United Natural Foods, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the UNFI fourth quarter fiscal 2020 earnings 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 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. Steve Blomquist, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on UNFI's fourth quarter fiscal 2020 earnings conference call. By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release issued yesterday afternoon. The press release, webcast, and the supplemental slide deck are available under the investor section of the company's website at www.unfi.com. Joining me for today's call are Steve Spinner, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, John Howard, our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Testa, President of UNFI, and Eric Dorn, our Chief Operating Officer. Steve, Chris, and John will provide a business update, after which we'll take your questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that comments made by management during today's call may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include plans, expectations, estimates, and projections that might involve significant risks and uncertainties. These risks are discussed in the company's earnings release and SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from the results discussed in these forward-looking statements. And lastly, I'd like to point out that during today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Definitions and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our press release. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Steve.

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us on our year-end call. As you saw, in addition to reporting our fourth quarter and fiscal year results, We also announced the succession plan for my role as CEO. I'll speak more about that shortly, but first, we'll discuss our fiscal 2020 results. We finished the fiscal year early last month, and it truly was a monumental year for UFI in many respects. Our financial results in the fourth quarter and for the year produced record sales and adjusted EBITDA, driven initially by the strength of our integration work and consumer demand driven by COVID, as well as UNFI's execution success. Fourth quarter sales grew 8%, while adjusted EBITDA grew 28%, resulting in a 50 basis point expansion in our adjusted EBITDA margin. This strong margin performance is a testament to the efficiency of our network, and our ability to generate operating leverage as we increase our top line. For the full year, we generated $284 million of free cash flow and reduced our net debt outstanding by nearly $390 million, exceeding our full-year debt reduction expectations. Our net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage ratio finished the year at four times, about a full turn lower than at the end of last year. Now, these results wouldn't have been possible without the people and culture at UNFI. And I want to thank all UNFI associates for their outstanding focus and execution during what have been unprecedented times for our company and for our country. The passion and caring of our people and our company have been clearly demonstrated in recent months. During the early days of COVID, we proactively took action to manage the spike in demand from customers and consumers while prioritizing the health and well-being of our associates. As evidenced by our early response with heightened safety, sanitation protocols, and flexibility to our attendance and productivity policies. I'm so proud of our culture. Our response to communities in need, social injustice, diversity, and inclusion puts UNFI on the leading edge of continuing to do what's right. We have a strong diversified customer base from which we can grow sales. We have an unmatched distribution center network that we've shown can handle demand, capacity, and performance at scale. We've won new business from a variety of customers, including those who self-distribute to their stores, but recognize the value we can bring to their operations. And we believe we'll win more business going forward. Towards that goal, we've successfully hired several new leaders to further enable long-term success, including a new Chief Supply Chain Officer, a new CIO, and a new Chief Marketing Officer, all of which positions us well for the future. There is power in our scale, pride in our partnerships and people, and we have never been better positioned for future growth. We've delivered on our promise to transform the world of food throughout North America and build considerable momentum towards building a better future with better food. Let me now turn the call over to Chris to provide more context on our business performance.