The Chefs' Warehouse, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to Chef's Warehouse Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Alex Aldis, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary, and Chief Government Relations Officer.

Please go ahead, sir. 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 fourth 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 in 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 fourth 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 fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. Fourth quarter business activity continued the return to more normal seasonality heading into the year-end period as celebrations and event-related business continued to build upon emerging third quarter trends. We are extremely proud of our team's execution during the fourth quarter, especially their ability to overcome challenging weather across our markets in mid to late December. Our people continue to drive the Chef Warehouse high quality product and high touch service model to our 40,000 plus customers and we are grateful to each and every one of them for contributing to a strong performance rounding out 2022. A few highlights from the fourth quarter as compared to the fourth quarter of 2021 include 22.7% organic growth in net sales. Specialty sales were up 34.2% organically over the prior year, which was driven by unique customer growth of approximately 18.9%, placement growth of 14.5%, and specialty case growth of 19.1%. Organic pounds and center of the plate were approximately 15.2% higher than the prior year fourth quarter. Gross profit margins increased approximately 116 basis points. Gross margin in the specialty category decreased 91 basis points as compared to the fourth quarter of 2021, while gross margin in the center of the play category increased 133 basis points year over year. Jim will provide more detail on gross profit margins in a few moments. As previously announced, during the fourth quarter, we are excited to enter the dynamic markets within the United Arab Emirates. Qatar and Oman with our acquisitions of Chef's Middle East. We look forward to supporting Steve Pyle and the CME team as we expand our capacity in the region, grow categorically, and leverage our combined strengths over the months and years to come. In addition to our expansion outside North America, during the quarter, we added a few key components to our East Coast markets with the addition of the Guaranteed Fresh Produce Company, and Down East Seafood. Guaranteed Fresh is a specialty produce company located in Cape Cod of New England serving primarily independent restaurants. We anticipate folding their operations into our new Bradford, Massachusetts produce and specialty operation in the coming months. Down East Seafood is a fresh seafood processing company located near our flagship chef warehouse facility in the Bronx, New York. Adding fresh seafood in the New York metro market provides us with another key step in building out our growing center of the plate capabilities as we continue to add categories and customers in these key markets. In the southern New Jersey and Philadelphia market, we recently signed a lease for a 175,000 square foot facility. This new building will consolidate service to the greater Philly area and the southern central New Jersey parts of our business. Once fully operational, this will allow for a more efficient distribution model in the region and will provide additional capacity for growth in our New York metro area and mid-Atlantic markets going forward. Our new facility in Florida is substantially complete, and we expect to move in by the end of the first quarter of 2023. 2022 was a stellar year for our company, for our people, and for our customers and supplier partners. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, our teams continued to execute at a high level to ensure that we brought the highest quality products to the market and maintained a high-touch delivery for our customers. We kept the balance sheet strong. We got ahead of the labor constraints associated with the snapback in demand, and we restarted investment in talent and capital deployment to build out our LA and Florida expansion facilities In 2022, we started the process of mining these investments, and our teams delivered strong organic growth, complemented by adding key acquisitions to multiple domestic markets, as well as our foray into the global specialty food distribution arena. As we continue to grow, Chefs will remain the most unique food service partner to upscale independent establishments and the world's top artisan food producers. We will continue to enhance our business model as a family of brands and companies, laser focus on the high end with an unmatched hybrid sell and service model. We will continue to make investments in facilities and market expansion, operational technology, and our customer-facing digital platform to provide improving efficiency for all CW stakeholders. Our people remain our greatest asset and source of our differentiation from the rest of the food service industry. We are focused on adding, retaining, and developing the best culinary and operational talent in the markets we serve. Our teams have never been more excited to drive Chef's Warehouse growth into 2023 and beyond. 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?