United Natural Foods, Inc.

After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Steve Blomquist, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for UNFI's fourth quarter fiscal 2025 earnings conference call. By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release from this morning. The press release and earnings presentation, which management will speak to, are available under the investor section of the company's website at www.unfi.com. We've also included a supplemental disclosure file in Microsoft Excel with key financial information. Joining me for today's call are Sandy Douglas, our Chief Executive Officer, and Matteo Tardidi, our President and Chief Financial Officer. Sandy and Matea will provide a business update after which we will 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. 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 and the end of our earnings presentation. I'd now ask you to turn to slide six of our presentation as I turn the call over to Sandy.

Thanks, Steve, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. UNFI delivered solid fourth quarter results that drove fiscal 2025 performance in line with our previously provided outlook ranges for net sales and adjusted EBITDA and above our outlook for free cash flow. Notably, our strong free cash flow generation enabled us to reduce net debt to around $1.8 billion, the lowest level since the end of fiscal 2018, and reduce net leverage by 0.7 turns compared to last year. Our fiscal 2025 results reflect the strength and resiliency of our customer base combined with disciplined execution against the multi-year strategic plan we detailed a year ago. We're building momentum as we enter year two of our strategic plan. We're increasingly confident in our trajectory and in our ability to create sustainable long-term value for our customers, suppliers, associates, and shareholders. With that backdrop, I want to take a few minutes to walk through the progress that we've made in the first year of our refresh strategy, as well as the opportunities ahead to further accelerate our performance. At UNFI, we aspire to become the food industry's most valued partner by bringing innovative products, programs, and services designed to help retailers and suppliers profitably grow their businesses and ours. We believe that UNFI's scale, heritage, and enduring high growth categories like natural, organic, and specialty products, our merchandising programs, private brands, and our value added services make us uniquely suited to help retailers differentiate and compete in a dynamic marketplace. And as a result, we are building significant capabilities to help our suppliers build their brands and accelerate their growth within our diverse retailer network. Based on these core strengths, we believe that we are well positioned to drive profitable growth within a growing $90 billion target addressable market that includes many natural organic specialty, multicultural, and conventional grocery retailers, all of whom can benefit from our differentiated products, programs, insights, and services today and in the future. As expected, the refresh strategy and multi-year plan we announced last October have been steadily driving growth within this market, anchored by two primary focus areas, creating more value for customers and suppliers and becoming a more effective and efficient business. Over the past year, we've made meaningful progress in both areas, starting with our focus on adding value for customers and suppliers. fiscal 2025, we grew our business with both existing and new customers by providing customized product, supply chain, and programmatic solutions for customers to meet their short and long-term needs. At the same time, we're taking action to improve our category merchandising and account management capabilities by realigning our sales and merchandising teams to better meet the unique needs of the customers and suppliers they serve across the natural, organic, specialty fresh, and conventional product sets. We also continue to expand our digital and professional services, which create deeper and stronger customer relationships and range from credit card processing, shelf management, and store remodeling to digital solutions like the UNFI media network and electronic shelf labels. Some of our longstanding customers increased their business with us to add these services last year, helping them save money, operate more efficiently, and compete more effectively. For suppliers, we continue to roll out our revamped commercial go-to-market program, which streamlines fees and adds access to proprietary insights that help them build and profitably grow their brands within our retail network. We also created a dedicated cross-functional team that has been building new and improving existing processes to enhance the supplier experience. Together, these efforts underscore our commitment to create meaningful value for both our customers and suppliers while strengthening our own market position for the future. Next, I'll focus on our progress towards becoming a more effective and efficient company, which has been driven by four components. network optimization, cost efficiency, working capital management, and reducing capital intensity. Over the past few quarters, we've outlined our efforts to optimize our distribution network to better serve customers and suppliers over the long term. During fiscal 2025, we consolidated volumes from four distribution centers into larger, more modern facilities with broader assortments to benefit customers in these regions. These actions will also further improve our network profitability in fiscal 2026. In parallel, we've optimized capacity and enhanced capabilities across our network. This includes strategic investments in automation and approximately 400,000 incremental square feet in Manchester, Pennsylvania, and Sarasota, Florida, which should enable growth in both regions improve product restocking speed and order accuracy over time while reducing our operating costs. To further improve our service levels, we've deployed lean daily management in 28 of our 52 distribution centers through the end of fiscal 2025, which is strengthening our performance across safety, quality, delivery, and cost metrics. We continue to embed lean management routines across our organization and create greater accountability through real-time tracking of key performance metrics. From adding new capabilities to embedding lean processes across our operations, we're building a more responsive and resilient supply chain that is well positioned to support customer needs across a range of macro and competitive backdrops. Our nimble, solutions-oriented approach helped us drive above-industry growth in fiscal 2025 and we expect to continue building on this strength in the year ahead. In fiscal 2025, we improved free cash flow by reducing capital intensity and strengthening our working capital management processes. Rigorous prioritization helped drive our approximately $130 million reduction in capital investment spend during the fiscal year. We also reduced inventory days on hand to pre-COVID levels while working to improve fill rates for our customers. Finally, we've continued to optimize spending through disciplined SG&A cost management across the enterprise. This included streamlining our processes and corporate support structure to enable key business functions to serve our customers and suppliers more quickly, effectively, and cost efficiently, which resulted in an approximate 30 basis point reduction in full year operating expenses as a percentage of sales. In fiscal 2026, we expect to continue to make progress in each of these areas while also focusing on capability building and incremental initiatives to accelerate long-term profitable growth. For example, we see a meaningful opportunity to improve the experience for independent customers and emerging innovative suppliers who are critical to the vitality of our industry. We will also make our portfolio of value-added services more accessible to these operators. In terms of driving greater effectiveness and efficiency, we're focused on building a strategic roadmap for technology investments and streamlining more of our internal processes to drive even greater adaptability, as well as margin and free cash flow benefits. Turning to our fiscal 2026 outlook, which Mateo will provide more detail on shortly, We are confident in our continued execution of our strategy and ability to deliver another year of profitable growth while further strengthening our balance sheet. Looking ahead and turning to page six in the presentation, we are accelerating and raising the multi-year objectives we previously set and announced one year ago for the fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2027 period. We now expect net sales to grow in the low single digits on average from fiscal 2024 to 2027, which compares to our previous expectation for fiscal 2027 net sales to be roughly flat to fiscal 2024. This reflects better than projected organic growth driven by growing customers as well as new customers, new categories with existing customers, customer retention, and growth within natural organic specialty and fresh products, which is supported by enduring consumer tailwinds towards health, wellness, and differentiated products. In addition, we now expect average annual adjusted EBITDA growth from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2027 to be well above our prior expectations and project that the growth for this period will be in the low double-digit range with adjusted EBITDA margin growing by almost 40 basis points in fiscal 2026. Our updated multiyear objectives imply that we will deliver adjusted EBITDA of over $730 million in fiscal 2027. This higher profitability as well as our continued focus on optimizing capital investments and achieving pre-COVID levels of working capital is expected to generate free cash flow of around $300 million in both fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027, roughly double the expectations that we communicated a year ago. Combining our higher adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow generation, we expect to reduce net leverage to around 2.5 times by the end of fiscal 2026 and to further reduce this to under two times by the end of fiscal 2027. As we reduce our debt levels and interest expense and improve profitability, we expect adjusted EPS will continue to grow faster than adjusted EBITDA. In summary, despite the unexpected challenges we faced as we navigated the cyber incident with our customers and suppliers in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, we continue to maintain our underlying business momentum through strong partnerships and a collaborative solutions-oriented culture. I'd be remiss if I didn't once again thank all of our customers and suppliers for their partnership and resilience during a challenging time. We learned a lot and we're putting our learnings into action as we focus on helping our customer and supplier community execute their strategies during the upcoming holiday selling season and beyond. Now a month into year two of our refresh strategy, we are focused on accelerating our momentum by building on UNFI's unique ability to provide differentiated products, services, and well-scaled supply chain solutions that help our customers and suppliers grow profitably. We look forward to discussing our path to long-term value creation in greater detail at our investor day in December. We are grateful to our customers and our suppliers for their continued partnership and the UNFI Associates for delivering on our commitments over the past year. We still believe our future value creation opportunities far exceed what we've achieved so far. With that, let me turn it over to Matteo to provide more detail about our financial performance and our fiscal 2026 outlook.