The Chefs' Warehouse, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Chef's Warehouse second quarter 2025 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 second quarter 2025 earnings press release. It can also be found at .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 historical adjusted net income, adjusted earnings per share, adjusted operating expenses, adjusted operating expenses as a percentage of net sales and as a percentage of gross profit, net debt leverage and free cash flow. These measures 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 and second quarter 2025 earnings presentation. 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. For a portion of our discussion this morning, we will refer to a few slides posted on the Chef's Warehouse website under the investor relations section titled second quarter 2025 earnings presentation. Please note that these slides are disclosed at this time for illustration purposes only. 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 2025 earnings call. Second quarter business activity displayed typical seasonality as revenue and profitability improved across our network. Our operating divisions, domestic and international, delivered strong unit volume and unique item placement growth and managed pricing effectively while providing our customers with high quality product and high value service during the quarter. I'd like to thank all the Chef's Warehouse teams from sales, procurement, operations to all the supporting functions for their dedication and contribution to a strong second quarter and first half of 2025. During the second quarter, Chef's Warehouse achieves the Great Place to Work certification for the fourth consecutive year. We view this certification as recognition of our unique culture and our focus on people as our greatest asset in dynamic and competitive food away from home industry. All of us at Chef's Warehouse recognize and give thanks to our customers and supplier partners as support and confidence in our people, quality and diversity of products, a high touch, flexible distribution platform continues to drive our company forward. As discussed on our first quarter call, as part of the process of integrating our Hardee's operation in Texas with our legacy CW specialty and protein operations, we have taken a number of actions to merge our culture's streamlined operations and drive both top line and bottom line improvements as we make progress creating the Chef's Warehouse model in Texas. This has included the attrition of a non-core commodity protein program during the first quarter and the subsequent elimination of a non-core specialty produce processing and packaging program early in the second quarter. These actions are aimed at creating distribution capacity for specialty category and customer growth, operating cost efficiency and improved profitability as we continue to scale in the Lone Star State. As such, given these non-core programs are high in case and pounds volumes, we will present price and volume metrics as reported and also excluding the impact of these changes to present more representative -over-year price inflation and volume change for our business overall. With that, please refer to slide three of the presentation. A few highlights from the second quarter include .4% growth in net sales. Specialty sales were up .7% over the prior year, which was driven by unique customer growth of approximately 3.6%, placement growth of .7% and reported specialty case growth of 3.5%. Excluding the elimination of the Texas Produce Processing and Packaging Program, specialty case growth was .8% versus the prior year quarter. Pounds and center of the plate were approximately .0% lower than the prior year second quarter. Excluding the attrition related to the Texas Commodity Protein Program, center of the plate pounds growth was .8% higher than prior year second quarter. Gross profit margins increased approximately 59 basis points. Gross margin in the specialty category increased approximately 59 basis points as compared to the second quarter of 2024, while gross margin in the center of the plate category increased approximately 56 basis points -over-year. Jim will provide more details on gross profit and margins in a few moments. Now please refer to slide four for an update on certain of our operating metric improvements. In summary, chart one shows continued improvement in gross profit dollars per route. Second quarter 2025 trailing 12 months was .8% higher versus full year 2024 and .2% higher than 2019. Chart two shows second quarter 2025 trailing 12 months adjusted operating expense as a percentage of gross profit dollars improvement by 69 basis point versus full year 2024 and 160 basis points versus 2019. Second quarter 2025 trailing 12 months adjusted EBITR per employee increased 7% versus full year of 2024 and 26% versus 2019. 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? Thank you Chris.