Sprouts Farmers Market, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Sprouts Farmer's Market's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Susanna Livingston, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased you have taken the time to join Sprouts on our fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. Jack Sinclair, Chief Executive Officer, and Chip Malloy, Chief Financial Officer, are with me today. The earnings release announcing our fourth quarter and full year 2021 results The webcast of this call and quarterly slides can be accessed through our investor relations section of our website at investors.sprouts.com. During this call, management may make certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our expectations for 2022 and beyond. These statements involve a number of risk factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our SEC filings, along with the commentary on forward-looking statements at the end of our earnings release issued today. Our remarks today include references to non-GAAP measures. For reconciliation of our non-GAAP measures to the GAAP figures, please see the tables in our earnings release. In addition, because our results for 2020 were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, this presentation will also include certain comparisons to results in 2019. As a reminder, to account for the 53rd week in fiscal 2020, we shifted each week back one week, thereby ignoring the first week of fiscal 2020 to better align holidays for comparison purposes. Because of this, the two-year stat comp will not be the simple addition of two periods. For more information, can be found at our investors.sprouts.com under additional reports if needed. With that, let me hand it over to Jack.

Thank you, Susannah, and good afternoon, everyone. We're pleased to report that our results for the fourth quarter were better than we anticipated for both sales and earnings, and we're encouraged by the fact that our quarterly comp transactions turned positive. 2021 was a year of meaningful accomplishments for the Sprouts team, while at the same time, we successfully navigated a very challenging retail environment. During the year, we opened 12 new stores, remodeled one and relocated one, of which four were in our smaller store format, and are encouraged with their initial results. We made significant progress towards filling our pipeline of future store openings, opened two new distribution centres, launched over 5,700 new products, and issued a fulsome ESG report, which resulted in a AAA rating from MSCI, just to name a few. I'm excited about the platform we're building and where we can take it in 2022 and beyond. Going forward, creating more meaningful messaging about our customer proposition, densifying our store base in established markets, and extending our reach to new customers in new markets will help us to continue to profitably grow. To that end, I'm thrilled to announce that Nick Conant will join our team in March as President and COO. I'm looking forward to Nick's leadership over the areas of marketing, merchandising and operations. Nick brings a wealth of experience in these areas with deep, deep retail knowledge from industry-leading companies such as Target and Petco. As we enter our 20th year as a Specialty Grocer, the bolstering of our team allows us to move our strategy forward and fulfil our mission of providing healthy living options for less to more people. Before providing more details relating to the quarter's activities and strategic performance, I'd like to turn it over to Chip, who will review our financial results for the quarter and full year, as well as provide our 2022 outlook.