The Chefs' Warehouse, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Chef's Warehouse fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this call 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. Thank you. Please go ahead.

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 2025 earnings press release. It can also be found at www.chefswarehouse.com under the Investor Relations section. Throughout the 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, net debt leverage, and free cash flow. These measures 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 and fourth 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 fourth 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 fourth 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 fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. Business activity and demand remain consistently strong through the fourth quarter amidst a healthy environment for our core upscale casual to higher-end dining customer base. Our teams across domestic and international markets provided excellent product and service amidst a busy holiday season. During the quarter, we continue growing market share, closing the year with strong year-over-year organic volume growth, unique item placements, and new customer acquisition. I'd like to thank the entire Shep Warehouse team for their dedication and commitment in delivering a strong 2025 for our team members, our customers, and supplier partners, and our shareholders. As a reminder, earlier in 2025, we eliminated two non-core programs, in Texas that came with the acquisition of Hardee's in 2023. These programs, one protein program focused on high volume, low dollar poultry and other, a produce processing and packaging program together only represented approximately 1% of our full year revenue. As such, until we lap this attrition in the second quarter of 2026, we will present price and volume metric as reported and also excluding the impact of these changes to present more representative year-over-year price inflation and volume changes for our business overall. With that, please refer to slide three of the presentation. A few highlights from the fourth quarter include organic net sales grew 9.7 percent, organic specialty sales were up 6.4 percent over the prior year, which was driven primarily by unique placement growth of 4.2%, reported specialty case growth of 3.3%, and price inflation. Excluding the elimination of the Texas Produce Processing and Packaging Program, specialty case growth was 5.4% up versus the prior year quarter. Unique customers grew 1.2% year over year. Reported unique customer growth was impacted by the Texas commodity poultry attrition. Excluding this impact, fourth quarter year-over-year unique customer growth was approximately 3.5%. Pounds and center of the plate were approximately 2.4% lower than the prior year fourth quarter. Excluding the attrition related to the Texas commodity poultry program, center of the plate pounds growth was 7.5% higher than prior year fourth quarter. Gross profit margins decreased approximately eight basis points. Gross margin in specialty category increased approximately 45 basis points as compared to the fourth quarter of 2024, while gross margin in the center of the plate category decreased approximately 50 basis points year over year. Jim will provide more detail 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. Chart one shows continued improvement in gross profit dollars per route. Fourth quarter 2025 trailing 12 months was 6.2% higher than full year 2024 and 7.4% higher than 2023. Chart two shows fourth quarter 2025 trailing 12-month adjusted EBITDA per employee increased 13% versus full year 2024 and 27% versus 2023. Fourth quarter 2025 trailing 12-month adjusted operating expenses as a percentage of gross profit dollars improvement by 176 basis points versus full year 2024, and 200 basis points better versus 2023. Before I turn it over to Jim, I'd like to highlight some of the accomplishments our teams across all divisions of Chef's Warehouse delivered in 2025. They delivered 9.1% full year organic revenue growth, exceeding 4 billion in revenue for the first time in our history. Approximately 18% increase adjusted EBITDA growth, adjusted EBITDA margin of 6.2%, and adjusted EPS growth of 29% versus 2024. Strong free cash flow generation, providing for continued investment in regional growth with the acquisition of Italico Specialty Foods in Colorado. With continued investment in distribution center capacity expansion and facility facility consolidation, strengthening our balance sheet with net debt to adjusted EBITDA approaching two times leverage, and the return of cash to shareholders via our share buyback program. Once again, I thank all of our teams across Chef's Warehouse for their continued investment in talent, technology, category growth, and operational efficiency. All these areas and many more allow our businesses to continue to provide our growing customer base with the highest quality product and service, supplier partners with market share expansion, and our team members with opportunities for career enhancement. 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?