Unifirst Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q1 2026 Unifirst 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 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Shane O'Connor, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me today is Stephen Sentros, President and Chief Executive Officer. We will review our first quarter results for fiscal year 2026, but first a brief disclaimer. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements that reflect the company's current views with respect to future events and financial performance. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. The words anticipate, optimistic, believe, estimate, expect, intend, and similar expressions that indicate future events and trends identify forward-looking statements. Actual future results may differ materially from those anticipated depending upon a variety of risk factors. For more information, please refer to the discussion of these risk factors in our most recent Form 10-K and 10-Q filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And with that, I will turn the call over to Steve.

Thank you, Shane, and good morning, everyone. Our first quarter results were largely in line with expectations, our expectations, and our outlook for the full year remains unchanged. Revenues increased to $621.3 million, up 2.7% from the prior year period. Consistent with our guidance, operating income and adjusted EBITDA declined year over year, reflecting the impact of planned investments designed to accelerate growth and improve operating leverage, as well as higher than anticipated health care claims and legal costs during the quarter. As we discussed in our last call, we've been making investments in our sales and services organizations, to build a stronger, more sustainable platform for accelerated growth. In addition to making targeted additions to our sales team during the second half of fiscal 25, we invested in strengthening our service teams, expanding both capacity and stability. These enhancements position us to drive improved performance across all key aspects of our growth model and are beginning to show up in our operating metric improvements like account retention, new account sales, in additional product placements with our existing customers. In addition to driving top-line growth and the resulting benefits to our drop-through margins, we continue to invest in and execute in several initiatives that we believe will meaningfully enhance our profitability over time. As we have previously discussed, these priorities include operational excellence driven by the continued adoption of the UniFirst way, our enterprise-wide operating framework focused on scalable, repeatable processes to enable consistent execution, operational efficiency, and continuous improvement. Enhanced inventory management, procurement, and sourcing, driven by our ongoing ERP implementation, which is improving inventory sharing, centralizing procurement, and expanding our global sourcing base and enabling enhanced supply chain execution. And G&A productivity, driven by our broader digital transformation which is designed to enhance scalability, cost discipline, and operating leverage. Turning to our segments, our core uniform facility service solutions business delivered solid organic growth of 2.4% with positive performance across both sales and service operations. New customer wins exceeded those in the same period last year, and customer retention continued its positive trajectory, logging a second year in a row of quarter-over-quarter improvement. We also grew facility service product placements within our customer base, underscoring the breadth of our offerings, the durability of our customer relationships, and the long-term cross-selling opportunities embedded in our platform. In our first aid safety solution segment, we continued our momentum with robust revenue growth of 15.3%, primarily reflecting the investments we have made in our first aid van business, including some small bolt-on acquisitions. Although growth during the quarter was somewhat tempered by a softer employment climate affecting both rental and direct sale accounts, we remain confident that our ongoing investments are yielding measurable improvements in the key areas of our growth model. Our balance sheet and overall financial position remain robust. We maintained our disciplined approach to capital allocation focused on investing in growth and returning capital to our shareholders. Underscoring the board and management team's confidence in our strategy, execution, and long-term growth prospects, we repurchased approximately $32 million of common stock during the quarter and over $77 million in the past two quarters, and again increased the common stock dividend. As always, I want to sincerely thank our team partners who continue to always deliver for each other and our customers. Every day our team partners live our mission of serving the people who do the hard work, the people in workforce who keep our communities up and running, by providing the exceptional products, services, and support experience that enable them to do their job successfully and safely. Through our always deliver philosophy, we remain committed to creating value for all stakeholders, including our employees, customers, the communities we serve, and shareholders. On that note, I want to briefly address the unsolicited non-binding proposal we received from Cintas recently. As we stated in our December 22nd press release, the UNIFIRST Board of Directors has engaged independent financial and legal advisors to evaluate the proposal and determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of UNIFIRST, our shareholders, and our other stakeholders. That work remains ongoing, and we will provide an update as soon as it has been completed. I also want to acknowledge the active dialogue our management team and board have had in recent weeks with many of our shareholders. We look forward to further constructive engagement to advance our common goal of enhancing shareholder value. With that, I'll turn the call over to Shane, who will provide more details on our first quarter results, as well as our outlook for the remainder of the year. Thanks, Steve.