on the road because it services our customer better, we can flow product to the store when we need it better than suppliers that want to deliver us once a week, deliver 25 cases that cost a fortune, the frequency is higher, it's like I said, it's not a perfect system. So when I have frequency going into the stores, my stores are going to be in better shape, if I miss it today, it will be there on Friday. And -- but if I miss it, and my Nestle ice cream order this week, it might not get there until the end of next week and that -- those are the things that we're picking up today. So -- and we have technology helping us order product that I think that's a better job than a human would. There's -- it predicts fairly well. Our -- like I said, if I could tell you that our business is doing extremely well on the volume side. I think it's helped by the fact that we have technology helping our stores determine how much volume is going into the store, ordering the right product for the store. So I don't know, Francois.

No, in terms of return expectations, it's the same CapEx. It's CapEx. It's funded from the same sources of funds. So -- it's a much longer time horizon. We're investing, as Carmen said, we're investing for 15 years plus. And so it's not going to happen in the first year. But the important thing is are we keeping with the assumptions that we had behind and so far we have. And so I think we're okay on that front. You can't compare what we -- the investment we've done with the status quo, the status quo was not an option, we were out of capacity. We had to make a move. So it's not like you can compare with today's, you compare with other scenarios of expanding, moving all that. And I think we chose the right one. We'll make sure so far so good, but we'll make sure that we keep track on those assumptions.

Thanks, Carmen. Much appreciate it. Obviously, one of the key issues with supply chain is how it integrates with the whole technology backbone and the flow of information, I don't remember who mentioned information. So from where you stand right now, do you feel comfortable with the technology platform and the integration? Are there add-on modules that you'd like to see in a perfect world if Francois would let you? Where do you sit with that?

I'm actually very comfortable with where we are today. We have to finish executing our SCIP initiative, right, because it ties -- it really ties in the store to the back end of the business and back to our supplier so that flow of goods, we get our share of the flow of goods because that's been an issue for the last 3 years. I'm very comfortable with the technology platform so far. Okay. We'll move to Marc.

Thanks, Carmen. As you can see, Carmen and I have been working closely together from store to supply chain from supply chain to store, and we'll continue to do so as we finalize those investments and deliver for customers. Today, I'm happy to have the opportunity to talk to you today. And what I'll do today is I'll talk a bit about who we are, and where we focus, what our market position is, and what are the opportunities for growth, and how we win, how we go to market, what's our focus. Carmen has talked about the customer and the investment that we're making for the customer. That passion to serve customers and to differentiate around customer experience has been a long-standing value of Metro. But about 10 years ago, we reenergized that strategy, launched a loyalty program in Quebec called Metro Moi, has signed a partnership with dunnhumby and launched Customer Promises. And those Customer Promises brought to life that customer satisfaction obsession through our processes. We have more than 400,000 customers that give us feedback on a yearly basis. And that feedback is at the store in the ends of our operators, store managers, department managers every day. They read the comments and they act upon the comments. And that journey that started about 10 years ago was a long journey because you need to develop great leaders that become passionate about the customer and mobilize your team that are frontline employees that are in front of customers to deliver on those promises. So leadership and continuity of leadership has been key at Metro. Eric mentioned it at the beginning. We have a great executive food team operators that are leading each of their banners in their market that have long-tenured Metro that ensures the continuity of strategy and making sure that we execute on that customer satisfaction strategy and all that we deploy in our processes to deliver and they have a strong succession plan. So that's a key strength at Metro that the leadership strength that we have, and Eric mentioned how we're structured to execute on our strategy. Each banner is focused on a market and a customer set. So we have a leader of discount in Ontario, a leader of discount in Quebec to a very different market at different maturity. Same for conventional, same for our international banner Adonis and same for e-com that's supporting all these banners. And that focus and accountability is driving ownership and those leaders are accountable for 100% of their business, their development plans, merchandising programs, assortment, et cetera, et cetera, delivering to customer specificities in each of their markets. And our overall -- it starts with the store. So you have good leaders that are operating great stores. And we have the fortunate -- we've the fortunate strategy of developing a mix of assets that we can adapt to each market and make sure that we have the right store in the right markets, serving the right customers. So we've invested in the last 10 years, over $2 billion in Quebec and Ontario to continuously improve our stores and to adapt our stores to the right market and to the evolving needs of customers and market. We've grown our square footage and discount by about 20%. As you can see, 43 new stores over that period. And we kept our conventional real estate square footage flat while we reduced the number of stores. So we invested within our conventional stores to expand stores to bring in new concept to make sure that our conventional supermarket would be a destination for customer, while our discount supermarket would expand and deliver that value that the customer is looking for more and more these days, especially in the last 2 to 3 years. We're very satisfied and pleased with the state of our asset today and the state of our network. We feel that we have the right store in the right market, but we will continue to invest at the pace we've been investing. We don't need a big bank capital plan to readjust our store asset. We've been satisfied of the rate and pace of our investment. And we will continue to invest to capture the growth of specific customer demand in specific market, either conventional or discount. So today, we have a little bit less than 1,000 food store in Quebec and Ontario, a bit more than 300 or 340 supermarkets, Metro and Adonis. Adonis, as you saw on the previous slide, has grown significantly over the last 10 years and we'll continue to grow as it serves the growing demand of new immigrants and ethnic market. Our discount stores, we have close to 250 stores now in Quebec and Ontario. We have neighborhood stores in Quebec, proximity stores and convenience stores, around 370 stores and customer stores and specialty store Premire Moisson . That's a great asset on which we will continue -- in which we'll continue to invest. And we feel that we're well positioned with our store asset, our leadership team at store and our people to continue to grow, continue to grow in Ontario, where we have a market share opportunity in a significant growing market, a market that has grown over the last years in which we've invested, and we will continue to invest. As well both our discount banners in both province are really well positioned competitively on price and not showing in our tonnage, in our sales and market share growth in the market and within the discount segment as well. So very satisfied of the growth of our discount vendors in both provinces. We've invested -- I shared with you that we've invested within our stores in conventional. And conventional store have to be a destination. And to be a destination, we've made the decision to overinvest in fresh and I'll talk to you a bit about how fresh is a pillar of our strategy and how we've continuously invest in our store in new concept to be a destination for customers who are looking for fresh food, great fresh food convenience and health. Carmen has talked about supply chain for store operators and for our business as a whole, this is an amazing opportunity, an amazing opportunity to be better in start, to be more fresh to deliver on customer expectations, to increase assortment where we need to be, to be more agile, to have less delivery in stores, so to be more efficient at the reception. So a great opportunity to be more efficient for our business financially in terms of cost, but also deliver on customer expectation. So that's going to continue to be a key priority over the next 2 to 3 years working in partnership with Carmen and the whole team. In Quebec, Eric has mentioned it, we have a leading position with both pharma and food. And it's a great opportunity in food where we lead in customer experience for the last 6 years, the WOW, Lger index identified Metro -- the Metro banner as the leading banner in customer experience, both online with our metro.ca online service and in-store. So it's an opportunity for us with our leading position in Quebec to leverage that differentiation on customer experience and to deliver on what customers want and to continue to grow share of wallet of customers, partnering with [ Jean-Michel ] in pharma and team through the -- and aligned through the launch of our MOI program that's going to be unique in market as we reach more than 90% of the population in that market. So for us in Quebec, if we have an opportunity to grow in Ontario as the market is really growing, and we have a market share opportunity in Quebec, we have an opportunity through a launch of MOI, through our differentiated customer experience to grow share of wallet and to continue our growth there. So how do we win? Where is the focus of the team? 6 pillars are people, Carmen has mentioned it, I'm mentioning it. Eric has mentioned it. It is true our teams across the business that we deliver for customers. I'll talk to you a bit about our focus there. Our fresh food and how we're evolving that offer, both in discount and in conventional, our brands, private label that have been growing significantly. Health, which is at the core of our purpose that Eric has mentioned to [ nourish ] the community in which we nourish their well-being and health of the community in which we work. Improving efficiency and our customer-centric loyalty and merchandising strategy, that's nothing new. We've been talking to you about this for the last 10, 11 years, but the launch of MOI is an amazing opportunity to invest in technology platform, reenergize that strategy and go to the next level, and Alain will talk to you about that. At the beginning of my presentation, I've talked to you about how passionate we are about customer and that at Metro, it starts and it ends with the customer. You need great leader at stores to be able to do that. Eric talked about some of the labor challenges that we have in stores. Well, in stores where we have great leaders, we have less of labor challenges because the leaders were able to create an environment where people want to stay. He's able to recruit his President and its community. So for us, making sure that we have great leaders in store across all of our stores has been a priority for a number of years. And in the last 8 years, we developed a leadership program -- leadership development program, it may seem a bit tactical when I'm talking to you about, but it is core to our success. For the last 8 years, we've trained more than 10,000 leaders across the business in store and in support groups and to make sure that we have the right leaders and the right talent to attract, retain and make sure our people are fully engaged around the customer. And that's a key strength that we have, the talent that we have at store. Another area where we focus is to increase the percentage of full-timers in our stores. So we have people that are making a career out of serving the customers, they are trained. They're getting more and more knowledgeable about the customers and about the business. And so we've increased the number of full-timers in our stores that has created more stability in labor and more expertise and improve customer satisfaction and efficiencies. On the part-time front, we created a program to make sure that part timers in our communities wanted to work at Metro and wanted to commit longer term by having flexible working schedule and a commitment to academic achievement for students and that has paid off as well. Those strategies are key in a tight labor market as -- in which we're operating to be able to have the best talent and to execute on our strategy, especially in Fresh. Fresh processes are complex at store. You need to make sure that you replenish your store at the right time to maximize freshness. We produce -- we have a production unit in store for prepared food. So the team, the expertise of the team and the adherence to processes are key. Hence, our investments in tools to help store employees and make their life easier, so that they can spend less time doing their task more time in front of a customer. And to Carmen's point, with the younger cohort that we have in store, make sure that they have the right tools to make the right decision. Carmen talked about Skip, the AI-powered automatic replenishment processing grocery. The same kind of tool were implemented in fresh, so people can forecast demand, make sure the product was in-store just in time and that they had tools to forecast the production and what product should be at shelf each day of the week to increase in stock, to increase sales to manage shrink better, to be more efficient, delivering improved customer experience, but also increased sales. So that's been a key focus. Another key focus has been sourcing in produce, in particular. We're working with more than 300 local growers in both Quebec and in Ontario. And that effort to partner with local growers to make sure that we have fresh local quality product in our stores on a daily basis has been a key focus also over the past years, and consumers are demanding local products as well. International sourcing as well as strategy that was developed about 8 years ago, allowing us to buy directly internationally in roughly 24 countries directly from growers internationally, making sure that we control quality, that we control the cold chain through the transport and that we can bring those products to our stores at the right time and partnership with merchandising so they can drive the right volume and we can execute. So those have been important strategies to deliver on fresh and on customer satisfaction. In conventional, in particular, if you want to be a destination, consumers are looking for convenience. So prepared food and the ability to -- in all of our departments to provide convenient solution with prepared food, hot food, et cetera, et cetera, has been a key focus. Those are growing categories. They are complex categories to execute in store. But our model allows us to execute, allows us to differentiate. So we can continue to drive the traffic and the loyalty to our Metro banner in both Quebec and Ontario. We have close to 1,000 SKUs of hot food, prepared meals, ready to cook marinated food. So this is for us in a very, very important category across both produce and cut fruit deli with prepared food and meat and we'll continue to invest. We recently announced in Quebec a new partnership with an executive chef that will help us continue to enhance the pace and the differentiation of those offerings and products. So that will continue to be a focus. So fresh food across all departments in both conventional and discount is a key focus and discount, making sure we have the right assortment that we evolve our assortment for the growing ethnic customers. Our customers are looking for organic product and produce. So evolving our assortment has been a key focus and value, making sure that we bring the customer a great quality produce at competitive price and great value. That's been a big, big driver of our success in both Quebec and Ontario. Eric has mentioned it, our private label portfolio has grown over the last 5 to 10 years. We've added significant assortment in health with our life smart assortment serving customers that are looking for alternatives that are more healthy in their diet. We have more than 6,600 private label products from a value brand called Selection and Personnelle in pharma that we now have in our food store, a discovery brand, irresistible that brings a differentiated taste and differentiated product to consumers. And in Fresh, in meat, in particular, where we bring organic and without antibiotic product in our meat department and our 2 international brands, Cedar and Adonis, that are not only in the Adonis store, but are also now in all of our banners and growing as consumers are looking for international cuisine and varieties of products. So we're very satisfied with the penetration of our private label. According to Nielsen, #2 in terms of penetration to sales, for our private label across our business and growing as consumers are looking for value in the last 3 to 4 years since 2020, the private label growth has outpaced significantly the rest of the product in our stores with a 30% growth. So an important strategic pillar of our strategy and continued investment on that front. I'll go to efficiency. Efficiency has been a core focus of our team to make sure that we have our teams focused on serving customers and not doing administrative tasks. To make sure that we're more efficient and the content of the job of our team in store is rich and that we reduce administrative tasks and facing the labor challenge in the market as well. One -- the first area, the first but an important area of investment has been the front end. More than 70% of our stores today have a self-checkout at the store. And when we first implemented self check-out, the worry was customer satisfaction. But as customers want to find ways to, in a more convenient way, exit our stores. In fact, when we implement self-checkout, customer satisfaction is going up. And it frees up labor at the front end, so we can reinvest that in fresh department, which is a key focus and create efficiency. So we will continue to invest. We have a plan now to go back to store and increase the number of self-checkout and use technology to manage the front end even better. We've implemented a 50% of our store electronic shelf label, again, a task that doesn't add a lot of value to customers, changing price at shelf. And an opportunity to bring the store a whole new bunch of tools and services using those electronic shelf tag in the future. And we've talked about replenishment in both grocery and fresh, which are making sure that we're in stock. So that's a key game changer in our store. And to close, I'd like to talk to you a bit about our e-commerce strategy and how we've approached this and how data and customer centricity is going to continue to fuel our strategy. We launched our e-commerce service in 2016. And we launched our services going to market with our store brand, with our brands. So each of our banner is going to market or we're adding e-commerce to the overall offering of these banner. And for us, it was a key pillar of our strategy because as we go to market and as we use data to understand the behavior of our customer from store to online, we're seeing that customers are increasing overall loyalty and overall sales with us by a little bit more than 20%. So e-commerce, as we look at e-commerce profitability and the role of e-commerce within our business, it changes our mindset as we look at e-commerce as a way to continue to drive loyalty, increased share of wallet and follow the customer, where they are, where they want to buy and bringing our full assortment to customers online. We've approached this with prudence with the first delivering the customers click-and-collect and the next-day delivery, we've added same-day delivery afterwards and then express delivery working with Instacart and Uber and Cornershop. So today, we're happy that we have a flexible operating model that allows us to tweak our model in dense urban area where we have bigger up stores, a dark store in Montreal, in less urban area where we have smaller lighter hub stores and click-and-collect across all of the 2 provinces. So we reached now more than 90% of the population in Quebec and Ontario through the mix of our operating model and partnership with Instacart and Uber. And in a market that's been relatively stable post COVID, we've been able to grow sales by augmenting capacity. And the next year, we'll continue to deploy click-and-collect in our discount banner in Quebec and Ontario. We should be finished in about 18 months and continue to expand our partnership and working on exploring and implementing mature technologies. So we're not the first implementer of technology. We're a fast follower of technologies that are going to drive improved efficiency in our dark store, in the pick and pack and in our stores. So the role of data in that context has become even more important. If you go back to 2009, when we signed that partnership with Dunnhumby and worked through the journey of making sure that within our teams, people would embrace those new tools, would embrace the data to develop customer-centric merchandising strategies from Planogram assortment, pricing and promo. It took us a while to get to a maturity for our merchandising team to fully embrace the data and use the data. With eCom coming on board on top of our stores, data is becoming more important to understand the behavior of customers from store to online. And I can tell you that online, consumers are buying different category in different quantities. So it's important to understand that so we can bring all that together to deliver unified experience across our different channel and then monetize those relationships as we build more and more relationship online and in store. And with the launch of MOI, that Alain is going to talk to you a little bit about -- a little bit later, sorry. He's going to talk to you about that a little bit later. With MOI coming online in Quebec, it gives us an amazing opportunity to understand better consumers and to continue to adapt our offering, adapt our program across our different banners to meet the needs of the customers in Quebec with more and in Ontario with our continued relationship with AIR MILES. So I started by talking to you about our obsession with customers, and I'm ending by telling you that, that obsession and that passion to serve the customer is going to continue to be in the core fundamentals of our strategy and executing on the fundamentals that Metro is part of our culture every day, and we'll continue to do that. We feel we have great teams, great leader at store and across the business, supporting the stores to do that and a great store network that's in great shape to be able to serve the customer in both provinces. We believe there's significant opportunity of growth in new market share in Ontario and in Quebec, an opportunity to increase wallet share customers, leveraging the new MOI program and the leadership position that we have. So that concludes my comments. I'll be happy to answer your questions.

I had a question on private label. I was just curious, the penetration has gone up clearly over the last couple of years. How do you view that going forward? Do you think there is a ceiling at some point? Are there certain categories where private label penetration has maxed out. Can you talk a little bit about that?

It's difficult to predict where private label penetration will end and if there's a ceiling. But what I can tell you is that consumers are looking for value and they're looking for alternatives to reduce their overall basket price. And they're participating in key category commodities, even more in private label and our selection portfolio is well positioned in those categories to serve that customer needs and we've seen that growth. But at the other spectrum, there are a lot of consumers that are looking to explore new product and to reward themselves with new taste and new product and our irresistible brand and the assortment expansion that we brought to our stores and the differentiation and the quality of our product that have improved as well over time has also allowed us to increase penetration. And lastly, with the acquisition of Jean Coutu in the [ Aba ] category, we're introducing more and more of the personal brand, which is an amazing value brand as well, a great quality product, a great price. It's very important to Jean Coutu as it their core business, but it's also important as we bring those products in our stores...

You mentioned the 1 dark store in Montreal that you're picking from. Can you talk a little bit about how that dark stores performed versus expectations? And then as well, should we expect more of those to come? Now that it appears that the e-commerce demand seems to be flatlining a bit in Canada and for the industry as a whole, at least.

Yes, sure, certainly. We made the decision of opening that dark store pre-pandemic, and it was open for about 5 months pre-pandemic. So it gave us amazing capacity to meet the growing demand of eCom during the pandemic. So we're very happy to have that facility. The opportunity with a facility like that is to drive volume to gain efficiency. You're densifying your route, reducing your cost of delivery, you're reducing the missing items that we sometimes have in our stores. So you're improving overall customer satisfaction, you can increase variety and reduce your delivery costs. And we've been able to do that over the pandemic and -- but the challenge has been labor. Especially in Quebec, where we have a structural challenge in the labor market. The real challenge has been labor. So technology efficiency is going to be a key focus going forward. And our teams are continuously exploring what technology could be brought in that store. I made a comment a little bit earlier that we have a prudent approach to implementing technology in our business overall, but also in eCom. So we have -- we're trying to be fast followers. So when we see a technology that is becoming mature, that has been tested, then we implement and we drive the efficiency, and that's part of our financial rigor and execution, and we'll continue to act the same way in eCom. So the dark store, we're exploring technologies right now, technologies are maturing, and we want to improve efficiency in that dark store.

I assume you're going to wait to see how that efficiency turns out before you [indiscernible] market.

That's one of the criteria, but also in Ontario, we have a strategy right now that's allowing us to grow. We have hub stores, click-and-collect and conventional and soon in discount and partnership that has allowed us to continue to grow and grab the share that we want on a continuous basis. So we'll make sure when we execute in Ontario that we have -- when I say execute, when we continue to expand our capability that we have the right strategy.

Hi, Vishal Shreedhar, National Bank. Francois, you showed a slide earlier on return on invested capital and Metro certainly for a long period of time has been a leader in that. Recently, over the last several years, the return on capital is maybe stagnated a little bit and understandable with the CapEx profile that you have, but we're at the kind of the back end of that heavy CapEx lifting. So where do you see your return on invested capital trending? Can you hit that kind of double-digit -- mid- to low double-digit rate again? Is that something that's a reasonable expectation for Metro given some of the tailwinds that you had in the past that push hard maybe that weren't sustainable?

Right. Well, you're right, we used to -- before the acquisition of Coutu and before these big investments that we made in our DCs, we were about mid double digit on the return on invested capital and high double digit on the return on equity. And obviously, as we make big investments for the long term, no surprise, those returns have come down. And so we're not done. And you mentioned we're at the back end, but we still have some big CapEx that Carmen referred to going forward. So -- but as we start benefiting from the improvements in the ones that we've ramped up, and as we continue to execute on our business model, our aim is to gradually increase those. I mean, yes, we would like to be back -- just like when we did A&P acquisition in 2005, it went down and gradually over the years, it went back up to the numbers that you quoted. So that's our objective, easy to say, harder to execute, but that's what we have to give ourselves in terms of objectives. So we'll see, we still have big investments to do. And as I said earlier, when you make those big investments, there is transition costs, and there is a onetime cost in transition cost that we have to factor in. But the aim is to do this so that in the long term, we increase those returns. So I'll leave it at that.

Is it fair to say that Jean Coutu is the higher mature business and [ gross revenue ]?

Well, Jean Coutu, so the question is on the pharmacy side, in Quebec, by law, the pharmacy is owned by a pharmacist. So the CapEx for the retail investment is borne by the pharmacist. So it's a less capital-intensive business than food. And you saw the cash flow profile. So that's obviously why one of the reasons that when we were on the road and explaining the deal, the free cash flow accretion per share of the Jean Coutu acquisition was quite high. We were at about 37% accretion on free cash flow per share, and we've exceeded that. So yes, this is all part of that how we get there.

So along those lines, a lot of talk about grocery today. But is there anything that Metro can do to accelerate to a change that [indiscernible]?

We'll let Jean-Michel present his division and his business plan, and we can revise this in the Q&A. Okay. Thanks.

Thanks for the comments, Marc, 2 things I just wanted to follow up on. So first on prepared food. I'm just curious if you see opportunity to sort of materially accelerate or change how that's presented to consumers or if the evolution from here is more of just that. It's an evolution and a sort of consistent improvement. And then also on electronic shelf labels, I'm just curious if there's any downside to that. Obviously, there's a labor efficiency argument, but I'm just curious, from a consumer perspective or from a promoting, is there any downside to ESLs?

That's good question. I'll start with ESL . So before we started rolling out ESLs across our stores, we executed the deployment of ESL in a few stores and there were comparable store and [ AB ] tested on visibility of promotion, participation in the promotion to make sure that as we execute our commercial program, ESLs would allow us to showcase our promotion and ensure customer would participate and we didn't see any change in promotional participation. The ESL themselves from the first deployment that we did to what they are today, have improved a lot as well. They are now colored for special. So the technology has also evolved. On your first question on prepared food, in our business, we need to find ways to execute within our stores, maximize the assets that we have and the capabilities that we have in store. So we think that our current model with hot food counters with differentiated offers in salad, sandwich, pizza, et cetera, to serve the convenience needs of customers is working out. And we think that the development of a prepared meal that you can bring it home and what we've been doing over the last few years, is also serving the needs of our customers. Where we have an opportunity is to serve the customers who are looking for a little bit a meal that's a little bit more gourmet and that's what we're working on. But for us, convenience in prepared food is hot food and hot food counters that you can buy and eat right away, is food that you can reheat at home and eat right away. It's food that's ready-to-cook and that makes it easier for you to prepare a meal at home, either marinated meat or cut vegetables or cut fruit. So for us, it's really convenience across all of our fresh department. And we still think that we have an opportunity to continue to grow assortment and to improve quality. For those of you who live in Toronto, if you go to our Liberty Village store or a new Milton store, that's just renovated. If you have been -- have had an opportunity to go there, you'll find our latest concept and our latest prepared food in Ontario. And in Quebec, the same way, if you go to our Wilderton store in Van Horne, we've taken the prepared food from Adonis and brought it into a Metro store that had customers, that had affinity to that type of international cuisine. And we're seeing great pickup from customers from a hot food, Adonis hot food cater and the [indiscernible] and all of the variety of prepared meals that are very differentiated at Adonis. So I think that's another opportunity to leverage an asset and bring the assortment in another banner.

Okay. So we have to move on. We'll hold questions until the end. Thank you, Marc. We'll take a 10 minute pause, and we'll come back here. Thank you very much. [Break]

Good afternoon, everybody. Hello. My name is -- for those I haven't met yet, my name is Alain Tadros , and I'm responsible for the marketing, loyalty and customer intelligence teams at Metro Inc., so for all of our food and our pharmacy banners and divisions. In a follow-up to Marc's presentation that he spoke to the importance of data-driven unified commerce, we've actually been leading a project that will see the launch of our new loyalty program, MOI in Quebec. In fact, I'm actually happy to announce that we've soft launched the program as of yesterday in our Metro banner in Quebec. So we've actually converted our digital infrastructure in the Metro banner as of yesterday. So we've transitioned our Metro app. We've transitioned our Metro banner website, and we now have a new [indiscernible] website as well. We're also accepting as of yesterday, instant redeem at our cash registers at Metro, and this is the first milestone of our migration towards the new program, and there'll be more news to come in the next couple of weeks. The objective of my presentation is to take you through the path that we've been on with loyalty and where this is going to take us with the new program launch. We're fortunate and it was mentioned before by my colleagues that we have leading and trusted brands in Quebec that each excel in their respective and different -- for different and complementary regions. Marc spoke earlier about the 5 customer promises, and we're able with that to cultivate a relationship of trust with our customers and deliver on these promises day in and day out. From leading on our customer experience in the conventional segment with Metro to be in the most admired retailer with Jean Coutu to leading on the best quality and price ratio at Super C that coming together of 5 leading brands in that market will allow us to leverage the strength of these brands and capitalize on the unparalleled value that this will bring to consumers in Quebec. Actually, when you have great stores like we have, the scale of the network that we have, the great brands and makes the marketing job a pretty fun one and an easier one as well. This is what I would call is the true definition of the expression. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Our vision is to create an ecosystem that puts the client at the center and bridges all of the touch points together, whether that's conventional with discount, whether that's food and pharma or that's bricks-and-mortar and online to deliver more relevant and personalized experiences throughout the path to purchase and build more meaningful connections with our customers. Therefore, that means driving more sales across all of our banners. Our approach capitalizes on the success of the metro&moi program that's provided us with a strong base that we've built on since 2010. Marc talked about our journey since then. We started off with a distinctive loyalty program. We built in more personalization capabilities over the years. We expanded that digitally and brought in commerce functions as well to now bridging it all together into one ecosystem. We believe that this will take loyalty and retail media as well to the next level for us. So we're building on the foundations of our strong proprietary loyalty program at metro&moi that has best-in-class personalization capabilities. And we're expanding that with the data science that we have and we're expanding that to other banners. We're also moving from a multi-banner approach for a multifaceted approach to one single view of the customer in a real true omnichannel approach and breaking down the silos. We've upgraded and unified all of our tech foundations over the course of the last 18 months or so, from bridging all of our data points together to developing one customer golden record that allows us to have now one single view of that customer with all other preferences, to having a single sign-on that allow customers to log in with the same user name, the same password across our banner apps and our banner websites, making it more convenient for the customer, also making it more secure. And we're bringing in marketing automation that will allow us to bring in efficiencies and more effectiveness in the campaigns that we deploy. Our objective is simple, to accelerate the digital adoption of our customers and to create more relevant and deeper connections with them through mobile, through web, through e-mail, social, push notification and much more -- e-commerce and much more. We know that the consumer habits are changing, and they are more digitally savvy. They expect us to deliver more relevancy and more value. And by doing so, we're also rewarded with more sales. Following the launch of the program, we'll also develop more further functionalities beyond just transactional allow consumers to tap into array of wellness tools that are integrated within our digital ecosystem and our loyalty program. That might mean, for example, recommending products or services to improve their well-being or putting them in contact with consumers where they can actually share with like-minded people or even rewarding them for walking 10,000 steps a day, as an example. The metro&moi program is recognized as one of the top 10 loyalty programs in Canada. We're fortunate to have a strong base of 1.2 million active members that we reach today, and over 50% of Quebec households that actually subscribe to our program. In the past 12 years, we've distributed almost $500 million in rewards since our program inception, and our members claim on average [ 56 million ] personalized coupons a year, and that contributes to 5 more products in a member's basket versus a nonmember. This -- later this spring, metro&moi will become MOI and will be across 5 banners and close to 900 stores in the market at Metro, Super C, Jean Coutu, Brunet, and Premire Moisson. We believe that we are better positioned than ever to leverage our position of strength in the Quebec market. Eric mentioned it earlier, we're #1 in terms of market share for the grocery and pharmacy networks in Quebec all stores combined. We have 97% of Quebec households that visit our stores during the year, one of our stores during the year. We have more than 5 million transactions that occur in our stores every single week which is significant foot traffic of returning customers with whom we interact with and have an opportunity to interact with day in and day out. And we also know by analyzing our data that more than 60% of our customers already cross shop our stores today. That's between conventional and discount and between food and pharmacy. Our ambition is pretty simple, become the most popular loyalty program in the Quebec market. Our loyalty program that combines the strengths of food and pharmacy and it contributes to the well-being of our customers and it's in line with the purpose that Eric mentioned of nourishing the health and the well-being of the communities that we serve. The MOI program is built on 3 distinctive pillars: my tastes, my rewards and my well-being. Customers can accumulate more points on their favorite products and get rewarded quick and save. We'll also obtain more personalized offers and discounts that are aligned to their taste across all of the banners that they shop. In summary, it's the perfect alliance between food and pharmacy. It's a loyalty program that offers options for their well-being, their body -- the well-being of the body, the mind, but also the wallet. We also know that bringing customers on digital is an important step. We're fortunate that metro&moi is already a digital -- strong digital program. MOI will also be digitally led. Consumers will still have plastic cards, but the intent is to accelerate digital adoption and increase customer engagement and maximize their value. Why is that important? Because the numbers speak for themselves and demonstrate that we have the scale, but that we're also deploying the right strategies to move the needle forward on customer spend. Our monthly digital reach is over 30 million impressions per month in Quebec via our platforms. That's over 7.5 million eyeballs that are viewing and interacting via our mobile apps, our websites, our e-mails and our social platforms. As an example, we know that a customer that we reach by e-mail spend 17% more than a customer that does not receive our personalized communications on a weekly basis. We're also launching MOI from a very strong loyalty base, as I said earlier, from metro&moi. 47% of our loyalty members today are digitally engaged. That's almost 1 out of every 2 customers that we can communicate to regularly via our digital channels. As customers become more digitally savvy and they participate more actively on our digital platforms, whether they subscribe to e-mail, whether they actually access and log on to our website, they download the app, they clip coupons, et cetera, they move up a digital ladder and become more loyal to us. In fact, a loyalty member engaged on our digital platform will spend on average 72% more than a member that's not. That is significant up spend on an already loyal base of customers. We also see that an omnichannel customer, whether that's bricks -- a consumer -- the customer that buys to bricks-and-mortar and online will actually spend 3x more per year and is more loyal versus a customer that only shops one of our single channels. So with that, metro&moi will become bigger, more personalized and more generous than metro&moi, allowing members to gain and obtain bigger rewards. There are 3 ways for customers to actually accumulate points. The first are base points which encourages customers to take out and use the card at the cash register at checkout. It allows us to get to know them. And we believe that this still remains a very distinctive feature of our loyalty program and has contributed to the success of metro&moi over the last 12 years because it rewards the customers on every visit they make with us and builds rewards and loyalty over time. The second is our bonus points that emphasize the generosity of the program in all the banners. For example, we distribute personalized offers according to each member's shopping habits, using a score-based predictive allocation model of our offers. That will help drive repurchase, discovery, trial of products or increase the frequency or the spend per visit of those members. We also have mass offers or member discounts that are available in the flyers and at shelf that we offer within specific banners. And we'll tie on all of that, our bonus offers on the coalition level that allow us to create accelerated earn for our loyalty members that shop more than one of our banners on a weekly basis. And the third way, our additional points accumulated on all purchases made with the new program credit card, a strategic partnership with RBC Royal Bank, though I'll speak to in a minute. Another key feature that we believe is that 100% of the points that are earned will be redeemed in participating coalition stores in order to drive savings for customers on their everyday food and pharmacy bills. Now back to RBC for a second. We're extremely proud to have signed a multiyear strategic partnership with RBC Royal Bank, the largest of the big banks in Canada, serving 14 million clients nationwide and the one that leads all financial institutions in customer satisfaction. This partnership unleashes the power of the leading food and pharmacy brands in Quebec with a leading Canadian bank to deliver more generosity to our customers. Members will be able to earn points faster inside our stores with accelerators, but also outside of the program and also 100% redeemable back in our participating banners. RBC has a significant presence in Quebec with 7,400 employees and more than 145 branches. This is an accessible mainstream appeal credit card. It's a unique solution to help customers reduce everyday grocery and pharmacy costs with a $0 annual fee credit card that will provide a welcome offer of 4,000 points equivalent to $32 at the official program launch. We think it's going to unlock unvaluable -- unlock value and savings and reward our customers for all their purchases on popular everyday categories, obviously, food and pharmacy, but also dining, gas and electric vehicle charging stations. It also provides access to Avon rewards that's available all the credit cards in the RBC portfolio to other merchant partner offers that include Petro Canada on fuel and also discounts at Rona or Lowe's, where customers can unlock these additional savings. I'll end my presentation on that. I want to thank you for your time. I hope this provides you an update on where we're going, where we've been and where we're going on loyalty. I'll take some questions.

Maybe I have 2 questions. First is in one of the slides, you mentioned that your cross-shop rate is around 60% at the moment. Do you anticipate that rate to go up as why it's fully launched?

I can't speculate on the percentage of cross-shop going up. The idea, though, is to get -- is to keep people loyal within our group of stores. So we know that consumers cross-shop our stores. They also cross-shop our competitors. The idea is to maintain their amount of spend within our network. It's the right balance between increasing the frequency within our stores without necessarily cannibalizing each other either.

Okay. That makes sense. And maybe a smaller question. I noticed on your slide when you talked about base points, those in asterisk saying that they're not available at Super C. Why is that?

So Super C being a discount banner, but we wanted to make sure that -- is that we aren't giving those base points. They're available at all other banners participating in the coalition. It's Super C being a discount banner investing significantly more on price. We're obviously not putting the investment in base points, but are putting it in personalization and mass offers to make sure that we'll drive the generosity through there.

So obviously, as you went to sort of launch Loyalty 2.0, there's tremendous learnings that you gained from that very lengthy period of dunnhumby. And you guys were really first movers on that one. So what was it as the leader of a loyalty initiative? What were the really critical objectives that you wanted to achieve with this program? And by the way, the app immediately updated on my phone. It works that you really set out to achieve as you launched one.

The number 1 thing is that and I mentioned it before, where we really put the customer at the center of this. And we had some banners that didn't have loyalty programs and just you collect basket data and they're able to take decisions through merchandising and our business decisions based on basket data, where we have loyalty allows us more depth in those decisions. But we had a very fragmented view of the customer, although we do know that they cross shop, we actually -- we follow baskets and some we follow loyalty members and other, and we have other ways of following that. The idea now is bringing it all together and breaking down those silos. And one, as I mentioned, making it bigger, more generous for customers, but also allowing us to better understand that customer behavior and making them more loyal towards our group of retailers. That's the biggest thing we've tackled, I'd say, in the last 18 months as we actually updated our tech infrastructure, right? And as you build that in and now break down the silos, what you need now is to be able to automate to get the scale -- right, to be able to now take on all that data, all that volume and then be able to communicate back with relevance to the customer.

And if I may add one thing. What we have learned through Metro MOi is that rewarding customers on product they love, created significant satisfaction around our personalization. And I was recognized in many surveys in market where Metro MOi was recognized as the most personalized reward program. And that will continue. Our strategy in law is not to try to sell Pepsi to a coke lover, but rather to reward customers on product that they love. So they feel that we understand them in that Metro was there a banner or Super C or Jean Coutu [indiscernible] because we will work them on product that they love. So that's a strategy that is a little bit different than others in the market, and that we'll continue to execute on.

At the base points. We talked about that earlier. It was a big discussion for us. So they are -- when you look at the different constructs to programs. Some have based some have -- don't base points for us was an important one to maintain that value for our 1.2 million members as we're expanding those. And we do see swipe rates. We do see participation in active rates with the loyalty program, particularly with base increasing. So they get to build on that generosity. That was an important one, [ Tier 2 ] as well, getting that -- continuing to fuel personalization. We think we have best-in-class personalization capabilities, and it's bringing that to the other banners.

So -- and just very quickly, in terms of the credit card piece of it because that's really the accelerator in certain ways. How do you -- is it will -- like if I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time looking at the app, but will there be outreached Will I need to say, "Hey, I would like to get this card and then figure out how to get it. Like how will that work?

Yes. We're not an official program launch yet. So we're in soft launch as we're migrating our Texas as we get to a -- an official launch date that will be announced shortly. There will be definitely an outreach and we know through credit cards that the first people that actually take the credit cards are your most loyal because they'll actually be able to unlock the greatest value. So the idea is that we'll be outreach to our most loyal customers to our entire customer base, understanding that we've modeled in estimates as to what we think we can convert of our most loyal customers to bring them back more value. Okay. And then we'll continue. And as we expand that to Jean Coutu, we have all sorts of plans to take more and expand it out to Jean Coutu and make sure that we convert those customers over to the new program.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you. Thank you for your attention, and we're going to switch gears a little bit -- we're going to talk about pharmacy now. So I'm very excited to share with you today our journey since the acquisition and talk to you about how this newly formed division that we put in place will better support and our 2 banners for growth over the long-term. So I do want to emphasize the word long-term. Over the course of the last few years, we have noticed in different ways that pharmacy has been helping the communities and how pharmacists and pharmacies play in the consumers' lives. And it's really involved at a completely unprecedented pace -- so we want to build on that momentum. That's really the goal that we're putting together and making sure that we're delivering the strategies and the plans to achieve that. Before I do talk about our plans, I do want to talk about some of the reasons we're very confident that we're in a strong position to deliver sustainable growth over the next few years. So as we look ahead, you're all aware of all the underlying demographic shifts that will drive greater demand for traditional pharmacy services. Now on top of that, we layer all the new responsibilities that governments and patients have entrusted in pharmacists. And in Quebec, this shift started in 2015 with law 41 and then in 2020, with law 41, which added new responsibilities, including vaccination. And around the same time, the government started reimbursing these professional activities. And that's when we really saw pharmacists applying them on a daily basis within their practice. And then finally, when we look at digital and how that can facilitate access through new ways of connecting with consumers, we see really a really powerful mix for a patient care, consumer-centric organization like ours. With our unique capabilities, our operating model, I think we are really well-positioned to expand the value that we bring to consumers in the networks that serve these consumers. So that said, let's get started. So when it comes to executing our store strategy, I think we're clearly in a favorable position in the markets that we lead. So we have over 530 stores in Quebec, 26 stores in New Brunswick. And we have pharmacies that have deep roots in the communities they serve in Eastern Ontario. Now with our deeply integrated franchise model, supporting franchisees that are part of the communities that they serve, we know that we are closer to the consumer than anyone else. As you know, pharmacy is local. Consumers, they want trusted pharmacists that are readily accessible in their communities. And that's something that we're delivering on every day, serving millions of consumers every year while maintaining an extremely high satisfaction score, as demonstrated here with our 81.5 NPS score. So in 2018, during the integration process, we saw a truly unprecedented opportunity to build a unique operating model to support 2 strong banners. This was one of the first decisions we made as a team to design and build an operating platform to support and facilitate the growth of 2 of the most trusted brands, 2 of the most trusted banners in Quebec, one of which is synonymous with pharmacy in Quebec. So to achieve this, we architected a common operational platform that combines all the back-end services, the infrastructure and the operational know-how while allowing the banner dedicated teams, all the operational flexibility required to ensure the successful growth of their respective banners. So as such, we get all the benefits and scale of the combined networks. We can capture more market share by the fact that we have 2 banners, and we have 2 brands that occupy unique positions within the market, and we get a better and broader understanding of the consumers' needs and expectations to guide our strategies. Also having one common platform helps us link a little bit more easily to Metro to gain all the additional scale and leverage all the corporate best practices that we get from Metro. And most finally -- and finally, it unlocks all the potential to leverage the combination of food and pharma that Marc already mentioned that I already mentioned, with programs like MOi. So let's talk a little bit about the operational platform, what it is. There are 3 main pillars to the operational platform. It starts with the in-store systems. All our stores are now operating on our highly integrated POS and pharmacy systems. Our POS and store management systems are built on Microsoft Dynamics, which we interfaced our proprietary pharmacy dispensing system, too. Now controlling the pharmacy system in pharmacy is key. It's key because ensuring that the technology that the pharmacy teams use, ensuring that, that's developed jointly with our operational workflows with our clinical and quality standards is really a differentiator for us in pharmacy. We also invested in our replenishment processes and distribution center to support the transfer of the Brunet volume and all the Metro clients for the [indiscernible] categories. And now both our banners benefit from our in-store smart replenishment capabilities, which facilitate distribution operations through better order predictability and demand planning. And finally, we evolved our operating structure. The new structure now benefits from all the expertise and depth of the Metro shared services. And then within the division, we have a strong seasoned leadership team and every leader within their teams have teams that either support both banners or teams that are dedicated to each individual banner. Now there are other ways that this common operational platform has enabled the pharmacy division to leverage Metro capabilities. So we've introduced the personnel brand to a private label brand to Brunet Metro Super C, Food Basics. Eric and Marc already talked about it. We also introduced Pro Doc at Brunet, which that's been very well received within the Brunet network. The Jean Coutu banner now also benefits from a more robust private label portfolio. Now we've been rolling out a lot of private label categories that didn't previously have the scale to support such as beverages and snacks. Now this additional scale is also creating opportunities for some of our health and beauty categories. Now obviously, centralizing procurement, as you well know, has allowed us to capture a lot of value, but it's also allowed us to create a lot of value for consumers. And while we can't talk about leveraging corporate strengths without mentioning why you've heard a lot about what today. It unlocks really the potential between food and pharma. But for us, it's also a game changer on many levels. Marc and Alain already talked about the data component. But for the pharmacy division, it's going to give us access now to the data, the analytical support and all the insights that we need to drive category growth. For Brunet, this is the first. They've never had access to this information. And for Jean Coutu, the data is going to be significantly richer and more actionable. So this will be a huge game changer for all our category management. So Yes, building a strong pharmacy division was one of the biggest priorities, so both our banners could strive, but it was 1 of 2 priorities. Our second priority has been and continues to be putting together and executing our strategic planning. So once we were finished migrating from designing to executing the integration plan, we started mapping out our 5-year strategic plan. And the vision we landed on is very, very clear. We want to be -- we want to remain the health and wellness destination in the communities that we serve. And we're going to do that by elevating the pharmacy experience by putting digital at the center of everything we do and by creating the required internal focus and alignment around health and wellness. Ultimately, we want consumers to see us as the health and wellness destination regardless if they're engaging with us online, in-store for their pharmacy needs or for their front-end needs. Now as a leading retail pharmacy entity in Quebec, we are well-positioned to drive this new evolution of pharmacy care delivery and make it even more patient-centric. And this strategic pillar of our strategic plan, we named it Pharma future. Pharma future enables -- it starts with the patient and focuses on introducing a new retail pharmacy model and creating new digital tools to increase accessibility and better serve patients throughout the continuum of care. Now this isn't just a corporate initiative. We've been actively engaging franchisees, salaried pharmacists to learn and understand better how they interact with patients today, how they're delivering care, how the extended scope of practice is changing that pharmacist-patient relationship. Simply put, we're working as one to lead the change right now in the new era pharmacy practice. So let me give you an example of what we're delivering with pharma future. So one of the first work streams that we tackled as a team was the patient digital journey. Now this slide gives you a glimpse into the progress and some of the solutions that we're delivering through our pharma future program. So 2 years ago, like most retail pharmacies, we did have an online refill capabilities, which essentially just transmitted prescription numbers to our pharmacy dispensing system. Now very early on in the work stream, the team mapped out a more integrated approach to providing a complete online experience. Today, we're one of the first pharmacy retailers in Quebec where patients can request a refill, pay online, decide whether or not they want to pick up in store or have it delivered. And if they need to consult with a pharmacist, they can have a virtual consultation with their pharmacists on our digital platform. I think this really speaks to the strength and integration of our POS and pharmacy systems. We're also focused on integrating the use of centralization to benefit from all the efficiencies that specialization creates and free up capacity and space and store. Now another work stream that's challenging the conventional wisdom of retail pharmacy is telework. As we started segmenting all these individual processes, the team identified a multiple activities that didn't require a physical in-store presence to complete. And using our highly centralized technology, pharmacists and technicians can now do these tasks remotely. For our franchisees, this has been an absolutely amazing tool to facilitate recruitment and retention of pharmacists and technicians. And in some cases, it's actually increased capacity in their stores. Now digital for us isn't just about the pharmacy experience. We do see omnichannel as a way to provide choice to consumers who do want to engage with our banners. So we are leveraging digital to achieve 3 objectives within the pharmacy division. First, to give consumers maximum convenience. You've seen that with the launch of our click-and-collect program in 2022. To create an extension of that in-store experience that we're still good at creating online, particularly for categories like beauty and cosmetics and to create new ways for consumers to access our expertise, whether it be through newsletter, through content, through virtual consultations. Now as a division, we are still in the early phases of our digital journey, but it's rapidly becoming an important enabler to reach out and engage consumers. Now the new team that we put together here is very well integrated within the division and they're working collaboratively with all the teams to make sure that digital becomes a shared competence. And this team -- and Marc talked about Christina Bedard. So she's the one that's leading the team, and they're implemented within the pharmacy division. So we're not only gaining expertise within the division, but it's a shared expertise across all of Metro. Now we are focused, obviously, on increasing our digital experience. It's always going to be a very important topic, but we are not doing this at the expense of our store networks. Our retail networks are and will remain core to who we are as a retailer and will remain a fundamental part of our strategy. Today, we have a very healthy store base with good locations and franchisees that are continuously investing to improve their in-store experience. Now to exceed consumer expectations and stimulate additional investment, we're constantly adding and updating our store concept. In the fall, we're going to be piloting a major update to our existing store concept. The concept will include a new updated, modernized facade that very recognizable [indiscernible] of facade that everyone knows. And inside key categories like beauty and cosmetics will have more space to create new opportunities for consumers to discover the wide assortment that we have in terms of brands, in terms of product selection. The new layout will also make cosmetics more accessible throughout that customer journey within the stores. Seasonal is also going to be positioned in a way to create more excitement, more discovery earlier on in the patient experience in the store experience. And we're going to start positioning wellness as a way to bridge between beauty and OTC within the store experience. So we're going to be piloting the store concept in the fall. We'll be surveying customers very intensely to understand the highlights and the low lights of the new concept. And in parallel, we're going to be -- we introduced a new store investment incentive program to continue to stimulate franchisee investment in their stores. So I hope I've given you a good glimpse into how we're setting the stage to accelerate our health and wellness position within pharmacy, within digital and within retail. We have a strong foundation. We're well-positioned in the markets we serve, and we continue to adapt our concept to serve customers. As you can see, consumers are already relying on us for the health and wellness needs, whether it be in store, whether it be online. And with our unique assets and structure, we have seen -- we have a lot more opportunities as you could see here on the slide to make sure that our brands and our banners play an important role in consumers' lives. So in short, we're not taking our leading position for granted. We're definitely not sitting still, and we're looking to drive further growth as we continue to execute on our strategic plan and our business priorities. So on that note, I'll gladly take questions.

Two questions for me. First, on the pharmacist shortage. Can you talk a little bit about how that's going? And #2, when you look at promo in general, how far into the journey are when it comes to beauty, cosmetics, where would you want to be how long will it take to get there?

In terms of promo price pricing...

Using, I guess, mine, just kind of incentivizing folks and software [indiscernible] you want to.

Perfect. So the pharmacy shortage has been a challenge. It's a challenge throughout Canada, and it's -- in Quebec, it's been just as difficult as the rest of Canada. It's -- the advantage that we have with franchisees is that they'll usually compensate for some of those hours. That definitely helps. There are other ways -- other levers that we've been using to compensate centralization, we've seen an enormous acceleration towards centralization of specialty compliance packaging, and that's really helped remove some of the pressure within the stores. But we foresee it being an ongoing challenge for the next few years. So far, we're in a good position by the fact that we do create pretty exceptional work environments for the pharmacists. So we do have that attractivity component that's been helping us. On the beauty and cosmetic side on the promo side, now there are certain categories within cosmetics that we can't promote, we can't reduce price or we can't have other value price-driven promotions. So MOi is going to become a very important component to attract and create additional value for consumers as we move forward. But overall, we're very pleased with our promotional mix and our overall beauty and cosmetics categories.

I just wanted to talk about adherence to prescriptions. It seems like such a big opportunity. The governments like it, corporation likes it and presume the franchisees like it, too. So is that a sizable opportunity for Jean Coutu? Maybe you could frame it and then tell us about what your initiatives are to improve adherence.

Yes. I'd love the adherence discussion. So the discussion we have a lot internally. Adherence has been kind of the [ Holy Gorilla ] pharmacy for the past, probably 25 years. I remember when I started my career, when I was in pharmacy school, we talked about -- a lot about the importance of medication adherence. And I think it was Dr. Everett Koop had that old saying that the most expensive medication is the one you don't take. And that's when the whole adherence conversation started. The reality is changing consumer behavior -- changing patient behavior is very, very complex. We've seen different theories like motivational behavior. I forgot exactly what it was called. We have programs in place. We have the data, we have the tools. We have stores that are working on adherence working on better consultations to educate patients on the importance of sticking to medications. We're doing the best we can, but it is one of those very challenging and hard to measure in terms of are we doing -- are we moving the needle on adherence. So our focus is always making sure pharmacists are playing their role at the top of their license. And we feel if they do that, adherence will come with it.

I'd like to see that corporate responsibility is not about doing the right thing. It's about doing things right. We started our approach with responsible sourcing policies. So the fishery and sustainable policy back in 2010. Then we did a first roadmap to give us a structure and to make sure that we would be working on material issues. Is it okay [indiscernible].

So no, I know I just forgot about it. And so we followed with a first roadmap, then we added more responsible sourcing programs such as local packaging. We developed in 2017 a supplier code of conduct for responsible procurement statement for animal welfare. We did a second and a third 5-year CR plan, which we are in 2 years in right now. Last October, we became a TCFD supporter to improve disclosure on potential climate risk and also the opportunities. We've been reporting to CDP climate change for the past 15 years, and we've published a CR annual report for the last 13 years. Our objective is to continue to raise the bar on our disclosure and work on issues that are material for our business such as responsible procurement, health, nutrition and well-being climate change, food waste and waste EDI as well as our business fundamentals such as product quality and safety, employee well-being and so on. With climate change, so it's a topic that is a lot discussed these days. We've made a specific commitment in our 5-year plan to -- and we've set the target to reduce by 37.5% by 2035 compared to 2020. Our GHG emissions in our Scope 1 and 2 scopes emissions and in some of our Scope 3 activities. To get there, we focus on refrigerants and transportation. Carmen alluded to that a little bit, energy efficiency suppliers. So it's converting to natural refrigerants whenever it's possible, try and electrify the fleet when it's feasible -- increasing efficiency in [ Cupid ] in transportation, again, lightning and some specifics -- site-specific diversion improvement. So the teams are focusing on their efforts on that. However, it takes extremely challenging, and we're currently in parallel working on the business case to identify feasible and cost-effective measures to reduce furthermore our greenhouse gas emissions and to be in line with the 1.5-degree trajectory. The outcome that we would like to look at is to see what kind of near-term or longer-term action plan that would enable Metro to achieve SBTI net 0. And what would be the best [ GHG ] reduction and cost ratio. So we want to have a clear understanding of what we would be -- what it would look like before we make a decision. We've calculated all of our Scope 3 categories already. It's the first time. We did it for specific items in the past. So we've documented that, and we'll see where it takes us. We stay tuned. So later in 2023, we'll be in a position to make a decision if we can be more ambitious or if we stay with our current target. But one thing is for sure, if and when we make a different commitment, we will have a clear roadmap to take us to our objective as everything we do at Metro. I've mentioned that we've become TCFD supporter already. As for responsible procurement, why should we care about responsible procurement. The purchase of our products we sell is our -- in our network is the most significant aspect of our business. We want to -- we have also consumers that are more demanding and knowledgeable than ever before, employees that are looking for employers that reflect their values. We have an industry that is performing much better regarding CR, and we have investors that are more concerned by those issues than ever before as well. So we want to implement responsible practices on our supply chain to offer our customers the products that they're looking for that respect workers that respect the environment. It requires a lot of collaboration with our suppliers and a lot of issue monitoring and rigorous programs. We have an approach where we combine -- we combine the attributes of the products with the behaviors of our suppliers. And that's how we developed our code of conduct that we published in 2017. It defines clearly our expectations, and it is based on 4 key principles that are really simple and basic. It's business ethics, respects for workers for the environment and for animal welfare. As stated in our current plan, we require our suppliers to respect working conditions across the supply chain. Our main challenge with that is to really better understand our supply chain and know what the practices that are used in the operations of our suppliers. So it's been very challenging. And recently, we've partnered with a firm that is called [ SupplyShift ]. It's a cloud-based platform that will -- that meet a lot of the requirements that we have. First is to be able to share secure and efficient data collection, increased transparency in the supply chain. And with that partnership, we'll be able to focus on all of the 4 pillars of our -- the 4 principles of our code of conduct -- as you can see, so we have a strong heritage. It's been -- so we've been at it for a number of years now over 12 years. So we have a strong heritage in responsible business at Metro. We have good programs in place, structuring programs in place and that we're continuing to build on those programs. It's not something that we do opportunistically. We do it because it is important to do it more and more. I could not conclude this presentation without talking about our socioeconomic contribution as well. One of our flagship initiative in -- is our food recovery program. It helps us fight food and security, but it also helps us to reduce food waste. So it's a program where we recover in over 450 stores right now. Food that was not sold and with our partners, the food banks of Quebec, Feed Ontario, Second Harvest, it's being redistributed throughout the communities. So it's every store -- or close to every store. The division is to have all of our stores in the program is partners with a local charity. And it's a program that is very well structured, and it improves the health of people in need. The food is available. It's our responsibility to make sure that it gets distributed. So we started with that program in 2014, and we're continuing with that. Also our -- we -- with that program just in 2022, we donated $50 million worth of food. So it's an expense that the charities don't have to make. So the food is there. Again, as I say, in Canada, it should not be an issue when people should be able to feed themselves. And we also, with our customers throughout our network and to our corporate donations, we donated over [ $13 million ] -- so again, it also -- it is important to be part of the communities where we live, where we work and to contribute to their health and well-being. I don't know if you have questions, but otherwise, this would conclude my presentation on ESG and corporate responsibility.

Just a question on auditing the supply chain. So is that through your partner of this cloud-based system that you're using or will be doing your personal audits of supply than.

So it's not an audit. So it's surveys that you fill online. So it's not a declaration. And then we ask quite a number of questions. And then this platform also is able to give you a rate. So as a supplier, we'll know if it meets, I don't know, 100% of our requirements, 50%, if there are issues that we need to maybe clarify or investigate further, but it's not an audit at this point.

Okay. And then second question, are you investigating plastic circularity amongst the selection in resistible brands?

Yes, we are looking into those opportunities for our private brands. Yes, but nothing to -- no announcement to make at this point. We have reduced, but circularity with some packaging, some plastic. We don't have any initiatives in place right now, but it's something that we're trying -- we're looking at it we would like to do.

Thank you, Paul. Before we close the session with Eric, is there any questions on any topic that you've heard today, we'll take those. Otherwise, we will go -- yes, a few Okay, Mark?

This might be for Marc or maybe for Carmen. I think you both sort of touched on this or maybe for Eric. The whole idea of sort of supply chain normalization, what you're seeing from national brands who presumably are probably going to want to reclaim some of the lost market share that they've experienced over the last year or 2 to private label? And how you think about that? Is that an opportunity for you? Is that a risk? What -- how does that all sort of net out as supply chains normalize and presumably, they look to rebuild market share.

I think we're at a stage where we've been restricted in supply for the last 3 years. I think the national brand companies personally, I think that they're looking for -- they're going to be looking for volume, right? So it's going to be an interesting dynamic because private label is really catching on with our customers. And the products have continued to improve in their quality, right? You know we have a competitor that their private label is a national brand, right? So the mindset of Canadians around private label, I think, is fairly strong. And it's going to be difficult for national brands to eat back, right, what they lost. That's my opinion. We -- I can show you categories where we're exclusively private label today. And our index in the category is well over 100%, right? So I don't see private label is taking anything away from a customer. I see it is only adding to the customer value proposition.

Merchandising-wise opportunities.

I think the opportunity, as national brand become more available, we'll be able to satisfy our customer better and get back to the right level of service. I think that's the opportunity we're looking for. But to Carmen's point, I think consumers have tasted private label, have seen the value of private label, and we'll see how customer demands evolve. But to Carmen's point, I think it's something that our consumer now today love more and more.

But it could provide opportunities. We are promotional retailer, high-low retailer, national brands want to move product. We can move product. So private label keeps the national brands honest. It's always been the purpose. We're -- like everybody said, we're super happy with our private label performance. We want that to continue to grow in it. We see it continuing to grow. But we're still -- we'll carry national brands, and we can move tonnage. So we'll see what they want to do.

I have maybe 2 questions for Jean-Michel and then maybe one for Francois. Jean-Michel, just my first one is, I asked the pharmacies all the time, but can you give us an update on drug reforms? And in particular, I wanted to get your thoughts on, #1, what are you hearing from the government in terms of generic drug price reduction with the agreement having expired a couple of months ago? And then #2 is, a few years ago, as you know, Quebec had implemented drug tendering temporarily, which did have an impact on product, and that was shell when the new agreement was implemented. What are you hearing now on drug tendering? Is that still on the table for Quebec?

Yes. So -- there's a lot going on right now in terms of the government's intention on trying to lower the cost of drugs. Something, obviously, we're favorable to -- if it increases accessibility to medications, especially quality medications. The challenge is how can we do that without affecting our economic model. Right now, unfortunately, we're not hearing much because everything everyone's under NDA. So there's really -- the PMPRB, there's been some public stuff coming out. It's more of a governance issue that they're having. PCPA, they've been really tight lift as to how the negotiations are going. We know that the negotiations are ongoing. There was some leakage in January when some of the members of the [indiscernible] generic medication Association came out and mentioned that they don't want to get another haircut because they're also living through a period of inflation, too. So after what happened in 2014, 2015, there's really not much more to give. In terms of the tendering process, that was -- at the time, the dynamic was very different with [indiscernible] that was there. Back then, the PCPA in Quebec still weren't very well integrated and linked and bought it was putting that really as a tool in his toolkit to get people to the table and get people negotiating. Since then, we have knock on wood. Since then, we haven't heard anything. That lost still in effect. It's still a tool that the government has if they want to go into a tendering mode. But we haven't heard anything from tendering or any threads about using the tendering process as far as I know.

Okay. That's great. And my second question, in terms of M&A opportunities in the farmer space. Can you share with us, do you have a particular preference in terms of market geography and also the size of the markets, you have a preference towards urban markets? Or also -- are you also okay to go into the smaller market as well in terms of M&A opportunities? Sort of your thoughts there?

Across Canada.

Yes. across Canada.

Yes, across Canada. So let me preface this with this. We're in New Brunswick, we're in Quebec, we're in Ontario. We know these markets well. Obviously, we're -- we still see ourselves as a growing business. So we're always open to acquisition opportunities, whether it be onesies or twosies or small blocks of pharmacies or larger blocks of pharmacies. We're definitely interested where we're actively looking. So the way we see it is the opportunity needs to be existent -- where we're trying to create opportunities, of course. And if there's any opportunity, my message is like a hopeful teenager, I'll be waiting by the phone. We want to create those opportunities absolutely. So we are continuing to grow our store base and for us that's important, but the M&A opportunities have to be present.

And Francois maybe one for you -- so obviously, as food inflation normalizes later this year or next year, you mentioned earlier, there's a lag when between that and when you see some of the long-term contracts, these cost increases starting to pick up. Do you think, in your view, there's a risk that maybe in certain periods, you will not be able to achieve your 8% to 10% EPS growth as prices deflate and your costs continue to go up. If the answer is no, that you can achieve that, can you remind us sort of some of the key levers that you have to get to that? I know it's been talked about already by a lot of the presenters here. But can you just remind us what are some of the key levers that you can do to get to that 8% to 10% irrespective of what the cost environment looks like?

So I think as I mentioned, these targets are long-term targets on an annualized basis, but they're long-term targets. And -- it may happen for events that maybe 1 year, we don't achieve the moment we look back on a more longer-term period, we still are behind achieving those [ gold grades ]. So meaning that we can still grow our operating income more than top line, so operating leverage, meaning store -- all the initiatives that we talked about today about being more efficient in store, investing in technology. The DCs, obviously, that's a long-term investment, but that's the purpose we're doing is to make sure we can continue to grow for the foreseeable future, but drive some benefit. So all this is giving us comfort that we can still commit to those long-term targets. It may happen that we don't necessarily hit them every year. But on an annualized basis, this is what we're behind. So we'll keep doing exactly what we said, executing on our model, maintaining a disciplined capital allocation where we see returns on the investments -- and I think -- and on SG&A, you're right, I'd say that there is potentially more lag in terms of inflation being reflected, but we have some visibility. We know when contracts are coming due. It's our job to make sure that we're proactive going for tender, going for bids, negotiating in advance so that we don't get surprised. You saw our results in Q1 and Q2. We've been able to maintain the year-over-year increase in SG&A at about 4.2% and 4.9%. So that's not a bad increase given the inflation we're in, that will be a focus for the year. So again, not every year necessary, but on a long-term basis, yes.

Any other questions? Yes.

Question on dunnhumby. Can you give us some examples how you use the dunnhumby to help you to optimize your pricing and your promotion strategy?

Go ahead, Marc, and I can add.

So using customer data, our merchandising team are using that data first to assort a store and decide what product comes at shelf. So we've dunnhumby -- we developed a process that we call [ MAVERICK ] because it's an innovative process by which we bring vendors in to look at best practices and deliver on specific objectives in key priority categories. A good example of an objective is to improve the presence of healthier products in our assortment as consumers aspire to eat better. So we've improved in-store our assortment and as an example, in the Metro Quebec banner by 40% through the MAVERICK project over 4 to 5 years. And we do that by using customer data to make sure that we have the right assortment and that we can also assort stores regionally to specific customer demand. A good example is the work that Carmen has done with his team as he was leading Ontario to make sure that we have the right assortment in the right region in Ontario to meet the specific needs of the different [ Aetna ] customers in Ontario. That's another example. On the promotional front, we're able post promotion to understand the promotions appealed to which customers sensitive, mid-market, upmarket, and we're able to evaluate the efficiency of our promotion and eliminate promotion or margin investment that are not delivering the return. So that's -- I could go on and on and on. But those are 2 examples of how we've been using customer data for now more than 10 years to improve merchandising strategy. I think that [ MOi ], as we launch [ MOi ] and as we've built a more robust infrastructure of data by migrating all of our data into a data lake and implementing new tools to have access to the data and treat the data, we have now an opportunity to understand the behavior of the customer across the different manners and to then execute with our new marketing automation tools, campaigns to drive customers to increase frequency and increased basket in each of our banners. So those are -- some of the priorities that we're going to be working on. Going forward, Alain is leading the team of analysts and data scientists that are supporting our merchandising to -- merchandising teams to continue to evolve our strategies. So if a category team has a question about their customers and the customer behavior within a category, they reach out to Alain's team. And together, they analyze the data, develop strategies. So we go forward. One last point I would make about that is that as we embarked on that journey in 2009, 2010 as a team, we wanted to make sure that our merchandising team and the Metro team kept accountability for category strategy, category profitability and growth. And even though we had a partner supporting us in using the data and leveraging best practices from around the world, we would not outsource our strategy to a third party. Our teams kept accountable -- the accountability to execute on our strategy and delivering the result. And I think that's in line with our culture of accountability of Metro and it paid off.

And is the dunnhumby, -- is it only available for Metro, what the about the Jean Coutu banner?

It's going to be -- it's that the tools that we have in place will be -- are available for Ontario banners and Quebec food banners and will become available to the Jean Coutu banner.

If I could just add. I mean we talk about dunnhumby. But in 2019, we did internalize a large part of the dunnhumby team and internalized that into Metro. We have now what we call as a customer intelligence team that's supported with dunnhumby and dunnhumby tools. But the role of the customer intelligence group is supporting on merchandising insight and analytics that Marc talked about, loyalty insight and analytics and bringing research and all market data to the different banners and divisions. So we have 3 areas that we support all of the banners, all the divisions where we have loyalty is significantly richer because we can track customers versus baskets. We've been supporting the discount banners for years, even on merchandising analytics to take those right decisions based on a basket level. Now it will be enriched with loyalty. We brought in since the acquisition of Jean Coutu more market research, more market data to bring that richer to the pharma. And now with the -- our own proprietary loyalty program and owning more of the data will bring significantly richer data now to both pharmacy banners that are there. So the idea is evolving that and bringing a much richer set of data to help the business decisions on the merchandising side, but also on the loyalty side.

Well, thank you. I hope you enjoyed the day. I think we reached our objectives here. Number one, to show you the new DCs, talk to you about our priorities and opportunities and introduce the senior management team. So I want to thank my colleagues for their presentations. I hope you found them informative. Francois, our CFO, who you know really well, I think, explained again in the capital allocation at Metro, it's been very consistent and credible I think, with our investors. Carmen laid out the supply chain modernization plans. We have a big couple of years ahead of us. Next year will be a big year with the opening of Terrebonne and the launch of Fresh Phase 2 after 2 very big years behind us and skip continuing. So lots on the plate there. You heard about our banners from Marc in our 2 markets. I think we're well-positioned to continue to grow. We have opportunities certainly in both markets to continue to gain share, either new stores or through organic growth. E-com, I think we were again well-positioned. So exciting times. Alain talked about the [ MOi ] program, which will be launched soon. We were not going to give you the exact date, but it's coming soon. It's the latest step in our digital journey, more customer connection, more customer engagement, more personalization, and we're going to get more loyalty from our best customers. So we're really looking forward to this exciting new program. It's been a lot of work, a lot of heavy lifting. And we think it's going to be a big success. And with the support of the RBC credit card, I think that's going to boost it even more. You heard from Jean-Michel about our pharma leadership in Quebec. The strategic plan that they put together the lab function of the future. It's not easy, but it's progressing well. The digital focus of the team and finally, the rentals and the store concept that will start this fall. So I think, again, exciting opportunities to continue to grow our share in pharmacy in the Quebec market and who knows outside of Quebec one day. So finally, Claude talked about corporate responsibility, something we have been on, as she said, for quite a long time. We're into our third 5-year plan. We've reached our targets along the way. The targets we set, we think we can achieve. We're not greenwashing anything. We have not published a net 0 target so far because we didn't see the path to it, honestly, and the delays that we were talking about. We're going to dig again do a feasibility study. And if we can be more ambitious like [indiscernible] said, we will be. But if we don't see the path, we will commit to what we can commit and which we think is a responsible way to go. So that's it for me. We have a great team, a good company, and I hope you guys agree. Thank you for your interest in Metro. Thank you for your time and safe travels back. [Foreign Language] Thank you.