United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, and thank you for joining us for the UNFI Investor Day. Please welcome to the stage, Steve Bloomquist, Vice President, Investor Relations.

Good morning to everyone here in the room with us as well as those that are watching virtually. Welcome to our 2025 Investor Day. We're glad you're here with us, and we're excited to provide you with an update on our long-term value creation strategy and our business outlook. Before we get started, let me remind you of a few things. First, during today's event, management will be making forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks and uncertainties and such risks are discussed in our SEC filings. Second, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Definitions and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are included at the end of our presentation, which is available at unfi.com under the Investor section. Now here's a brief look at today's agenda, where you'll hear from our Chief Executive Sandy Douglas and several members of our senior management team, and how we're advancing our strategy and capabilities to drive long-term, profitable growth and shareholder value. Finally, I would ask those of you here in the room with us today to turn your phones to silent mode if you haven't already done so. Now to get the day started, before we welcome Sandy to the stage, let's roll a brief video. [Presentation]

Good morning. Thank you all so much for joining us today. It's great to be with members of our investor community here live in New York and also online, and we appreciate everybody taking the time to be with us today. It's been a few years since UNFI hosted an Investor Day, and a lot has changed for us and the broader food retail industry. Today, we want to take the opportunity to connect with those who have been following UNFI for a long period of time and with those who may be newer to the story. We'll share how we're advancing our strategy and building differentiated capabilities to help our customers and our suppliers more effectively compete in the marketplace. In parallel, we'll demonstrate how we're taking action to improve effectiveness and efficiency across our company and how the entire strategy creates value for our stakeholders, especially our shareholders. At UNFI, we're guided by a simple purpose. To bring better food to more people and in turn, to create a better future for the businesses and communities that we serve. This purpose honors our heritage and our opportunity. It encompasses what we've always done best, dating back to the company's founding in 1976, when Michael Funk sold organic produce out of the back of his Volkswagen van in Northern California. Through the years, UNFI has evolved into a company that delivers much more than better food. We also strive to help create a better future by helping our customers differentiate, compete and profitably grow. By helping our suppliers build stronger, more resilient brands and by helping our associates learn and grow and develop fulfilling careers and by helping our community partners increase access to quality food. And we believe this all comes together to unlock significant short, medium and long-term value for our shareholders. So let me unpack more about what we'll cover today. You'll see UNFI's road map towards our aspiration of becoming the most valued partner to grocery retailers and suppliers in the most attractive segments of the market. We'll share how UNFI is working to improve value for our customers and suppliers through competitively priced and differentiated products, programs, insights and services that help them more effectively compete. You'll hear how UNFI is transforming into a more effective and efficient company through a combination of people, processes and technology. And you'll get to meet our experienced leadership team that is delivering results, strengthening our capabilities and developing the next generation of talent for the future. And finally, we'll introduce new financial commitments through fiscal 2028, including our low single-digit top line growth and low double-digit adjusted EBITDA growth, on an average annual basis while delivering $300 million in annual free cash flow. We believe that all of this will lead us to long-term profitable growth with our partners and consistent operating leverage for our business. Our success ultimately depends on the strength of UNFI's talented team. Later this morning, our Chief Human Resource Officer, Danielle Benedict, will highlight how we've built our leadership team to include a mix of homegrown talent and industry experts who are developing the next generation of capabilities to support our customers, suppliers and associates. We're excited for you to get to know these leaders and the teams behind our company's continued transformation. I think it's important to place all of this in context of where we've come from. For nearly 50 years, UNFI has grown alongside the food retail industry leading innovation to make higher quality food accessible in more places. Founded in 1976, from a passion for natural and organic food, the company grew by listening to customers' needs, developing solutions and scaling rapidly to serve tens of thousands of retailers and manufacturers. As more people embraced healthy food, UNFI's growth accelerated from the late '80s to the mid-90s, culminating in 1996 when we became America's first scaled national distributor of natural products and went public. Over the next 2 decades, we expanded our network to help scale natural, organic and conventional food companies with the 2018 acquisition of SUPERVALU, we combined our expertise in natural and organic products with full service conventional distribution, which brought the company more great customers to serve and new opportunities to help them profitably grow along with a strong portfolio of new professional services and private brands. In 2021, I joined UNFI as CEO. And together with our senior management team, we've been focused on transforming the company for the future. Last year, we introduced a renewed purpose destination and multiyear strategy that the entire organization is now executing with increasing excellence every day. To summarize, we were the first to scale distribution of natural, organic and specialty products, bringing better food to more communities. And now we're accelerating a new era of growth rooted in what we do well today and really importantly, what we can do even better tomorrow. Today, we're focused on creating value across 3 unique segments of the business. First, our Natural Products segment. This segment accounts for nearly half of our sales and over 70% of our EBITDA, driven in part by steadily growing consumer demand for health and wellness products, which are proving resilient across economic cycles. Next, our conventional products segment. This segment distributes leading well-known brands that many shoppers know and love. It accounts for 44% of our sales today and nearly 30% of our profitability. And finally, our retail segment. The smallest portion of our business includes 2 retail banners, Cub in the Midwest and Shoppers in the Mid-Atlantic. Cub is the grocery retail market leader in the second largest metro area in the Midwest, Minneapolis St. Paul. And we see more opportunity to improve this segment, which also serves as a test and learn hub for UNFI's brand insights and services. In fiscal 2025, our company generated just under $32 billion in annual revenue and over $550 million of adjusted EBITDA at a 1.7% margin. We operate 49 strategically located distribution centers with a collective 28 million square feet of warehouse space to support our customers and our suppliers' growth. With a team of more than 25,000 associates, we deliver about 230,000 unique products to over 30,000 retail locations, covering over 90% of the population of the United States and Canada. About 2 years ago, we began conducting and have now completed a comprehensive board-led financial review of our target market, our approach to driving long-term profitable growth as we go forward. And as a result, we've sharpened our strategic focus on a growing $90 billion target market that includes many natural, organic, specialty multicultural and community-focused grocery retailers who can benefit from and value the differentiated products, programs and services that we offer today and are building for the future. We expect our target market to continue to grow in the low single digits annually driven by lasting consumer priorities around health and wellness, personalization, customization, convenience and value. Within our target market, approximately 2/3 of it or $16 billion is being driven by the sustained growth of natural, organic and specialty products and the strength of our customer base that focuses on these categories. We expect the sales contribution from the conventional product segment to be stable, and that's the other $30 billion of the target market. And when we look at this target market by retailer type, we see opportunities with a diverse range of retailers who want to further differentiate themselves, including premium, natural and organic, traditional, multicultural and community-focused retailers, each of which has meaningful growth potential along a differentiation strategy. Now make no mistake, we recognize that grocery retailers are navigating an increasingly dynamic marketplace with fierce competition for mass retailers and discounters. To win in this environment, we believe grocery retailers need more than a distribution partner. They need a scaled growth partner that can help them meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. That's the core focus of UNFI's value creation strategy at scale. Our strategy has 2 components: adding value for our customers and suppliers and becoming an ever more effective and efficient company. First, we're focused on adding value for differentiating retailers by bringing them unique competitively priced products, merchandising programs, private brands and digital and professional services to choose from that fit their strategy and help them compete effectively and grow profitably. In turn, we aim to add value for our suppliers by helping them expand their reach beyond the mass and discount retailers to build stronger, more resilient brands. After a 30-year career in the CPG industry, I've seen firsthand the importance of building strong brands in a highly diversified retail environments. Together, we can help retailers win with the better, different and special brands their shoppers want. And we can help suppliers build enduring brand equity that simply cannot be achieved with a narrow channel mix. The second component of our strategy is focused on becoming a more effective and efficient company, which you'll hear our colleagues talk about throughout the day. Each of the components of our strategy has multiple benefits. They enable us to better serve our customers and suppliers while also reducing operating costs to support investment and returns for our shareholders. Ultimately, by executing our strategy, we can create a win-win dynamic where our retailers and our suppliers grow faster, they generate higher profitability, and we do too. Over the past 18 months, we've gained even greater confidence and conviction in our strategy and in our execution. But we still have much work to do and much more opportunity ahead. Today, we're going to highlight capabilities that we believe will strengthen UNFI's competitive advantage and our ability to help our customers and suppliers grow. The first 4 are focused on adding more value. Customer stewardship. We're revamping our commercial organization to better understand each customer's unique strategy and to enhance our ability to provide tailored account level execution. Merchandising and supplier support. We're focused on building the largest, most innovative and growth-oriented assortment while driving competitive pricing and merchandising programs designed to help each retailer win. We're also working to provide a simpler and better experience for suppliers so that we can become their best partner to build their brands. Professional and digital services, we're leaning into our unique ability to help our customers beyond their core wholesale needs with scalable services that help them save money, operate more effectively, build shopper loyalty and drive profitable growth. And private brands, we continue to build, enhance and innovate. Our best-in-class customizable private brands programs, which are a key source of differentiation for retailers today. Next, we'll focus on 3 capabilities to drive greater effectiveness and efficiency. Technology and innovation. We're driving a step change in digital capabilities by focusing on improving simplicity, performance, and efficiency for UNFI and our stakeholders. This includes solutions that help our customers meet the digital challenges that they face while also enhancing operational effectiveness and efficiency at UNFI. Next-generation supply chain, we're continuing to invest in solutions that empower our people, strengthen our processes and leverage advanced technologies to better serve our customers and suppliers while reducing operating costs. Productivity, we're maximizing productivity by streamlining SG&A in our corporate functions, eliminating waste in our operations and driving strategic transformation initiatives. And we see significantly more opportunity in this area for years to come. Our leadership team will share more detail on these capabilities today, many of which are already well underway. As you've seen, we're well positioned in a market with significant potential. The reality is that in the past, we've not always delivered on our full potential. And that's why our strengthened leadership team has spent the last few years sharpening our priorities, accelerating industry-leading capabilities and improving execution across the business. In the first year of our multiyear strategy, we delivered on each of the commitments we made to our shareholders. We finished fiscal 2025 at or above our initial outlook for net sales, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. We reduced our leverage ratio from 4x to 3.3x, with net debt at the lowest level since 2018. We brought lean practices into a business that had not yet benefited from the discipline that this practice brings, and we raised and accelerated our 3-year financial objectives for net sales, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. And because of this, we expect to realize our previous net leverage reduction goal about a year ahead of schedule. We're proud of the progress we've made, but we believe the opportunities ahead far exceed anything that we've achieved so far. Anchored on our strong performance in fiscal 2025. Today, we're introducing our next 3-year financial plan through fiscal 2028. Our proven strategy, combined with our vibrant, diversified customer base, and strong operational execution, give us confidence in the financial performance we can continue to deliver over the long term. We expect net sales to grow in the low single digits on average over this period. This reflects continued growth with new and existing customers, strong customer retention and sustained growth within the natural, organic, specialty and fresh products segment. In addition, we expect average annual adjusted EBITDA growth from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2028 to be in the low double-digit range. Our updated multiyear objectives imply that we will deliver adjusted EBITDA of around $800 million in fiscal 2028 at an approximate adjusted EBITDA margin of 2.4%. Implying the improvement of approximately 65 basis points versus fiscal 2025. This higher profitability as well as our continued focus on optimizing capital investments is expected to generate around $300 million of free cash flow annually through fiscal 2028. Combining our higher adjusted EBITDA and consistent free cash flow, we expect to reduce net leverage to less than 2.5x by the end of fiscal 2026 and to further reduce this to under 2x by the end of fiscal 2027. As we reduce our debt levels and improve profitability, we expect adjusted EPS will continue to grow faster than adjusted EBITDA. I've described our strong foundation, our growing target market, our value creation, strategy at scale and our improving operational execution, all of which gives us confidence in our long-term aspiration to become our industry's most valued partner. By continuing to successfully execute our strategy, we believe we will drive sustained revenue growth, consistent operating leverage and strong cash generation. As I've said, we're proud of what we've accomplished so far, but we have greater conviction about the incredible opportunity we have over the next 3 years and well beyond. We believe that UNFI is a good company but it's on its way to becoming a great company with its best days still to come. I've shared my reasons to believe in UNFI, but chief among them is the talented, energized team that is leading our company into its next chapter of success. And I'm thrilled for you to meet and hear from many of them today. So on behalf of all of us, thank you again for your investment, for your trust and for the time you're spending with our team this morning. And with that, I'll turn it over to our President and Chief Financial Officer; Matteo Tarditi, who will talk about how we're translating strategy into specific capabilities and actions to help our customers, suppliers and UNFI win. Matteo?

Thank you, Sandy, and thank you to everyone joining us in person and virtually today. Today, we will be focusing on the strategic capabilities that we're building to create incremental value for our customers and suppliers and for UNFI. We believe that by combining the strengthening capabilities and scale with our extensive network and industry relationships, our natural and organic heritage and strong operational foundation, we can create sustainable, profitable growth and shareholder value. As Sandy just described, the strategy we introduced a little over a year ago has 2 key elements: adding value for customers and suppliers and improving our effectiveness and efficiency to drive increased free cash flow. And each of the capabilities we are building support at least one of these 2 pillars. Within the adding value pillar, there are 4 capabilities were accelerating that we believe will help customers and suppliers more effectively compete in the highly dynamic [ food ] retail marketplace. These initiatives are focused on enhancing customer value, merchandising and supplier support, professional and digital services and private brands. And importantly, we expect this enhanced capabilities to clearly differentiate within our industry. Let's begin with the customer, which is at the center of how we deliver value to our industry. Here, we work with our customers to help them achieve their unique goals by bringing them tailored solutions rooted in data-driven insights and our scale commercial expertise. How can we help our customers to solve their unique problems and bring more shoppers into their stores. Answering that question drives UNFI profitable growth. We have reorganized into product-oriented teams, recognizing that our retail customers aim to provide a distinctive assortment with compelling value that attracts a loyal shopper base. And we're continuing to invest in our customer-facing associates to help strengthen our relationships. As you'll hear from Louis later today, we are revamping our customer go-to-market programs to better tailor our offerings to the diverse retailers that we serve. Think about the needs of an urban-located premium retailer are different from those of a multi grocer or natural and organic retailer. And so we're working to bring tailored solutions to customers now with no 2 stores serve the exact same shoppers or compete with the same competitive set. Serving 30,000-plus locations provide us data that we convert to insights that we use to inform and help customers operate more effectively. Another key change we made in the past 18 months is that our commercial contracting process is more collaborative, discipline and meant to create and maintain win-win relationships built upon share profitable growth. We know it is critical that we help our customers more effectively compete over the longer term for both their success and ours. And the growth we are seeing within key parts of our customer base demonstrates how our focus on strengthening these partnerships is driving value, differentiation and supporting shared profitable growth. We are seeing growth among larger and smaller customers, particularly within our natural product business, and we want to build on this progress. We want to ensure we're doing everything we can to support the long-term growth strategies of each of the unique retailers that we serve. Second, capability, merchandising and supplier support. It is critical for our customers, improving merchandising capability and simplifying the supplier experience to be the best partner for their growth. Our retailer partners work hard to provide their shoppers with compelling value and a unique assortment. Our broad differentiated assortment and data-driven merchandising capabilities are core to helping customers build a unique set of products that delight their shoppers at competitive price points. And we'll be focused on continually upgrading and refreshing our assortment, so retailers can offer their shoppers innovative in demand items and give them the insights to position them effectively. And we will be working to keep them as competitive on price as we can knowing that our 30,000-plus locations provide a great path for CPG companies who want to profitably grow and optimize long-term brand positioning. Excellent merchandising requires a leading assortment and working with established and emerging brands. Just as we compete with our customers, we compete for our suppliers. We are continuously striving to be easier to do business with and be the best partner to grow your brand. As an example, as part of our simplified supplier go-to-market program introduced over the last couple of years, we began providing a platform called UNFI Insights that provide sales, inventory and category data to help suppliers make strategic decisions to optimize their performance and brand positioning within our retailer network. Enhancing the supplier experience has also been an early focus of our lean initiatives. As a result of a successful continuous improvement event, we've been able to reduce the time to set up a new item by about 50% and see significant opportunity to further improve. And lastly, innovation has always been important to this industry, and we are committed to supporting growing categories, brands and suppliers. We want to identify them, bring them to the market faster and give the suppliers the tools to manage their growth. So having the right access to a diverse slate of brands, including emerging brands, is key to enhancing the differentiation we can help offer our customers. One example of how we develop this brand's relationship is through regional spark events, which are smaller selling shows designed to help spotlight new brands. The smaller format shows give emerging brands the opportunity to showcase their product to a more targeted set of retailers, driving awareness and incremental sales. And combined, these initiatives help the entire supply chain and our broader industry work better together in a win-win-win collaboration. The third capability is professional and digital services. We see these as a great way to support our customers and help them leverage our scale to reduce cost and grow sales all while increasing loyalty and deepening our relationships. We have a core set of services based on the most common activities in store. Think of accepting credit cards or coupons for which we have programs to lower cost and make operations simpler for our customers. These are higher-margin businesses for us that can have a significant impact on our customers' performance. And we're working to add new services as the market evolves in areas such as our relatively new UNFI media network or electronic shelf tags. These services support our customers across their operations and P&L in 3 ways. First, we're helping them lower cost. For example, for our payment services, we're able to a offer lower processing fees and streamline back-office work, savings that go straight to the customer bottom line. Today, we save our customers tens of millions of dollars annually on credit card payments. Second, we're helping drive their core revenue. Programs like loyalty and rewards help retailers build repeat traffic, while our planogram and merchandising support improve shelf productivity and ensure the right products are in the right place to sell. And third, we're opening up new revenue opportunities. Our digital media and retail media programs connect suppliers directly with shoppers creating new marketing income streams and helping retailers better monetize their shelf and digital space. We have the opportunity to significantly increase the penetration of our services. Today, the average customer who utilizes UNFI for services uses an average of 2 to 3 services, while our top service customers average around 6. And so this represents a significant growth opportunity to create mutual value, strengthened customer partnership and drive higher profitability through deeper service adoption, all while helping our customers with above priorities of lower cost and more sales. Overall, we want to help our customers operate smarter, grow faster and ultimately drive more profitable growth for them and for UNFI. The fourth capability under adding value is private brands. And this is a win-win opportunity that we have to increase penetration of our private products, items available only in UNFI stores. Our $1 billion plus private brands program has been streamlined and is poised for innovation and reacceleration. Today, you can see the private brand penetration for conventional is roughly 4x that of our natural business where private brands are less mature broadly. This means we have a compelling opportunity to grow private brands over time, especially with our higher growth in natural business and help our retail base deliver more value to their shoppers. Because of this, we expect our private brands to grow in the mid-single-digit range over our planning period. And to do that, we are focused on innovation and bringing sought after new products to market, creating tailored portfolios that sync up with each customer store and rigorously managing our sourcing to ensure quality, service and cost expectations are met. As you know, these items are designed to deliver strong value to shoppers while offering more attractive margins to both our customers and UNFI. And it's our job to demonstrate the value these products bring to our customers. Our private brand teams continue to develop a private offering that resonates with customers and their shoppers. So taken together, high-margin brands and services contributed around 1/4 of our total company adjusted EBITDA and we believe there is an opportunity to continue to drive this higher as we seek to increase penetration across both areas. Now let's spend a moment on how we're becoming more effective and efficient. These capabilities also help our customers and suppliers by improving our day-to-day operations and ease doing business with UNFI, support profit improvement and free cash flow generation. We're becoming more effective and efficient by strengthening our technology and innovation platforms by advancing the supply chain of the future and by increasing productivity, including optimizing our cost structure. We're continuing to improve our foundation and capabilities to help upstream and downstream partners succeed, building on the progress we've made over the last years. And a big part of who we are is our distribution center network. Our 49 distribution centers or DCs spend from coast to coast, and our network scale is a competitive advantage for us and our business partners. As you can see on the chart, we've been improving fill rates and on-time deliveries, and we are continuing to drive further improvements to get customers what they order, when they expect it. As we work to continue improving fill rates, we recently introduced Relex across about half of our supply chain network. Relex is a software-based AI-enabled supply chain solution that helps with demand planning and replenishment driving better inventory management and helping optimize inventories. Where implemented, we're beginning to see more improvement in our fill rates and more efficient management of inventory levels. which is helping drive higher customer service levels and better free cash flow generation. Given this early progress, we're planning to continue roll out to the balance of the DCs in fiscal '26. Now to give you a better sense of this tool, let's watch a short video featuring our Head of Procurement Organization, Scott Rochwarg. Please play the video.

The Relex platform is a leading supply chain platform that's really modernizing the way we do procurement and supply chain at UNFI. The AI and machine learning that's built into the forecasting algorithms really help to drive better inventory levels at the right time for our customers, improving their overall fill rates. We're going to start to be able to share forecasts that are more accurate with our supplier community which allows them to improve fill rates to UNFI as well as our inbound on-time performance. Relex is also a big unlock for our days on hand and our free cash flow initiatives at UNFI. All the same things that help improve our fill rates also help improve our inventory levels, improve forecast accuracy, better time demand to our actual inventory levels and future purchase orders allows us to enhance not only fill rates, but at the same time, draw down our inventory days on hand and improve the inventory turns in our distribution centers.

What an exciting solution for all our stakeholders. Now as we look forward, we're working to continue to transform our supply chain in ways that are fundamental to our strategy of bringing value to customers and suppliers. We're investing in innovation and technology including AI power solutions to make us better in many areas. New tools and processes help us better forecast demand, which allows us to be better at procurement. We have talked before about the use of automation investments that improve customer experience in many ways while adding capacity, improving service levels and creating efficiencies in our DCs and we're coupling these targeted automation investments with increasing deployment of lean management to drive process improvement. We believe implementing automation and lean alongside each other magnifies and complements the benefits of each. With lean daily management now in over half of our warehouses, we're reaping quantifiable benefits to safety, quality, delivery and cost from unleashing the collective power of all team members to solve problems and drive continuous improvement in our network. We've also developed a more rigorous approval process for capital investments and plan to maintain this discipline in the future. Projects are scrutinized from a broader perspective, and double-digit hurdle rates are being applied for investments, while maintenance is now used based versus calendar based, all leading to more productive overall capital spending. Coupling this discipline with our network optimization is enabling us to more effectively deploy our capital spend. In our fiscal 2026 capital investment outlook, spend per DC is expected to grow. The goal of this investment in our broader capital allocation strategy is to improve service levels, maintain our skilled asset base and solidify our future growth while improving return on invested capital. During fiscal '25, return on invested capital rose nearly 100 basis points and is on track to rise another 200 basis points in fiscal '26. Importantly, there is still significant opportunity ahead. As we continue to transform our supply chain network through these targeted actions, we are seeing improved operational and financial outcomes. For example, we've driven sustained improvements in both throughput and shrink and are confident that continued execution of our plan will unlock additional efficiency gains, strengthen our cost position and enhance returns across the network. Next, we are using technology and innovation to drive forward. First, we're focused on simplifying our business to enhance resiliency and streamline interaction with our partners, and that includes the technology and digital interfaces that power much of what we do. Second, we're improving performance through digital platforms that help support growth and bring increasing level of benefits to associates, suppliers and customers to help them make better and faster decisions. And third, we're also using technology to enhance our effectiveness and efficiency. This includes the launch of a new ERP system to simplify our tech stack and to modernize our ability to use and generate valuable real-time data. Complementing all this, we also began deploying AI power tools to enhance our analytical capabilities. The third and final area under effectiveness and efficiency is productivity which means using the resources we have to do more. We've been driving down our OpEx as a percentage of sales, and we plan to continue this journey. A few of the levers we're using are lean daily management, which I'll review in a moment, working to lower our indirect cost and taking a critical look at our processes to eliminate steps, waste and cost. And this builds on the progress we've made in fiscal '24 and '25 by streamlining our organization by reducing layers to increase the adaptability and the responsiveness of our business. We've also established our value delivery office. A cross-functional team tasked with overseeing and driving accountability across 10 key strategic projects every year, all meant to improve effectiveness for our customers and make us more productive and efficient as an organization. This office was developed when we kicked off our multiyear strategy in fiscal 2024, and we have a long runway of value-creating projects to tackle with this team. So now I want to frame up our lean transformation. One that we believe is accelerating. Lean is a way of thinking and a way of working that at its core, revolves around problem solving and continuous improvement to help drive value for customers and in turn, for UNFI. Lean daily management is driving safety, quality, delivery and cost improvements that will improve our execution and drive lasting culture change. Our journey started in 2024 when foundation was laid and a small team was formed. We've been scaling lean over the past 12 months and have educated senior leaders and developed employee practitioners to act as coaches and ensure we are applying lean consistently in our day-to-day decision-making. We've also implemented a standardized lean operating model with 34 DCs. And we plan to continue the rollout and broaden adoption as we move through this fiscal year to drive the highest possible impact. We have more recently accelerated the use of continuous improvement events to solve specific problems identified by customers, suppliers and leaders using the collective resources across the organization to drive improvement. I have to say I'm pleased with the progress we've made today and how the organization has embraced lean to solve problems and take actions to course correct in real time. Lean is driving lasting change to an already strong collaborative service first culture. And with lean, we expect to drive meaningful impact, including stronger customer relationships, improvement in safety, quality, delivery and cost, working capital and free cash flow and expanded operating margins. So now the best way we know how to deploy lean is to go to a distribution center where the work is done. Let's look at one of our DCs that was an early adopter of lean daily management. The leaders at this facility adopted lean daily management, or LDM, in December 2024, exactly a year ago. The core aspect of LDM is the daily review of key operational metrics that underpin safety, quality, delivery and cost or SQDC. Imagine each day, a group of these leaders reviewing metrics for these areas and evaluating whether they are on target or not. Using a standardized dashboard that shows metrics over time on target as green and those below target as red. And this data review of the data enables our DC teams to make real-time changes to continuously improve operations. And as you can imagine, in the spirit of continuous improvement, if a team is consistently meeting or exceeding their targets, we raise them. And this ensures we drive greater improvement across the areas that really matter. In just a year, we have seen significant progress since the adoption of lean daily management at our DCs. This DC's throughput, so how many cases we can move through the DC is up 9%, and on-time deliveries are up 3%. And at the same time, shrink is down over 16%. And importantly, success in lean daily management also encourages collaboration and creates a better working environment, which benefits us through lower turnover. We see significant opportunity to drive further improvement across our supply chain as we bring LDM to more of our DCs. And as we see the DCs extend their track records practicing LDM. Before I turn it over to my colleague, Danielle, I want to reiterate the capabilities you'll hear us focus on today that support continued execution of our long-term strategy and value creation. These capabilities are central to adding value to customers and suppliers while becoming a more effective and efficient organization, which we expect will drive profitable growth and free cash flow and ultimately, continued shareholder value creation. Now let me turn the floor over to Danielle Benedict, our Chief Human Resources Officer, to discuss the initiatives we're executing to maintain and build our strong talent base.

Good morning, everyone. I'm excited to be here and talk about how we attract, develop and empower talent to drive UNFI's next generation of growth. We see our team as our #1 differentiator at UNFI. Over the past few years, we've been deeply focused on building a strong management team in cultivating the next generation of leaders to transform the business and execute our strategy. As Sandy shared, our purpose is to deliver better food and create a better future for everyone we serve. That purpose is deeply tied to our culture. For 50 years, UNFI associates have taken pride in delivering better food to more communities. While our business has evolved, our passion for serving customers and suppliers remain strong. It's what fuels our high-performing culture and attract the industry's most talented leaders to our company. We're creating a culture of leaders who model 3 core values: Better every day. We aim to stay curious, challenge the status quo and continuously learn; Do the right thing. We put the safety, security and well-being of our people and partners first in everything we do and win together. We work together as one team holding each other accountable to our commitments and delivering on our promises. Our purpose and values have been foundational to our strong performance over the past few years, and we see even more opportunity ahead. Now I'm proud to introduce UNFI's senior leadership team, a blend of long-tenured talent and strategic external hires with deep experience in transformation, growth in customer-centric industries. Let me take a moment to briefly review their unique backgrounds and experiences. Our CEO, Sandy Douglas, is a 30-plus year CPG veteran who brings a unique understanding of what brands and retailers need to succeed in a dynamic marketplace. Matteo Tarditi, our President and Chief Financial Officer, joined UNFI in 2024. He brings 25 years of financial leadership expertise from GE, where he served as CFO for 7 different business units around the world. As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, he successfully drove transformation and increased productivity across the enterprise. Mark Bushway, our President of Natural Products and Chief Supply Chain Officer, built his career in food wholesale from the ground up starting in distribution center and later joining UNFI in 2003 as an operations manager. Today, his hands-on leadership style, drive deep associate engagement and operational excellence. Louis Martin, our President of Conventional Grocery Products and Chief Commercial Officer, joined UNFI in 2022. He began his career as a commodities trader, and brings retail-focused CPG expertise and strategic consulting experience from McKenzie & Company. David Best, our CEO of Retail, joined UNFI this summer, bringing retail experience from Target and CPG experience from General Mills. His Minnesota roots and personal connection to our Cub banner make him uniquely suited to strengthen our retail segment as we go forward. Mario Maffei, our Chief Information Officer, joined UNFI in 2023, following a 24-year career at Mars Inc. During this tenure, he spearheaded global IT system integrations automation and AI initiatives that transformed associate and customer experiences. Mahrukh Hussain, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, joined UNFI in 2022. She brings extensive legal expertise from nearly 22 years at the McDonald's Corporation, where she served as General Counsel in global, international and regional roles. Matt Echols, our Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, joined UNFI in 2022 with nearly 25 years of CPG experience. He has led corporate affairs functions in both North America and Asia Pacific. And finally, a little about me. I've spent about 25 years in HR and started my food industry career at Dunkin' Brands. I've been here with UNFI for 12 years and have served as CHRO since 2017. It's been an amazing journey, and I'm excited for the future. UNFI's ambitious destination, attracted many of us here from other high-performing companies. And now we're all collectively focused on helping our customers, our suppliers and our associates win together. Our leadership team is hiring and developing the right people to accelerate capability building across the enterprise. Sandy and Matteo covered these capabilities earlier today, which focus on adding more value for our customers and suppliers and improving effectiveness and efficiency across UNFI. Behind this work is a committed talented group of next-generation leaders. I'm excited to share how we're enhancing these capabilities from customer stewardship to merchandising, to services and to data and insights. So now let's hear directly from a few of our next-generation leaders, Kelly, JJ, Simon and Tyler on how they are bringing these capabilities to life. Roll the video, please. [Presentation]

Talent development doesn't stop at hiring. It's also about continuous learning. Building on Matteo's overview on lean daily management in our distribution centers were teaching leaders to apply lean principles across the enterprise, creating the culture of empowerment, curiosity and growth. We've also invested in high-impact leadership programs focused on commercial and operational excellence. Through initiatives like UNFI Elevate, and leaders in supply chain, we're equipping leaders to build high-performing teams that deliver more value to our partners. Next, you'll hear from UNFI leaders like Belinda, Ron and Ria, who have grown through these programs, making a difference for their teams and the businesses they serve. Let's roll the next video, please. [Presentation]

As we build talent and capabilities, we've also been streamlining our structure for speed and impact. We've reduced layers and key functions, empowering faster decision-making. And we've launched the value delivery office led by Matteo Tarditi to drive strategic initiatives, operating discipline and accountability. This helped us deliver a significant EBITDA improvement in fiscal 2025. Bringing it full circle, we'll continue to recruit and developing talent who live our values, better every day, do the right thing and win together. These simple and clear values guide everything we do and keep our entire team aligned. In closing, to build on what Sandy shared earlier, our team is our #1 reason to believe that UNFI's future is bright. Together, we're developing the talent and the capabilities to become our industry's most valued partner. Thank you. And next, I'll turn it back over to our CEO, Sandy Douglas, along with our President and CEO of retail, David Best. Please give the team a few minutes to set up the stage. Have a great day. Thank you.

So good morning again, everybody. Kind of coming from Danielle's team about talent, we had the opportunity this summer to grab one of the industry's rising stars as a retailer and a merchant and somebody who could really strengthen a key component of our business, which is merchandising services and obviously, our retail business, and that's David Best. And it's totally unfair because he's only been here for 3 months. But I just thought you all would get a kick out of hearing from him in a kind of an informal fireside chat format. And David, as I think about your depth of retail experience and proven record of success, I'm interested in sort of what you saw, you're Minnesota native, you love Cub, but you've got extensive experience and could have worked anywhere. So talk a little bit about why you joined UNFI and sort of what's your early take?

Yes. No. I mean I'm thrilled to be here. And I've spent my life in food and retail, so between stints at Target, General Mills as well as running an independent grocer. And one of the things I've long -- of course, now Cub is my hometown grocer. So it's a deep passion project for me. But one of the things I've long felt is all the headlines are about how these big mass players are gaining share in food, and that's true. But what's often underreported is the fact that there's lots of differentiating unique retailers out there also winning and breaking through in the marketplace. And part of what gets me excited about being with UNFI and being here specifically leading our retail businesses, we have the opportunity to do that here at Cub Foods and to really break through and be one of those retailers. And so it's early days yet, but we're really focused on a couple of key things. We call it with the team going back and relearning our ABC. So A, is for anchor on the shopper. B is for bold and distinct assortment and merchandising. And C is for clear value. And now this may not sound super fancy or different. But the reality is, is that there's magic when it all comes together and is executed consistently every single day by a team that cares. And so we have the opportunity to do this at Cub and truly make it a local distinct retailer that can win and dominate in its market.

Yes. Well, and we believe that, too. And for investors, the Cub turnaround is not part of our projections. It's a plan plus initiative. It's something that, as David succeeds, we'll generate incremental value for the business. But there's a bigger idea in this, which is the importance of what he just said more broadly across our customer base. And so before we talk about the more broad impact on our customer base and the role that you and your team could play in helping all of us help all of our community. Let's talk a little bit about transformation and innovation and how you would describe your leadership approach to that as you begin to engage to get the Cub brand back on a winning trajectory?

Yes. No. And I think it's a great question. And I want to go back to what Danielle said. She illustrated, and I think you'll all see is what a talented team we have here at UNFI as a whole. And it's really cool to be part of that. We moved very quickly in retail to make sure we build the right team of both internal experts as well as key external hires. And we're starting to hit the ground running. But I'll say this, is, a lot has changed in food retail over time. But one of the things that hasn't changed is that we're a people business at its core. And I firmly believe that great culture drives great results. And so a lot of what we've been talking about as a new leadership team is what are the types of behaviors we want to coach into our team to help really drive and accelerate this transformation. So it breaks down for us as being bold. And I do think that in our industry, fortune favors those that are bold and really working hard to break through with the customer. The second thing is really around making sure that we're curious. The environment is changing quickly. We've got to make sure we're focused on our shopper, what do they need, how do we raise our bar every single day. That's one of our UNFI values. The third thing is really around adaptability. And I do think this is where independent grocers in particular, can win. The market is -- it's always been changing. It's going to continue to change. But the reality is that if we can adjust faster than our competition, I really do think that can be part of our recipe for success here.

As I listen to you, it excites me because over 40-plus years in this industry, I have called on so many merchants, and I've seen some amazing ones and seeing how they how they bring analysis and creativity and curiosity and then they invent things. I've had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Danny Wegman over the years, and he talks about merchandising as the process of bringing relevant things to market that were previously unavailable. And he speaks simply, but there's nothing simple about that. But as I listen to you and I put you on the spot here, your Thanksgiving week, you were in how many Cub stores?

I think I was in 40 stores in just a handful of days. So I was out with our team and our customer, our shopper during our biggest week of the year.

And you weren't alone. You had your new team with you?

Yes. And we're getting ready to do it again for Christmas here. So we've got to get as close as possible to -- Matteo talked about this with lean daily management get as close as possible to the work and to the shopper. And that's a big part of the culture that we're building as well.

And then the last thing I would say about this is David attracts talent. There's talent calling him going, "I want to be on your team." And you had 4 new senior-level merchandising hires in your first 3 months. So I'm excited to see what he can do and let's take one more look at a broader question, though. So imagine we start to hit on all cylinders at Cub, which I know we will. We're going to be learning a lot. We'll be hearing later from Louis Martin to talk about conventional and some of the capabilities for customers. But think about what your thoughts are about the broader industry and the talent you're bringing in and how we can strengthen our own company from your experience.

Yes. I mean it's a great question, and it's something that I really think will be part of our secret sauce for retail is our collaboration upstream with our value chain. And between Louis, Mark and I, we're kind of all joined at the hip here as we work to learn really together. And let me give you an example of that. I mentioned earlier the C in our ABCs is clear value. And we had done some work with our shopper and done some research to really realize we lost our way there. And so we wanted to make a very quick impact going into the holiday season. And so we started with our UNFI private brand items and pick core staple items like milk, eggs, flour, butter, all under our brands and really double down on making sure we offer really strong everyday value and paired that with both really strong in-store and online merchandising and to make sure it could show up to the customer, the shopper that was in the store. But what's important about this story is I've been doing this for a while. And you can't just put something in the store and hope people find it. You've got to work hard to make sure you break through. And we use UNFI's media network specifically to target our lapsed shoppers as well as our most value-seeking shoppers. So it's early days yet, but we're starting to see our transaction count and our unit counts grow specifically with those cohorts as we let them know, there's something new and exciting to come check out in store. And so as we do this, we're working hard to make sure we're sharing back all those learnings really across the whole UNFI ecosystem to wherever there's a playbook that can be applied to other retailers that we take the opportunity to do that.

And what's another neat thing about this, and this is not something most folks know, is that the Cub brand is made up of company stores and franchisees and the franchisees not only own Cub stores, but they also own other banners. I think that ecosystem Cub plus the related franchisees and banners is the majority of our Hopkins DC. And so there's a lot of learning going on across that as David and his team begin to find things that work and use our tools in new and better ways. So really excited to have you on the team, excited to see what happens, some planned plus value in the next few years. No pressure, only 90 days in. But I think what we're going to do now is take a 10-minute break, give everybody a chance to stretch and for those online as well, and we'll start up again in about 10 minutes. Thanks, everybody. [Break]

Good morning, everyone. My name is Louis Martin, and it's a pleasure to be with all of you here today, for those of you here in person as well as those of you listening in online, thank you for joining us. You've already heard from Sandy about our broader strategic direction. You also heard from Matteo about the operational road map that is translating our strategy into results. So now what I'd like to do is take a few moments to share how UNFI connects those 2 worlds together every day through our commercial capabilities. From customer stewardship and merchandising and supplier support, to professional services and digital services and private brands, we are accelerating our capabilities to help both customers and suppliers win in this competitive environment. At UNFI, helping retailers create compelling value and differentiation isn't just a concept. It's at the heart of what we do. And we understand that in today's grocery landscape, where consumer habits are evolving faster than ever standing out is everything, and our role is to help our partners do exactly that. The success of UNFI and our partners is linked. We partner with customers to bring them competitive prices, unique product assortments and innovative merchandising programs and services that help them stand out and create separation from mass retailers. We then partner with suppliers to offer simplified experiences, go-to-market programs and insights that help them build their brands and accelerate growth within a diverse network of retailers. At UNFI, we think about every day, how can we better serve our customers. So let me share more on who they are and how we are working to help them achieve their unique goals. For independent grocery retailers, it's often more than just about price or convenience alone. Compelling value is required, but so is delivering an experience that reflects the needs of the communities that they serve whether that's health and wellness, multicultural authenticity, sustainability or premium quality. Our customers care deeply about the products that they carry. And so we have reoriented the way we engage with customers into product-oriented customer teams to ensure that they receive the expertise on both the natural and conventional products that they seek. We have lined up our cross-functional merchandising analytics and operations team to directly engage with and support our customers with a tailored personalized approach to help them drive higher growth across all categories. And today, we are combining our experience and relationships with enhanced data-driven insights to understand each customer's goals and strategies and the growth and financial outcomes that they are pursuing. Ours is not a cookie-cutter approach. It's not a cookie-cutter service model. It's a collaborative growth partnership model that aims to support win-win outcomes for us and our retail partners. This is how we help retailers drive value in different differentiation, which in turn enables profitable growth, both for them and for UNFI. Now as Matteo highlighted earlier, Today, our average share is about 50% of each of customers' total consumer COGS spend. But for our top decile customers, it is over 80%. And this presents for us a significant opportunity to deepen relationships that support our share goals for profitable growth. Now I could sit here and just describe how we help our customers execute their unique strategies. But rather than hearing from me, I'd like for you to hear from a few of them directly. So let's roll the tape. [Presentation]

What you just heard and saw represents diverse types of retailers from a family-owned specialty chain like Heinen's to multicultural grocers like Vallarta to local natural food pioneers like Healthy Living. Each of these operate in a unique market but they all share one thing in common. They are successfully growing in this market by delivering a strong value proposition and differentiation, and our customer-centric sales model helps enable this growth. And sometimes that will mean helping a multicultural grocer access the best ethnic and international products in the market. Sometimes it means partnering with a natural retailer to help them refine store layouts or launch a new private brand strategy. And in all cases, we're using our data-driven insights to help our customers capitalize on the fastest-growing brands and products. And for all of them, our goal is the same: support our customers in their growth journey and make UNFI the easiest, most responsive and most innovative partner to work with. Now let's turn to the other side of the equation, merchandising and supplier support. Our broad differentiated assortment and merchandising capabilities are core to helping customers build a unique set of products that delight their shoppers at competitive price points and we can enable this growth by providing data-driven insights and simplified experiences for our suppliers. From an assortment standpoint, we have a strong history of delivering items that cover every grocery category and product type, be they natural or conventional, large or small, or fresh and non-fresh. But as we look ahead, we see even greater opportunities, not just to provide a wide and diverse assortment but to also offer innovative merchandising programs that deliver both competitive pricing and differentiation across growing categories, regions and stores. Our assortment of about 230,000 SKUs from approximately 10,000 suppliers, covers the core brands that consumers know and love as well as innovative and emerging natural, organic, specialty and fresh products that continue to gain share in this market. This broad assortment allows us to work with our retail partners to help them build the most relevant, distinctive and profitable product sets for their stores, whether they're focused on natural innovation, value-driven essentials or premium items. That said, over the past year, we've begun to reposition our merchandising organization to create value beyond just assortment by leveraging data, analytics and market-tested insights to achieve higher levels of price competitiveness and to become the authority in innovative merchandising programs. But what does this mean in practice? Well, it means that we start by collaborating with our suppliers to offer our customers a compelling and competitive core assortment that delivers a strong value proposition on key items. We then help our retail partners differentiate further with unique and locally relevant products supported by innovative merchandising programs that not only create value on the shelf but support an enhanced shopping experience in the store for consumers. For those customers with a broader set of conventional products, this may come to life through the activation of merchandising programs that more heavily emphasize value and the shoppers' trusted experience with key brands and products. For customers with a broader set of natural products, our merchandising programs may in turn lean in more on innovative new-to-market and locally relevant qualities of the products on display. And with our national scale, we can move quickly and with agility to leverage our learnings across all the markets and provide our customers wherever they may be with the best options to activate and grow their preferred brand set across their stores. For suppliers, our goal is simple. We want to be the easiest and most effective partner for them to access an increasingly attractive set of differentiated retailers and their shoppers. We help suppliers grow by delivering data-driven insights through the UNFI Insights platform, offering tailored go-to-market growth programs that address unique brand needs and by simplifying our processes to decrease time to shelf and help suppliers scale their brands faster. And this approach enables us to offer unique benefits to all suppliers from the largest CPG company to the smallest start-up. All of these companies desire broad reach, easy processes and support to drive growth. Let me give you 2 examples of this. We're helping larger brands like Califia Farms drive both unit and dollar growth through targeted placement and data-driven merchandising. And we're also investing in the next generation of innovators which are growing at and above average rate, as Matteo described earlier. Through customized programs such as UNFI Up Next, we help small emerging brands like Painterland Sisters access resources, relationships and data that they need to grow faster within our retailer network. But again, I could talk about it, but I'd rather you hear directly from both of these suppliers. So let's roll the video. [Presentation]

These examples are powerful reminders that partnering with UNFI can help everyone win. Retailers receive competitively priced, differentiated products and innovative merchandising product programs that help them drive shopper engagement and sales growth. Shoppers and stores discover authentic exciting brands that reflects their needs and values and suppliers build the brand equity that they seek for sustainable growth. As we look forward, we are continuing to strengthen our supplier experience through faster onboarding, better analytics and richer insights to make partnering with UNFI as seamless and impactful as possible. We want to be the growth partner of choice for every brand that wants to win in grocery. Beyond product assortment and innovative merchandising, we also help customers win by providing services that help them make their store operations stronger, smarter and more profitable. Our professional and digital services portfolio is one of the most exciting growth opportunities across our business. As you heard earlier, across customers that use our services, the average number is 2 to 3 compared to the highest use customers who average around 6. So we have a clear growth opportunity. We deliver solid value in this space today and are focused on continuing to drive penetration of our current services portfolio while developing new and relevant services that meet our customers' evolving needs. We think about our service offerings in 3 tiers. One, base services. These are the foundation of doing business with UNFI. So think about ordering, pricing and data exchange tools that simplify day-to-day operations. Two, premium services. These are value-enhancing offerings like payments processing, coupon management, planogram designs, all which save time and money and deliver value. And three, digital services. New and next-generation capabilities like UNFI, media network, digital coupons, e-commerce all which directly accelerate retail sales and help our customers compete in today's evolving digital marketplace. Now I'd like to highlight how we provide our full set of service offerings to our retail partner Niemann's. As you can see here on the slide, Niemann's has approximately 100 retail locations under several banners in the Midwest, and they leverage a broad set of UNFI services on top of our base services, to support their business. Some of our services, including payments and equipment purchases, help them lower the cost of running their stores. Other services, including coupon processing and shelf services, are helping them drive loyalty and an improved shopper experience at the shelf. And importantly, they are leveraging our digital services to help drive incremental revenue including them being one of our early adopters of the UNFI Media Network. While we have consistently grown our services business in the recent years, we continue to see opportunities to accelerate this growth, strengthen customer partnerships and drive higher profitability through deeper service adoption. And we're focused on doing this by leveraging better data visibility, ensuring we bring our full relevant service offering to our customers and driving customer specific value propositions. We're also focused on expanding our digital services solutions, leveraging AI and automated tools. For example, through our electronic shelf labels and dynamic pricing tools, we can enable real-time visibility and promotional flexibility at scale. And through our UNFI media network, we help suppliers gain targeted reach, closed-loop measurement and access to high-value audiences, putting their brands in front of consumers at the point of purchase, whether it's across website, apps or in-store. As we look to the future, we continue to curate this digital portfolio with intention. We want to make sure that every tool platform and data solution we launch creates value for our customers and helps them stay ahead of the digital wave. By bringing together retail media, analytics, loyalty and e-commerce into one connected ecosystem, UNFI can help retailers and suppliers lead in an ever-increasing digital marketplace and capture new growth where technology and consumer engagement intersect. We believe we are uniquely positioned to deliver a win-win-win value for our customers and for UNFI in this space. Let me now turn to private brands. These brands are one of the most important levers retailers can use to drive profitable growth, and shoppers are seeking the quality and value provided by private brands. These brands help retailers compete more effectively, improve margins and build long-lasting shopper loyalty. Now through our scale, we're able to see what works across thousands of stores and hundreds of categories. And we use that insight to create tailored private brand programs that reflect each retailer's specific growth strategy and help them meet their shoppers' preferences. We are focused on expanding our in-store presence across both natural and conventional product segments, ensuring that our private brand offerings create value wherever our customers compete. And we believe that our potential sales penetration in our addressable market can move higher, as you can see here and as you heard from Matteo earlier. Over 20% of U.S. grocery sales today are private brands and they're gaining share on the shelf. Our private brand portfolio is built to complement our customers' assortments. It combines scale, data-driven insights and merchandising expertise. Three things that uniquely position UNFI to help our partners succeed. And each of our brands serves a distinct purpose from value-oriented everyday staples to premium attribute-driven innovations. That clarity provides retailers with flexibility to design private portfolios that fit their competitive positioning, whether they're focused on affordability or sustainability. And we're not standing still. We are continuing to invest in innovation, reformulation and packaging redesigns that bring more modern relevance to each and every category we serve. Now for those of you here in the room, when you're on break, you maybe saw some of those products outside in the lobby. So if you haven't had a chance to sample our essential everyday or wild harvest products, I think you have a tote bag that came with your seat. Feel free to fill it up with some of those brands, and I encourage you to try them. They are delicious examples of the quality and innovation that define our brands plus portfolio. So now let's hear from one of our customers about how our private brands are boosting their growth. Please roll the video. [Presentation]

Private brands deliver yet another win-win-win. Retailers gain margin and loyalty, suppliers see category expansion and shoppers benefit from better products at a better value. We are confident that our continued focus on innovation and differentiation in Brands+ will remain a core growth driver in the years ahead. Across everything I've shared today, I hope you've heard a consistent theme and that is that our focus on delivering a compelling proposition that is driven by value and differentiation. We are working to partner with retailers to help them stand out and grow through competitive pricing, unique product assortments and innovative merchandising expertise. We are helping suppliers to scale their reach, build brand equity and accelerate innovation. And through our services and Brands+ offerings, we are helping our partners operate more effectively and create more value for their shoppers. Our commercial capabilities are strong. Our partnerships are deep and our opportunities across categories, brands and services are greater than ever before. But we also recognize there is a lot of work to do. And that is in this ever-evolving commercial landscape, it's incumbent on us to get better each and every day, and we are humbled by both the challenges and the opportunities that lay ahead. And I can tell you that our team is committed to building a UNFI that helps all of our customers and suppliers win together. Thank you again for your time. And now I'll turn it over to our Chief Information Officer, Mario Maffei.

Good morning. It's great to be with everyone today. You've heard a few of my colleagues talk about the capabilities we're building to create more value, effectiveness and efficiency for our customers, suppliers and company. Today, I'm excited to talk to you about how we're accelerating our technology capabilities for the benefit of all of our stakeholders. At UNFI, our technology strategy is designed to enable better business outcomes. We're focused on 3 key priorities. The first is simplicity. We're building a resilient, frictionless technology ecosystem with security at the core of everything we do. The second is performance. We're using technology to improve service levels and help our customers meet the digital challenges they face. And lastly, underpinning all of this is effectiveness and efficiency. We're creating a modern, integrated technology foundation to improve speed and business outcomes. We operate a large and complex supply chain with 49 distribution centers running virtually 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, moving nearly 3 million cases a day. And today, we use more than 475 different systems to run our business. To secure, maintain and advance an architecture at this scale, simplicity is critical. That's why we're focused on reducing our total number of systems. So we can create a frictionless, simplified experience for our customers, suppliers and associates. This allows us to create and realize more value for every dollar we invest in technology, which, in turn, allows us to continue investing in next-generation capabilities. Our infrastructure is critical to the businesses and communities we serve. It needs to be resilient, adaptable and scalable in support of our business strategy and we're investing with this in mind. The capabilities we can deliver through technology are a differentiator for UNFI, and we plan to grow this advantage to help our customers and suppliers more effectively compete in the marketplace. We're implementing several industry-leading technology platforms to do just that and with many of these solutions well underway. We've deployed Samsara's connected operations platform across our transformation fleet. And this is giving us greater visibility into our operations. We're now working to use that platform's real-time data and insights to improve driver safety and on-time delivery for our customers. You heard Matteo mentioned Relex, a predictive purchasing platform that makes inventory management more efficient. We're about halfway through this deployment, and we're already seeing this technology improve service levels for our customers while improving working capital efficiencies. Next, we have Manhattan Active, a cloud-native warehouse management system that helps us to seamlessly orchestrate workflows in our distribution centers. So far, we've driven hundreds of thousands of dollars in efficiency across the 4 DCs that have gone live to date. With the remaining network, we have a long runway to deliver more effectiveness and efficiency with each deployment. Finally, we began our journey to implement a strengthened technology foundation on SAP. This will allow us to significantly reduce the number of systems used to operate our network and, in turn, substantially reduce operating costs. It's early days. But with our recent successful go live of the SAP master data platform, our confidence is growing that we can effectively implement this technology across our network. Through these platforms, we're unlocking access to the data and insights that will most benefit our customers, suppliers and associates. We're implementing technologies that do more than just show us what's happening today. They will allow us to continuously improve our operations and the economics of our business over time. I'd like to show you just one example of a capability we're preparing to pilot called UNFI Endless Aisle. It's an example of how we can use technology solutions to add more value and drive simplicity for our customers and suppliers. Let's roll the video. [Presentation]

So exciting. So I've shared technologies we're already deploying or have deployed. As we look further out, we're beginning to see another wave of opportunity that we can connect those technologies that we're deploying with powerful artificial intelligence and analytics solutions. We see 3 key opportunities emerging. The first is embedding intelligence into how we operate our business. The potential for AI is immense, but it's costly, and there are risks. We mentioned how we're already using proven intelligence embedded into applications like Relex and Samsara to drive performance. We've also begun exploring intelligent agentic solutions that can make it easier for our customers to do business with UNFI. For example, leveraging AI to buy smarter and grow their business faster. Next, automation. We believe process automation can drive a step change in quality, throughput and speed to market. We have thousands of touch points within our supply chain and many still rely on paper trails and manual actions. We're working on ways to digitize and optimize common documents like a bill of lading, which will increase visibility and automate time-consuming manual work. This is just one example of the many examples we can digitize and automate in our business in the future. Then predictive capabilities. As we drive process automation and intelligence, we're seeing this open up the ability to use predictive technologies. In the future, predictive insights and processes may allow us to achieve greater business-to-business integrations between customers and suppliers, fueling more profitable growth for all of us. Through a strategic combination of third-party partnerships and internally developed capabilities, we've seen early successes that are increasing our confidence and we're in the beginning stages of using intelligence and automation solutions with our internal processes, and we're now starting to explore developing solutions to help our customers successfully manage the increasingly competitive and technology-driven marketplace. This will be a phased journey, and we believe we're taking the right actions at the right pace to ensure technology not only enables but also accelerate our performance for many years to come. I'd like to just recap the key points I've shared today. We're building a resilient frictionless technology ecosystem with security at the core to add value for our partners and improve our effectiveness and efficiency. With significant upside ahead of us, we believe better technology will be a foundational element of how we deliver better food and create a better future. Thank you. And now I'll hand it over to our President of Natural Products and Chief Supply Chain Officer, Mark Bushway.

Good morning. It's great to be here with you. Today, we've heard how UNFI is focused on becoming a stronger partner for our customers and suppliers. And you've heard how effectiveness and efficiency help us serve their needs better. Our supply chain is foundational to delivering on these goals. Over the next few minutes, I'll cover 3 things: our approach to driving value, effectiveness and efficiency across our supply chain, the progress we've made in the past 24 months and what's next. The initiatives that we believe will improve service for our partners while generating consistent leverage and free cash flow for our business. Now our supply chain is the engine that drives our strategy. It enables better service, lower costs and stronger partnerships. When we improve service, reduce costs and create more value for both sides of the supply chain, it translates directly into higher sales and profits for our customers. For UNFI, we see better working capital, lower operating expense as a percent of net sales and stronger cash generation. Our supply chain priorities are threefold. Safety. It's always first. We work to protect our people ensure their stability. Effectiveness, delivering the right product in the right quantity at the right time. And efficiency, optimizing our operations, improving our service and reducing costs. These 3 pillars reinforce each other. They're the foundation of our performance and the lens through, we make our decisions in supply chain every day. It all starts with ensuring our associates get home safe every day and that the food we move arrive safely to the communities we serve. So let's take a moment to hear more from UNFI safety leader, Tehzin Chadwick.

We are building a world-class safety management system that is rooted in shared responsibility and a strong culture to protect our associates, the communities in which we serve and to really drive operational excellence. Our customers and our suppliers expect us to keep their products and the reputation safe. We do that by anticipating risks before they occur. Everything from maintaining our supplier management program to ensuring that our facilities are clean and temperature-controlled to transporting the food safely to our consumers needs to all happen with safety top of mind. We always stay ahead of it so that our partners can really focus on growing their business. It's a real differentiator. Safety is not just about a compliance check box but becoming a value-added portion of our organization that helps to deliver on sustainable long-term growth.

Great. Over the past 24 months, we've made real progress through disciplined execution. We track effectiveness through fill rates and on-time delivery. For efficiency, some of the metrics we focus on include throughput and shrink as a percent of net sales. We've improved across all 4 metrics through a few specific actions. Implementing lean daily management which drives frontline problem solving. We also decentralized procurement to bring buying teams closer to our customers. Then we finally did optimizing our DC network for capacity productivity and a healthy return on investment capital while rolling out some of those new technologies Mario just talked about. These actions of improving service levels for our customers and suppliers, and they're translating into better working capital, stronger operating leverage and more free cash flow. One area where we've made real progress is what we call network optimization. For example, in the Northeast, we transformed our network by consolidating unit pick items from our natural DCs into 1 automated hub in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Carlisle now distributes a broader assortment to the Northeast market and ensuring customers receive their full case and unit picked items together for their natural and conventional products. Through these changes, we're working to give customers a more complete order with improved service level and accuracy while lowering our handling costs and increasing network capacity. In addition, we replaced our facility in York, Pennsylvania with a larger state-of-the-art facility built for growth in Manchester, Pennsylvania, adding full case automation. These changes have service levels, increased throughput, enhanced fulfillment capabilities and stronger asset usage while reducing complexity and costs. You've heard from Mario about some of the technologies we're now deploying in our supply chain. As he noted, we're taking a disciplined test, learning rollout approach to ensure service levels remain strong as we scale. Now I want to spend a moment highlighting some of these early impacts these technologies are making on our service levels and our results. With the deployment of Samsara's connected operations platform, we've started tracking our truck routes and customer deliveries in real time. We've already used this data to improve driver safety by 37% to date. And now we're beginning to use the insights to improve on-time deliveries to our customers. With the deployment of Relex, we've improved service levels while reducing inventory days on hand by half to a full day across the DCs that it has been implemented in so far with more opportunity ahead. In summary, we're seeing that advanced technology and disciplined processes are powerful when they're paired together. As we combine our automation solutions with our new lean process, we're empowering our associates to drive everyday improvements to the metrics that matter most and we're just getting started. Now to be clear, we're not satisfied yet because we know we can be even more effective and efficient. One of my mantras I tell my operators is the rent is due every day. It's our way of reminding ourselves that we have to earn trust from our customers, our suppliers and our associates, 365 days a year. So what's next? As we look ahead, we see opportunity to expand our automation into more DCs, continue to scale our AI-driven forecasting and replenishment tools, optimize our network to support growth and improve returns on invested capital and continue to embed lean daily management into all of our DCs. Each of these initiatives has multiple benefits. It strengthened service reliability for our partners, while lowering costs and supporting our long-term margin cash flow and cash flow goals. Now we're building distribution centers of the future driven by empowered people, disciplined processes and advanced technology. Now I'd like to share a video that brings the vision to life through the voices of several UNFI associates who are making it happen every day. Please roll the video. [Presentation]

Enjoy watching our employees in action inside of our distribution centers. We're confident in our path. Every step strengthens our commitment to safety, effectiveness and efficiency. And ultimately, it fuels the ability to create long-term value for everyone we serve. Now I'm going to turn it back over to Matteo.

Thank you, Mark. What an exciting future you just described for our supply chain. So you heard a lot from the leadership team today, and I want to bring it all together in terms of how our strategies and capabilities will be reflected in our financial outlook. Let me start off with a few key messages. First of all, we made good progress in executing on our strategy and have accelerated our expectation toward long-term goals. Two, discipline is a key focus as we scale in and we work to become more effective and efficient across the organization so we can best serve customers and suppliers. Third, today, we're introducing financial targets through fiscal '28 that demonstrate UNFI's strengthening financial profile with solid growth, improved operating leverage and profitability and continued strong free cash flow generation. And fourth, we expect to continue to strengthen our financial position, prioritizing reducing debt and leverage to get us under 2x while investing for the future. Our team is focused on delivering our commitments and we have a clear path to creating value for our shareholders today and tomorrow. When we look at our prior financial targets, successfully executing our strategy, to [ date ] has enabled us to raise and accelerate multiyear financial objective for several key metrics as we detailed on our fourth quarter earnings call and reiterated last week. If we look across these metrics, from fiscal '24 to fiscal '27, net sales is now expected to grow at a low single-digit rate versus flat in our initial expectations. In fiscal 2027, adjusted EBITDA is expected to be around $730 million, approximately $80 million higher than our initial objective. Free cash flow expectations are about $150 million higher for fiscal '26 and '27 at $300 million annually. And because of the stronger profitability and free cash flow, we expect to reduce net leverage to 2x by year-end fiscal '27, which is about a year earlier than our prior expectations. We've built a track record of delivering our financial commitments and we continue to take a disciplined approach to develop high confidence plans when multiple pass for achievement, which has been enabling us to consistently meet or exceed our targets. Now turning to our updated value creation framework. We're introducing financial targets through fiscal '28. And we expect sales to grow in the low single-digit range from fiscal '25 through fiscal '28 driven by higher growth in Natural. We expect adjusted EBITDA to grow in the low double-digit range as we become more effective and efficient and deliver operating leverage on incremental sales resulting in around 65 basis points adjusted EBITDA margin expansion from fiscal '25 through fiscal '28. And this will bring our fiscal '28 adjusted EBITDA margin to more than 2.4%. We expect free cash flow to be roughly $300 million per year on average. And combining the above, we anticipate net leverage to be below 2x and remain there through fiscal '28. We believe these targets are achievable and reflect a high confidence case where we have multiple levers within our control to achieve our financial objectives. And beyond fiscal '28 in a highly dynamic industry we envision significant further opportunities to improve the value we create for customers and suppliers. And we believe that our ability to leverage our talented team, lean processes and emerging technology will continue to drive growth and operating margin expansion. Let's now take a closer look at our single -- low single-digit multi-average growth rate for sales. Natural is expected to grow above the company average as we seek to an increase in business with new and existing customers and continue to do other project-based work for them. To support this growth, we have been adding capacity to our natural network and investing in automation to help deliver cost-effective growth and more benefit to our retailers. As you all know, some part of the food retail market have faced secular pressure, and we're working to deliver value, products, services and insights to help them differentiate, compete and profitably grow. And as we work to deliver this, we have also been taking action to optimize the portfolio to ensure we have the right long-term network capabilities to serve our customers where and how they need service. We're also working to restore our retail business, and we're optimistic that David Best with his local market knowledge and commercial expertise, will develop the right strategy to improve the competitiveness and performance of our stores. And as he does this, we expect this could provide us with a good playbook to help other customers that we serve. Underlying the path of these 3 operating segments is continued growth in our private brands and services business and enhanced merchandising capabilities. As we have discussed today, we're focused on enhancing these offerings to help our retailers more effectively differentiate and compete. Let's review how we expect to grow from roughly $550 million in adjusted EBITDA in fiscal '25 to approximately $800 million in fiscal '28. We have clear profitability drivers underlying our expectations that give us high confidence in our ability to deliver this target. Let's start with organic growth in our wholesale business. We expect this will be led by incremental natural organic and specialty product sales gains while leveraging fixed costs. Next, we project an increasing contribution from the value-added capabilities that we described today, particularly through increasing services and brand penetrations. Then higher productivity, supported by our operational discipline, managing the organizational structure and benefits from technology enhancements, all underpinned by a lean mindset, driving lasting changes across UNFI, including our specific fiscal '26 focus on managing indirect spend. And finally, supply chain effectiveness and efficiency outcomes that will be driven by ongoing network improvements and by efficiency gains from technology advancements such as automation. Now we plan that part of these positive adjusted EBITDA drivers will fund investments made in safety, labor and capabilities to support our growth and transformation efforts. And finally, we are not assuming any elevated procurement gains or insurance proceeds in our financial outlook. So taken together, this road map is expected to help us generate around 65 basis points of adjusted EBITDA margin expansion and deliver roughly $800 million in adjusted EBITDA by the end of fiscal '28, implying a low double-digit growth rate over 3 years. Now let's spend a moment on how we are improving the efficiency of our supply chain. DC productivity measure as throughput is a key metric that will help us define how we continue to modernize and optimize our supply chain. And we have multiple initiatives in place to deliver the improvement we are targeting in fiscal '26 and beyond. And these initiatives include: first, higher accuracy, speed and service levels from DCs through better training; two, improved inventory management, so our warehouses are not overstocked with product or lacking the items that customers order; three, more rigorous implementation of standard operating procedures. So everybody is working out of the same playbook, including lean daily management to create buy-in from the teams that are closest to what we do and can create solutions in real time that help us continuously improve. And lastly, as both Mary and Mark highlighted, we also have a long runway to realize benefits from our methodical technology deployments. During fiscal '25, we improved throughput around 5% from fiscal '24. And based on our operating plan for fiscal '26, we expect throughput to be up another 8% versus fiscal 2025. Now as we continue to become more effective and efficient company, we are working to eliminate waste, which is reflected in our P&L within both gross margin and operating expenses. Over the last 2 years, we have taken a programmatic approach to reducing OpEx as a percentage of sales, focused on reducing structural cost, and we expect to drive greater improvement in fiscal '26 and beyond. Our plan from fiscal '26 to fiscal '28 envisions reducing our OpEx rate at a similar magnitude to the reduction we expect from fiscal '24 to fiscal '26. And our programmatic approach consists of 3 key areas of focus. First, organizational efficiency. We remain focused on simplifying and optimizing our organization to enhance adaptability and responsiveness to support customers and suppliers and improve profitability. We believe there is an opportunity to continue to thoughtfully optimize our organization, building on the sustained workforce efficiency improvements we made over the last 2 years. Second, we established our value delivery office at the beginning of fiscal '25. This is a small cross-functional team focused on executing strategic projects to help support operational quality and discipline and drive margin improvement. Between fiscal '25 and '26, this team is expected to deliver over $100 million of adjusted EBITDA improvement across functional SG&A efficiency and network optimization. This network optimization has been proceeding ahead of our initial expectations with short paybacks on the restructuring charges we have incurred to realize this profitability improvement. And lastly, productivity. Increasing productivity comes in many forms, including network optimization and lean daily management. And we made strong progress on both and believe we have a long horizon to drive sustained productivity increase. So let's look at indirect spend. We continue to see significant opportunity to more efficiently manage our broader OpEx cost base of roughly $4 billion, and we are particularly focused on the opportunity to reduce indirect spending, which represents about half of total OpEx. So indirect spend includes expenses incurred as part of operations, but not directly related to the products and services that we sell to our customers. So think about areas as freight and transportation, facilities, technology and telecom and other third-party services. These are areas we plan to optimize through better purchasing, competitive bidding for many items and services and as you would expect, tighter spending controls. This is a major focus area of our value delivery office this year and is expected to extend into fiscal 2027. Free cash flow. Based on our improved adjusted EBITDA growth trajectory and the net leverage reduction, we expect to improve free cash flow to a $300 million annual level. This bridge shows the multiple levers we have used and will continue to use to drive free cash flow, starting with fiscal '25 as the base. We expect higher adjusted EBITDA and lower interest costs as we continue to reduce debt to help drive the roughly $60 million increase in annual free cash flow generation that we are projecting. Our plan also includes working capital investments to support safety, top line growth and higher cash taxes resulting from improved profitability. It also reflects continued capital investments to help deliver strengthening service levels, a well-maintained network and future growth. As I highlighted earlier, as we've optimized our network, we've also been able to refocus our capital investment, which, coupled with our disciplined underwriting process has resulted in lower total investment levels, but also rising investments on a DC level basis. So all in, we expect to drive free cash flow generation of approximately $300 million annually from fiscal '26 through fiscal '28. And this means our cumulative free cash flow from fiscal '26 to fiscal '28 is projected to be around $900 million. Now turning to our financial priorities. We will leverage our sustained improved free cash flow generation to continue to reinvest in our business while steadily reducing leverage and financing to strengthen our capital structure. Lower net debt, combined with rising profitability is expected to reduce net leverage to or below 2x by year-end fiscal '27. Reinvesting in our core business will continue to be a focus on an enduring basis to further strengthen the value we bring to our customers and suppliers and solidify our profitable long-run growth trajectory. So taking this all together, I hope you see what I see. We have a great deal of momentum and are confident in our strategy and where we are headed. We have made significant progress executing our strategy and materially accelerated our progress. Operating discipline remains our core focus as we build enhanced capabilities, and we're applying lean daily management to enhance effectiveness and efficiency, which is helping to also expand margins and free cash flow generation. Our fiscal '25 to fiscal '28 positions us well to deliver operating leverage with adjusted EBITDA expected to grow to approximately $800 million by fiscal '28. And importantly, we have multiple ways to achieve these financial objectives. Sustaining free cash flow and reducing net leverage to under 2 turns by year-end fiscal '27 remain a top priority and will strengthen our financial position, allowing us to reinvest in the business, creating then a virtuous cycle of value creation going forward. And finally, as we think about the high confidence plan that we have detailed today, we have a long path of value creation for our stakeholders, including our shareholders well beyond fiscal '28. So we hope that you found the information shared helpful. We know that you're all very busy, and we are grateful to have had the opportunity to bring our story to all of you. And with that, let's take a few moments to set up our Q&A and welcome CEO, Sandy Douglas and the rest of the UNFI senior management team to stage.

Good morning. Thanks again for joining us today. My name is Kristyn Farahmand and I'm Chief Strategy Officer of UNFI. I'll be moderating today's Q&A session with our senior leadership team. [Operator Instructions] With that, let's dive into Q&A. All right. Let's go to John first.

John Heinbockel, Guggenheim. So I want to dive into that wallet share opportunity, right, 25, 30 percentage points. How does that look across natural and conventional or just the customer base in general? How do you think about attacking that, right? What you need to prove, right, to customers, right, to get more wallet share? And then lastly, when I think about that drop size benefit, is it unfair to think about -- I don't know if it's a 2x or a 3x incremental margin on that drop size, it depends what they buy, but it's probably got to be at least 2x, if not higher.

Thanks, John. And I'll get some help from Louis on this and also from Matteo on the operating margin benefit. I think broadly, the wallet share opportunity is similar in natural and conventional. Effectively, what it is, is categories that we don't serve or do serve in the case of the 80% version. In the 80% scenario, you've got direct store delivered products that we wouldn't touch. So that's about the roof. But a lot of our growth over the last few years in terms of new business has come from doing more for existing customers. And as we've said before, which was the premise of the last part of your question, the operating benefits, if, in fact, we can deliver on the same truck is significant. And the other thing is it just -- it's an indication of the health of the relationship. So it's really good growth. Now we obviously have an active pipeline of new banners as well. But from our standpoint, the question is based on the fact that it's probably the most profitable growth we can have. And it is when you don't consider services and brands, which are particularly profitable expansion items. Louis, anything you want to add?

Yes, I would just build on that. I agree completely with Sandy. And as you think about the opportunity that we have to serve some customers with more categories that we don't serve today, part of that is leveraging the capabilities and insights to be able to bring the data to the retailers and share with them how participation in these categories and our ability to bring them those suppliers that best fit those needs of those categories helps enhance their growth strategy. And then certainly, our participation with brands as we see further penetration in our brands portfolio, that helps enhance the total wholesale percentage of categories that we're serving with natural and conventional product basis.

One other point before I go to Matteo on the financials of your question. We'll never get to 80% with every customer. Retailers, particularly the retailers that we're segmented to serve are going to be very, very active around local sourcing and other innovative products. And what we're going to be doing alongside them is seeing if we can add value to that process. Where we can, great opportunity. Where we can't, we move on to the next thing because their success ultimately is what we're in the business to support even when it doesn't include distribution for us. Anything on operating margin?

Yes, John, on the operating margin, when you think about the 65 basis points of expansion through fiscal '28, operating expenses are a very, very important part of that progression. And within the operating expenses, we talked about productivity and all the actions that we're taking there, but there is also the operating leverage that growth in natural and growth in those categories will drive.

All right. Let's go to Kelly, please.

Kelly Bania from BMO Capital. I think, Matteo, maybe you gave the example of the lean daily management example. I think that was a West Coast facility. But could you just talk a little bit more about how broad the rest of the DCs line up with those metrics? Was that kind of an average lean daily management example? Or is there a lot of variance depending on how they are, what type of facility? Maybe we could just go deeper into that lean daily management and the benefits from that.

Yes. And I'll ask maybe Mark also to add some perspective, Kelly. So within the 34 DCs that are on lean daily management, as you would expect, there are different stages of maturity and progress. But the exciting news is that now we have 34 of the 49 that every day measure their effectiveness and efficiency the same way that helps all of us detect opportunities and pressure points and get into a problem solving. So at altitude, when you sum it all up, we talk about a throughput improvement of 8% to come and lean daily management is clearly helping that. Shrink has been a positive trend in the last 24 months plus. And so that's another area where lean data management is helping and then on the fee rates and on-time deliveries, we've also seen how their ability to go into problem solving in real time is detecting the friction points and the unhappiness from the customers and allow us to jump to solutions. But Mark, anything you'd like to add?

The only add I would put on is, as we said, we're in different stages of it. And as the teams on the floor learn the process of lean, we continue to see the enhancements of it by DC by DC by different stages. So we're in the middle of it, and we're going to continue to roll it out, but we're excited for what we can see for the future.

Matteo, unfair qualitative question here, but where are we in this journey? Are we very early just early, medium, we've captured most of it or near the end.

I know literally about baseball, but I know the expression. So I would say early innings.

I would completely agree. I think it is a journey and it is very early, even in the DCs that we've said are implemented, even in that DC that we use, which had good metrics from the first year.

All right. Let's go to Mark, please.

Mark Carden from UBS. So I wanted to touch on some of the value-added services. You guys mentioned about 1/4 of the EBITDA today is coming from the value-added services. How are you guys progressing with adding more of your natural organic customers to your value-added mix? I still over-indexed to conventional today? And just how should we think about retail media's contribution to the growth over the course of the next 3 years?

So Mark, why don't you talk a little bit about the sales process that you and J&J are going through to sell services to natural customers? And then Louis, maybe you can take the broader strategic perspective.

Yes. For the services part for the natural customers, we talked about getting out and being able to have conversations on -- if we're going into Spark events, is that what you're talking about? Yes. So with our Spark events, being able to get our customers and our suppliers together, small customers, local suppliers and being able to have that conversation with each other and be able to sell them on the processes that we're working on as well as sell them services in that more dynamic area where we have 50 or 60 suppliers with a bunch of customers in one area, and we can really talk to those small customers about the services we can provide them. So -- and we're seeing a lot of -- we're in the early innings of that as well, and we've got more of them coming in the back half of the year.

Louis?

Yes. I think more broadly, strategically, the way I would think about how we're focused on advancing that penetration opportunity is to really make sure that what we're doing is tailoring what we're bringing from a services or brand perspective to each of the customers with a set of services that actually meets their specific needs. The way -- the services that a small natural customer needs are going to be different than that, which we offer some of the larger conventional product-based customers. And so part of it is understanding exactly what services we're offering to each type of profile of retailer that we see today and where we see value being created with a service with one profile, how can we scale that to other retailer customers in other regions and other parts of the country that would benefit from that same level of scale that they just can't capture on their own. And then the same thing would apply, I think, strategically as we think about retail media. We have been learning our way through that as we are also in early days in that process. But what we've learned is that different retailers have different technology capability to integrate. And thus, we need to tailor how we offer our retail media services to them, whether it's an on-site type of retail media, more off-site advertising or in some cases, it's just partnering with -- like David mentioned earlier, trying to find ways to target specific shoppers and provide abilities to have kind of closed-loop data that allows our retailers to see the results of their investment in a way that they wouldn't be able to just through their own independent tech stacks. And so there is not a single retail media offering. There is a variety of those capabilities as well as how we think about the broader Pro services growth.

Kind of the punchline on that is, I guess, 3 years ago, when we last quantified what services and brands represented as a percent of EBITDA, it was about 22%. I heard Matteo just say 25%, and we continue to expect to grow those at a faster rate than our total business across a wide range of levers. The other example, you saw Ben Naman from Natural Co-op Grocers talk about Field Day, and they're a very large customer of ours, and he absolutely believes he owns that brand. And so the level of engagement that's possible is very high, and there's an awful lot of opportunity for other customers along the path. So financial punchline is continuing to grow its share of our profitability at accretive margins and growing ahead of the company.

Can we go to Peter, please?

Peter Saleh, BTIG. Just going back to the conversation around lean management. I appreciate that we're in the early innings. What is the governor of faster implementation of lean management across the rest of the DCs? And can you talk about -- is this directly linked to the compensation of the employees at that DC? Meaning how do you incentivize them to hit these targets and move on to the next level?

I'll take the first pass and then Mark I love you to talk about the compensation mechanisms at the DCs and the incentives. So we go through a process where we want to test the DC readiness to implement LDM. So this is not a corporate-driven pushdown initiative, but it's really a way of working and thinking. And with that, we test if the DCs have enough processes, leadership engagement, time sometimes, right, to go through a change management process like LDM. That's why Peter, we never set a goal to be at 49 by end of fiscal '26 because we know that we would start embracing the very vicious idea of fake lean. We don't want people to do LDM because I like it or Sandy likes it or Mark likes it, but because they see the value of doing that in improving effectiveness and efficiency. So we could be at 49 by a certain point in the next 12 months. We could be at 49 in the next 24 months. It all depends on how gray and excited the local teams are to do LDM. Mark, do you want to comment on how you.

Yes, just to tee off that a little bit and give a little bit more is we want to be very structured on how we're doing it, and we do a circle back also to that DC to make sure it's implemented the way we said like said, it's not my idea. We want to make sure we have the buy-in of the distribution centers. People inside the distribution center talk about incentives is that they're very competitive. So all you need to do is put a red or a green up on the board, and they're very into trying to achieve those goals. And as we say, we continue to raise that bar. And it's not us, it's not meaning me. I don't call them and say, "Hey, you're green, push it up." they want to push the bar up. And once they do that, we know we've got lean management starting to work inside the DC, right? Because they're wanting to lift the bar, and we continue to push on that inside of our distribution centers.

Danielle, do you want to comment at all about how we compensate supply chain leaders?

Sure. It differentiates -- it's different between supervisors and general managers in the distribution center down to our forklift operators. So we have safety in most of our programs. We have unit-based incentives for some of our selectors, on-time delivery rates for our drivers, OpEx for our general managers. So it really differs across the organization, I would say, throughput and our unit-based incentives are specifically what you asked around compensation, and those do exist in most of our DCs that have those monitored. Mark, do you know how many DCs we have unit-based incentives in?

We have it in all of our natural DCs at this point.

So generally tied to the metrics you see on the board.

Can we go to Scott, please?

Thanks guys for this. It was great. So Scott Mushkin, R5 Capital. Sorry about that. Kind of a little bit of the elephant in the room. I'm going to probably to Matteo. The accounting has kind of come under some scrutiny and some reports that are out circulating. I just wanted to know if you guys had any thoughts about that. I think it was on the accounts receivable. People are talking about CapEx a little bit. I don't know if you have any thoughts you want to share with the audience on some of those negative reports. I mean, strangely enough, the stock has gone off today, actually.

Yes. I would say without doing a rebuttal, right, it would not be our policy or our style. But a couple of thoughts here. So on capital investments, first of all, we spent about $1 billion when you add up '23, '24, '25, and it is the usual envelope that we described of about 1/3 in safety and maintenance, about 1/3 in technology and 1/3 in automation and general modernization with dollars that could pour from a bucket to the other depending on a given year. But at altitude, $1 billion split in this way. On the depreciation comment and the reinvestment ratio, we booked about $240 million of depreciation last year. We spent $240 million of CapEx. So the reinvestment ratio of 1 is consistent with the framework of approximately 1% of top line that we have put out there. It's embedded in our financial outlook. It's embedded at $300 million sustained free cash flow through 2028. And then on receivables, in 2023, we added an AR monetization facility to our financial structure. And it's a facility that has a cost that is very competitive and in line with the cheapest one in our tower, which is the ABL. So obviously, as we said in the remarks, we plan to reduce our net debt and financing structure. And we've been working to remove customers from the AR monetization program that otherwise would grow as the customer grows because it's not a buy invoice factoring program, it's by a customer AR monetization program. But again, in the spirit of strengthening our balance sheet, our actions are focused on both reducing net debt and the AR monetization program.

And Matteo, just from an EBITDA adjustment perspective, company has been in a significant transformation phase. How would you comment on our policies around that?

I would say short paybacks. I mean we have seen the benefits of the network optimization efforts, the related restructuring, the cost to reduce layers in our organization with very quick paybacks. I mean we've been expanding margins consistently. We have a high confidence path to get to $800 million. So they all go through the scrutiny of high-impact, fast paybacks.

And I would just say very, very broadly, our eyes are very much on the long-term value we're creating in this company, and we apply a lot of discipline to the processes that are related to some of those questions and for obvious reasons. Ultimately, free cash flow is a very important metric, and it really doesn't -- it doesn't mislead. And the growth in it and the sustainable outlook for it continues to be one of the most important value drivers in the company.

I have a follow-up. I think I have a follow-up. But thank you for offering all that clarity. My follow-up is actually on the retail, more a little positive here. Sandy, I think you said it's not -- or have said it's not in your projections. But I'm sure it's in your compensation goals. So I was wondering if you could share what you think that in '28, what EBITDA could that business throw off if you're successful?

Sure, Scott. And I'm going to give him some air cover here. It very much will be, but his 3-year plan is in progress. And one of the things that David and I agree with is when you're approaching a turnaround and you have a high ambition, you want to under constrain the problem and focus on the things that matter the most. And so he is in the process, day 1 stores, engaging associates, letting everyone know how we really do believe in Cub, the inspiration of our franchisees, some of the early progress and just the way the network is starting to come together creates the opportunity to think in a different way about Cub. He will be working on that plan over the next few months, and we'll be in a position to be more articulate about it. But at this stage, I would just say we're excited about what he can do, but we haven't quantified it yet. So it wouldn't be appropriate really. I'm happy for you to make any comment you want. There's no numbers.

No. I mean the ambition is there, and you heard us talk about that. So we know what success looks like. We're going to be laser-focused on building a great plan to get there and look forward to sharing more as it comes together.

Getting the right people.

But as I did say, in terms of the outlook we provided, it's not embedded in it. And it's not necessary to assume success for that in order to have confidence in what we outlined for the Street today.

Can we go to Bill, please?

Bill Kirk, ROTH Capital Partners. As you focus on like the better-for-you and the more specialty assortment, you move away from some of the largest promotional dollar buckets from manufacturers. So how do you balance those focus and assortment consideration versus the promotional dollars that some of the conventional manufacturers would be sending?

Sure. It's a super good question. I wouldn't describe it as a shift in focus. It's more an analytical point that we think natural and organic are going to grow faster than the more kind of conventional products. I would expect -- and this is a crystal ball, but I would expect that the brand manufacturers and the conventional brands are going to be digging in for more growth. And to the extent that we can, with the new merchandising muscle that we're building, create programming that's accessible to retailers that are selling those products, we're going to be very aggressive about it. We just in communicating an outlook for 3 years, believe that natural organic and specialty will grow ahead of the company average kind of mid-single digit and conventional will be more stable.

Can we go to Tim, please?

So I apologize for stealing thunder from the 2026 Investor Day. But -- so here's my question. You have $1.9 billion of net debt. Your high confidence free cash flow plan for this year is $350 million for Q2 through Q4. So you $1.55 billion. So by my math, you need another $100 million if you deliver your high confidence EBITDA for '27 to get to your net debt target. So capital allocation is a very easy decision this year. There's -- you still have $382 million of term loan. It's high single digit, and you don't want that. So that's easy, right? But at the end of this year, I would assume by the end of this year, the term loan is gone, you'll flex the ABL a little bit to take out the last $30 million or $40 million. And then you have a tricky capital allocation decision for '26 calendar fiscal '27. So I just wanted to tee up that question of what do you do with the cash, I guess, with the notion that you've just painted a normalized free cash flow yield, which in this year, it's not necessarily normalized because there's a huge contribution from working capital. But at the end of your plan, it is normalized and most stocks don't usually trade at a 15% free cash flow yield. So with all of that preamble, I'd like to hear about the upcoming capital allocation decision.

Well, Tim, there is a lot there, but let me share a couple of thoughts. So first of all, we really think first in terms of cash flow from operations. And then within the cash flow from operations, we decide every year based on safety maintenance needs and then technology and growth investments, the last 2 leading to hurdle the double-digit rate, how much do we want to spend and how much can we execute, right? Both questions being very important. Once we define the envelope, then yes, we get to the free cash flow $300 million sustained through 2028. And right now, the way we're thinking is staying focused on deleveraging in the broad definition back to Scott's question. So net debt, but also looking at other financial structure that we put in place. And then by the time we get there, we'll know what are the different optionalities between more organic growth, more organic investments versus alternatives to return cash to shareholders. But it's like going almost in 2 steps. Let's get first to the 2.5 and the 2x and sustain and then give us the time to decide how we want to deploy that extra capital. Sandy, anything you would add?

Yes. I mean the operator in me wants to reinforce something that I have believed for a long time and believe even more now, and I think we evidenced today, which is that actually capital dollars are not the scarcest resource. It's the quality of talent and capacity to execute well. And one of the things I think this company is starting to demonstrate is that we're building some significant strength around execution. And so pacing becomes a function of that, maybe even more so than dollars that you might put against the next initiative. That's the operator in me. The CEO in me says, listen, we think the opportunity to get to our future best has years and years ahead. The challenges that our customers face in the marketplace require UNFI and our competitors to step up. And we see that bar raising and we're ready to meet the challenge in what I think will be a very competitive way. On the other side, we have $4 billion of spend. And the notion that we would ever tap out the ability to make that more effective and efficient is not -- that's not a concept that we understand. So we will invest capital to get superior returns to ensure safety and quality. And then as we evolve and the capital structure changes, we'll do whatever it takes to maximize shareholder value consistent with those other priorities in balance. The long runway is the net effect of that.

Can we go next to Leah, please?

Yes, Leah Jordan, Goldman Sachs. Thank you for doing this today. This has been great. Just seeing if you could provide more detail on the growth drivers for the natural business. How much is reliant on new and innovative products versus core SKUs in the category? What's going to drive the outsized growth there? And then on the wallet share opportunity in natural, how much of it is maybe retailers that haven't focused on the category, increasing our focus there, just given the high customer demand? Like how much of it is that versus where you're already doing more with who you're doing with today?

Yes. Super set of questions there. It's almost a brand management question relative to the category. Is it -- and the first answer would be new products are going to continue to drive growth. It's very much an innovation and discovery ethos in the natural, organic and specialty. If you go out to Expo West in the first quarter, and there's 100,000 people there looking at all the new products. It's why the endless aisle technology initiative that we showed you a video on is important because those items deserve sunshine, but they don't necessarily deserve a slot in the DC yet. And so discovery and forging, which is a key merchandising muscle in natural and organic, we now have a way to activate that and to make that possible for customers. So a good bit of growth is new. There'll be a lot of energy and continuing energy. The second component is there's going to continue to be growth with consumers adopting healthier and better-for-you products. We think that is a secular tailwind that will last for a while. That will show up in vertical growth of the pure-play natural retailers, and it will show up in our more conventional customers assorting in incremental ways. I mean we think one of the big opportunities for Cub is to really strengthen the natural organic and specialty assortment, for example. So there's multiple ways for us to perform into those trends with the industry. And then to the extent that we can serve it better than others, perhaps we can grow a little faster. But in our algorithm, we put sort of industry outlook in terms of sales.

Could we go to the gentleman in the back, this will be our last question.

All right. Alex Slagle from Jefferies. A question on retail media networks and grocery in the industry overall, sort of kind of wondering how big this is right now, how fast it's growing, where UNFI sits in that spectrum at this point and kind of what you see on the path ahead?

Yes. So we don't obviously talk about the customers or disclose the size of the partnerships that we have, but it is a significantly important portion of how shoppers are shopping. So I would say it's less around the size of retail media and more the size of where shoppers are making their choices around purchasing and where they're seeing the promotions that activate those purchase actions. So our position has been to make sure that where there is an opportunity for us to bring scale and technology to those customers that don't have the innate ability to do it themselves, and partner that with suppliers who are trying to bring their products into this ecosystem of retailers that we serve that are unique and special. Those are the connection points that we're trying to make. And so the focus is around the value we create, not necessarily the number of store counts that we generate with it. But that leads to what I said earlier, which is understanding that there's different components. Retail media is not just one brush. There are different ways to access that, whether it's pure on-site technology that's being used, off-site, which is very different in its nature or even simply activating, as we talked about earlier, targeted consumer search so that you're able to bring products and/or programs to those consumers in a more targeted way. And right now, we have a core set of retailers that rely on us to bring that scale to them and access to that revenue stream that they otherwise, frankly, would not have the capability or the financial ability to build that stack for themselves.

And Alex, I guess one way to help you all think about what role we play is that we're out there with a kind of a vision of a digitally enabled store, looking for technology providers that may be best-in-class and then creating scale in terms of building partnerships with them and then helping them onboard with our retail system. And so we're kind of in the middle of the marketplace there, trying to help independents move faster down that path so that they can be as competitive as possible. And again, we see that as a solid part of the growth of our services portfolio going forward. So Kristyn, that was our last question.

That was. Before I turn it over to Sandy for some closing remarks, I just want to remind everyone, please fill your tote bag on the way out with the products and the lobby. And also, we'll be hosting a lunch afterwards for everyone attending in person to continue the conversation and to get to know some of our other team members. I'll turn it back to Sandy.

Thank you. And as we conclude today, I want to leave you with a brief summary of what we've covered and most importantly, where we're going. The strategy, we think, is clear. We're focused on adding value to customers and suppliers. And whatever challenges that, that faces, we have an ambition to do that at very high levels going forward in very different ways that we've gone through today. And at the same time, continue a relentless pursuit of effectiveness and efficiency. We've made some progress. You can see that in our performance over the last couple of years, but we see even more opportunity in the 3-year period we focused on here, but well beyond that for this company to continue to get better and to create more value, more effectiveness and more efficiency. And it's needed. It's needed by our customer base. It's relevant, and we're focused on doing it. I think another point I would make about the marketplace, though, and we tried to show this today is there are a lot of retailers out there in the all other that are doing very well. And we're designing ourselves to add value to them. So it's not a big red ocean out there and just 4 winners. There's a whole lot of retailers that are doing extremely well, and we're designing ourselves to be helpful to them. And to the extent that we have customers who are not doing as well today, but they want to do well tomorrow, where we have massive energy for that process as well, including a company-owned one we use as an example today. We believe our focused strategy and operational plan will lead to long-term profitable growth, operating leverage for the business. And based on the solid foundation that we built, we're excited about our high confidence plan for the next 3 years, low single-digit annual top line growth, double-digit average annual adjusted EBITDA growth and strong annual free cash flow. I guess my #1 reason why I'm so confident about all that we've learned, the team that we've built, the progress that we've made and the opportunity we have ahead is this group of people and many of them over there. We have an amazing team, and it is a competitive advantage, I believe. And I think a lot -- we talked earlier about being what we believe is a good company today. We do think we're a good company. But we think we can build a great company, a great company as defined by our customers, by our suppliers, by the communities where we operate and by our shareholders. And we continue to be committed to delivering that. We're proud of what we've accomplished so far, but even more energized about what we have ahead. So on behalf of everybody at UNFI, thanks so much for investing your time with us today. We appreciate it. We appreciate your investments, and we look forward to reporting out to you in March. So have a happy and healthy holiday season, everyone, both here in New York and out there on the web. Thanks, everyone.