United Natural Foods, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the UNFI's fourth quarter fiscal 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker 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 zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to our speaker today, Mr. Steve Blomquist, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on UNFI's fourth quarter fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release issued this morning. The press release, webcast, and a supplemental slide deck are available under the Investor section of the company's website at www.unfi.com under the Events tab. Joining me for today's call are Sandy Douglas, our Chief Executive Officer, John Howard, our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Testa, President of UNFI, and Eric Dorn, our Chief Operating Officer. Sandy, 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. I will now turn the call over to Sandy.

Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us on our Disco 2021 Fourth Quarter Earnings Call. Let me begin by saying how happy I am to join UNFI and how excited I am to be back in the food business. Over my career, I've had the opportunity to meet and work with many of our customers, and I look forward to renewing and carrying forward those relationships. I also look forward to meeting customers that I've not met and learning how UNFI can help make all of them even more successful. I've been on the job for about seven weeks now, and I've spent the majority of my time meeting with customers, our senior team, and with associates across the organization, focusing on growth opportunities for customers and how we can all work together to capture these opportunities in a very complex operating environment. Several things have become apparent to me about this company. First, I've been impressed with the leadership team. both on an individual level as well as how they work together collectively to solve problems serve our customers and our associates and move the business forward they've brought me up to speed and given me the support i've needed to successfully on board during these interesting times they also embody the values and culture that were a key part of what attracted me to unfi Second, my early take is that there are significant opportunities to improve the way we serve existing and new customers and the opportunity to partner with suppliers to bring customers the highest quality, differentiated products and services that they want and need. Importantly, as the COVID pandemic lingers, our operating environment remains challenging. From our suppliers to UNFI to our customers, we are all facing challenges making, moving, and delivering products through our interdependent supply chains. So my focus will continue to be learning the full extent of this business and assisting our team as we manage through the challenges and execute our plans for the benefit of our incredible community of customers. In doing so, I'm confident that we will continue to find ways to help our customers create value, which will benefit all of our stakeholders. The final point I'd make is despite the challenges that we're managing, we have momentum in our business, and it is accelerating. And I believe our plans for the new fiscal year will carry that momentum forward. Under the leadership of my predecessor, Steve Spinner, and our senior team, we delivered a solid fiscal 2021 and we expect this new fiscal year to be even better we start fiscal 22 with less debt and an improved leverage ratio and plans for further growth driven by a sincere focus on doing everything we can do to serve our customers john will go over the details of our fiscal 22 outlook shortly and i'm genuinely excited for the year to come Let me now turn the call over to our president, Chris Testa, for his comments on our performance. Chris?