The Chefs' Warehouse, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Chef's Warehouse first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal conference specialists by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Alex Aldis, General Counsel. 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 first quarter 2023 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 under 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 first 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 first quarter 2023 earnings call. Customer demand was strong during the first quarter of 2023, despite several significant weather events, especially in our West Coast markets. Revenue trends improved gradually from January into February and March as dining away from home and the upscale casual to higher end customer segments continue to grow both in terms of new customer openings and placements per customer. In addition to our organic growth, we completed several acquisitions in important growth markets such as Texas and California as we continue to enhance our strategy of expanding market share in the regions we serve, category growth to grow relevance with our customers, and driving synergies via facility investments, consolidation, and operational technological improvements. A few highlights from the first quarter as compared to the first quarter of 2022 include 17.1% organic growth in net sales, Specialty sales were up 15.9% organically over the prior year, which was driven by unique customer growth of approximately 21.2%, placement growth of 18.7%, and specialty case growth of 16.8%. Organic pounds in the center of the plate were approximately 14.4% higher than the prior year first quarter. Gross profit margins increased approximately 64 basis points. Gross margin in the specialty category increased 65 basis points as compared to the first quarter of 2022, while gross margin in the center of the play category decreased 68 basis points year over year. Jim will provide more detail on gross profit and margins in a few moments. As previously announced, we closed a number of key acquisitions during the first quarter and in the first few weeks of the second quarter of 2023. In late January, we added Mike Hudson Specialty Foods located in the Napa Valley region to our Northern California business. Additionally, during the second quarter, we acquired Greenleaf Produce and Specialty Foods. Greenleaf is located in Brisbane, California, and provide chefs with a robust produce and specialty partner, both complementing and enhancing our presence in the broader Bay Area. The addition of these companies and brands to our portfolio provides us with a great platform for category growth, cross-selling opportunities, and synergies across many of the vibrant markets in the region. In late March, we closed the acquisition of Hardee's Fresh Foods, a premier fresh food distributor with deep local roots in Dallas, Houston, and Austin, Texas. The acquisition also includes Texas Harvest Company, a value-added process division in Houston. The addition of Hardee's comes at a great time in the Chef's Warehouse growth story in the region. Our specialty broad-line facility continues to grow at a fast pace, and we recently opened our brand-new state-of-the-art Allen Brothers processing operations located in Dallas. Together and with a continuous focus on investing in people and facilities, the Chef's Warehouse, Allen Brothers, and Hardee's will be a triple force of unparalleled quality and uncompromised service, which will benefit our customers in Texas and accelerate growth throughout the region. The decision we made to invest in talent and facility expansion during the challenging years impacted by COVID, combined with strong local leadership, has allowed us to continue accelerating both organic and acquired growth in a very controlled manner across our platform and markets. During the first quarter, we began the phase move-in process into our new 200,000-square-foot facility in Florida. Our specialty business is operational, and we expect center-of-the-plate processing for both meat and fresh seafood to start operations in the coming months. As part of this move, we are fully consolidating our specialty sales and operations, our protein processing plant located in southern Florida, and portions of our fresh seafood processing operations located in the central region of the state. This new facility will provide ample capacity for category and customer expansion, synergistic growth with our key categories, and processing operations in one location with ample room to add fold-in acquired growth for years to come. As we are closing on a six-month since Chef's Middle East joined our family of companies and brands, we are pleased with every aspect of our integration. Our shared culture, vision, and go-to-market approach has provided a solid transition and roadmap to our plan for growth in the region. CME's performance has exceeded our expectations and the region continues to display significant growth, both demographically and economically. We are currently in the design phase of our planned facility expansion in Dubai, and we look forward to continued success and growth to come. I would like to thank each and every one of our 4,000-plus team members for their dedication and commitment to excellence that drive the Chef's Warehouse high-quality and high-touch service model. providing an ever-evolving platform for growth for Chef's Warehouse, our customers, and our supplier partners. We are beyond excited to be certified by Great Place to Work for the second year in a row. This is the result of continuous efforts to place our talent at the epicenter of our operation and at the heart of who we are as a company. Whether it is in actions around our workplace environment, our employee benefits, talent development, and training and investing in our team members' career path, we aim to excel and surpass expectation as a true employer of choice. 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?