Performance Food Group Company

fiscal year Q4 2025 earnings conference call. If you would like to ask a question at the conclusion of prepared remarks, please press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad at any time. I would now like to turn the call over to Bill Marshall, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations for PFG. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you and good morning. We're here with George Holm, PFG's CEO, Patrick Hatcher, PFG's CFO, and Scott McPherson, PFG's COO. We issued a press release this morning regarding our 2025 fiscal fourth quarter results, which can be found in the investor relations section of our website at pfgc.com. During our call today, unless otherwise stated, we are comparing results to the results in the same period in fiscal 2024. Any reference to 2025, 2026, or specific quarters refers to our fiscal calendar unless otherwise stated. The results discussed on this call will include GAAP and non-GAAP results adjusted for certain items. The reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the corresponding GAAP measures can be found at the back of the earnings release. Our remarks on this call and in the earnings release contain forward-looking statements and projections of future results. Please review the cautionary forward-looking statement section in today's earnings release and our SEC filings for various factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements and projections. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to George.

Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. I'm excited to review our company's progress through fiscal 2025 and provide our current thoughts on the industry and external environment. PFG finished a fiscal year with excellent results and momentum to set us up for a strong 2026. While the food away from home industry is still not quite operating at a level we would like, our company has executed our strategy to take market share and win new business while improving our margins. In 2025, we grew our top line and have now exceeded the $63 billion mark. Importantly, we grew our bottom line even faster through a combination of improving business mix and diligent focus on our gross and operating margins. As we highlighted at our investor day in May, PFT has carved out a unique niche in the food away from home market. Our range of capabilities allow our associates to aggressively pursue new business anywhere that consumers purchase food away from home, with little restriction on where we can grow. At the same time, there is still ample white space for us to grow into over time, which we believe provides a runway of strong top and bottom line performance for many years to come. We would not be in this position without the cooperation across our three segments, food service, convenience, and specialty. At Investor Day, we described our PFG1 strategy, which is focused on capturing top and bottom line opportunities across the entire PFG platform. As we closed out the fiscal year, all our business units were contributing to our performance. Through a volatile market, each business gained momentum. We're excited about PFG's potential in 2026 as we expect to propel our results to new highs. In a moment, Patrick will provide a detailed review of our financial outlook. We're often asked how we were able to outperform and win market share at such a consistent clip. The simple answer is it starts with our 43,000 dedicated associates. We hire the best in the industry and give them the autonomy to build and grow business. In the fourth quarter, we continue to hire food service sales reps at a very aggressive rate, ending the year with an 8.8% increase compared to prior year. We are not slowing down this important investment in our business. As I mentioned earlier, The industry backdrop has room to improve, and I'm confident that we will see better trends in the future. The investments we are making in our people now will enable us to significantly accelerate growth as the industry finds its footing. Our efforts are producing results. As you know, our organization targets 6% independent restaurant case growth or better. While we were not quite at that level in 2025, I am proud of what we were able to achieve. For the full year, we grew organic independent cases by 4.6%, despite facing several difficult periods. If we exclude just the February result, which was heavily impacted by severe weather, our independent case growth would have been 5%. In the fourth quarter, our independent cases were up 5.9% organically, with consistent results in each of the final three months of the fiscal year. This is encouraging, as we enter 2026, and we believe we'll go right around the 6% growth level for the full year. We have also seen success growing our chain business profitably. Over the past several years, we have shifted our portfolio of chain restaurant towards high-performing customers who are growing. We are excited to have partnered with several new accounts through the year, generating 2.2% case growth over the full year and 4.5% case growth in the fourth quarter. We still have a robust pipeline of potential new accounts that the team is working diligently to secure, which will provide additional growth. Overall, our food service segment had an outstanding 2025, and we believe is poised to produce an even better 2026, despite several casual changes experiencing sales declines. We also closed the year strong in our convenience and specialty segments. Both organizations executed their strategic plans and saw sequential improvement into the end of the year. In convenience, the total industry continues to see mid-single-digit sales declines across many of the key categories. By adding new accounts, broadening our food service offerings, and partnering with strong customers, convenience produced positive case growth in each of the four quarters with a stronger performance in the second half of the fiscal year. It's hard to overstate what an accomplishment this is in the current environment. A strong focus on procurement opportunities and cost management generate a double-digit profit growth for the convenience segment over the full year. Even with a very difficult fourth quarter comparison, convenience grew adjusted EBITDA and is entering 2026 with a great deal of momentum. Our specialty business faces historically high prices across the candy and snack industry. High competition in the theater channel and financial struggles for several customers in 2025. The organization rose to the occasion by securing new business, identifying efficiency gains, and fostering collaboration across our broader organization. These concerted efforts led to continuous improvement throughout the fiscal year. As we enter fiscal 2026, our financial position is strong and we're continuing to execute our balanced capital allocation plan, bringing our balance sheet back within our target range over the next several quarters. We'll also continue to look at disciplined M&A, where we have a track record of delivering sustainable growth across our three business segments. Before I turn the call over to Scott, I want to take a moment to address U.S. food statements from last week. PFT's board has a track record of regularly evaluating a range of potential paths to generate shareholder value. We are committed to taking actions that are in the best interests of PFT shareholders, and we will continue to focus on ways to deliver further growth and value creation. The outreach from US Foods was a request for information sharing to explore regulatory considerations and potential synergies related to a possible business combination. We have a clear strategy in place to effectively build upon the company's position as a leading North American food and food service distributor in the food away from home market. We are executing at a high level, continuing to make progress on our three-year plan and advancing toward the targets we outlined at Investor Day in May. We're doing this by aggressively pursuing new business and capitalizing on additional opportunities in the market while continuing to invest in our people. We expect To be well positioned to accelerate growth, PFG is building a formidable organization that is set up to grow and win for many years to come. Because of the successful execution of our strategy and our confidence in the path forward, any transaction would need to clear a high bar on all fronts. Value and speed and certainty to completion, taking into consideration associated risks, including regulatory, synergy, and integration risks. After careful consideration, the PFG Board determined that there was no basis to engage in the information sharing requested by U.S. Foods. We have demonstrated PFG's powerful value proposition across our three business segments, have strong momentum underway, and have conviction in the value-creating potential of our strategy. That is all we have to share today on this subject, and when we get to Q&A, we'd ask that you keep questions focused on our results and outlook. I'd like to conclude my remarks by highlighting how proud I am of our team's efforts throughout the year and how excited I am about what lies ahead in 2026 and beyond. With that, I'll turn it over to Scott. Scott?