The Chefs' Warehouse, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the SHIP WeHouse second quarter of 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all attendees are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require assistance from the operator, you're welcome to press Start and then 0 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. But now to hand over to your host, Mr. Alec Elders, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of the Shakespeare House.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. With me on today's call are Chris Pappas, Founder, Chairman and CEO, and Jim Letty, our CFO. By now, you should have access to our second quarter 2022 earnings press release. It can also be found at www.chefswarehouse.com under the Investor Relations section. Throughout this conference call, we will be presenting non-GAAP financial measures, including, among others, historical and estimated EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA, as well as both historical and estimated adjusted net income and adjusted earnings per share. These measurements are not calculated in accordance with GAAP and may be calculated differently and similarly titled non-GAAP financial measures used by other companies. quantitative reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures appear in today's press release. Before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our estimated financial performance. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Some of these risks are mentioned in today's release. Others are discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, which are available on the SEC website. Today we are going to provide a business update and go over our second quarter results in detail. Then we will open up the call for questions. With that, I will turn the call over to Chris Pappas. Chris?

Thank you, Alex, and thank you all for joining our second quarter 2022 earnings call. Late first quarter business strength continued into the second quarter as the combination of strong consumer demand, new customer openings, and increased dining capacity led to consistent growth in revenue trends as we entered the late spring and summer season. Despite sequential deflation in certain center of the plate categories, Overall, pricing remained firm and incremental gains in volume contributed to sales growth during the quarter. Although not back to pre-pandemic levels, moderate improvement in hospitality and event-related business was evident as the quarter progressed. A few highlights from the second quarter as compared to the second quarter of 2021 include a 36% organic growth in net sales, Specialty sales were up 52.2% organically over the prior year, which was driven by unique customer growth of approximately 35.9%. Placement growth of 54.6% and specialty case growth of 34.8%. Organic pounds in the center of the plate business was approximately 14.2% higher than the prior year second quarter. Gross profit margins increased approximately 140 basis points. Gross profit in the specialty category decreased 70 basis points as compared to the second quarter of 21, while gross margin in the center of the plate category increased 230 basis points year over year. Jim will provide more detail on the gross profit margin in a few moments. We are excited to announce the addition of two acquisitions completed during the second quarter and one completed just recently in July. University Foods is a specialty broad-line distribution company located in Southern California. We welcome Dean Trara and his team into the CW family, and we expect to fold their operation into our new Los Angeles Distribution Center in the coming weeks. We are also excited to add Alexis Specialty Foods to our Northwest region. Located in Portland, Oregon, we will combine Alexis with our CW specialty business serving Portland and Seattle and look forward to driving significant growth in these key markets going forward. In Florida, we added Master's Purveyors, a center of the plate distribution company operating out of the Tampa area to our portfolio of categories and brands in the region. Masters was eventually combined with our seafood processing operation to bolster our growth in the central to northern regions of the state, complementing our expanding and high-growth specialty and protein business in South Florida. Each of these acquisitions are important additions to the CW portfolio and facilitate growth in key regions and create operating leverage as we grow into our expanding distribution capacity across our footprint. I would like to express sincere thanks to the entire Chef's Warehouse team for delivering on a great second quarter performance and continuing to provide our customers with the premium product and service they have become accustomed to over our 37 years of operations. With that, I'll turn it over to Jim to discuss more detailed financial information for the quarter and an update on our liquidity. Jim?