United Natural Foods, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Krista and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the UNFI third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question at that time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. And if you'd like to withdraw that question, again, press star one. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kristin Fehrenbein, Chief Strategy Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on UNFI's third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings conference call. As many of you may have heard, Steve Blomquist our Vice President of Investor Relations and longtime leader within UNFI's finance team has moved to a part-time consulting role. Given this, I'll be leading our earnings calls going forward. We invite you to continue to reach out to Steve or any other member of our investor relations team as needed going forward. 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 on the events tab. We've also included a supplemental disclosure file in Microsoft Excel with key financial information and our quarterly investor letter with more detail on our third quarter progress. Our letter this quarter includes a video link detailing some of our recent supply chain improvements driving increasing effectiveness and efficiency. Joining me for today's call are Sandy Douglas, our Chief Executive Officer, and Matteo Tarditi, our President and Chief Financial Officer. Sandy and Matteo 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 these 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 at the end of our earnings presentation. I now ask you to turn to slide six of our presentation as I turn the call over to Sandy.

Thanks, Kristen, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. In the third quarter of fiscal 2026, UNFI continued to make steady progress on our value creation strategy that's focused on adding value for our customers and suppliers and becoming a more effective and efficient company. Through disciplined execution of our strategy, we generated strong profitability and free cash flow, while continuing to strengthen our balance sheet and increase our financial flexibility. Throughout the quarter, we remain focused on helping our customers and suppliers execute their strategies in a dynamic operating environment. Our underlying top-line performance reflects the continued strength and resilience of our customers, building on a long track record of consistent growth across our industry. As you'll see on slide six, over the past two decades, differentiated regional and independent grocers have steadily gained share, roughly doubling their position in the approximately $1 trillion U.S. grocery retail market, where each incremental share point is equal to $10 billion of retail sales. Natural and organic retailers have tripled their share over the same period. And beyond these groups, many multicultural and neighborhood grocers are also well positioned to deliver enduring growth by offering a unique value proposition to the communities they serve. Retailers pursuing differentiation are the basis for our value creation strategy and defined UNFI's growing $90 billion target addressable market. What's notable is the consistency and growth across these food retailers. Differentiated formats have generally outperformed the broader market over time, reflecting a growing segment of consumers that prioritize high-quality, healthy assortments and differentiated experiences. That trend continued in the third quarter, with estimated growth for these segments in aggregate, tracking in the low single-digit range, despite a highly dynamic operating environment. As we communicated at our investor day, Our focus is on strengthening the capabilities that are supporting differentiation and growth in our industry. In the quarter, UNFI's underlying net sales performance, excluding the impact of accretive optimization, was in line with the estimated low single digit growth of our target addressable market. Since our founding 50 years ago, we have listened closely to our customers and developed solutions to help them respond to emerging trends in business needs, from high-quality natural and organic products to unique private brands and scalable services. The breadth of our product assortment, services offering, and the scale of our distribution network position us to play a meaningful role in supporting the long-term differentiation and growth within the food retail industry. Turning to slide seven, We're building on this foundation by strengthening our capabilities in seven key areas, customer stewardship, merchandising and supplier support, professional and digital services, private brands, technology, next generation supply chain, and productivity. During the third quarter, we continued building and executing our plans for these capabilities. Informed by our customer and supplier feedback, and through cross-functional collaboration across our teams. We also continue to invest in talent to accelerate our capabilities, including adding a new leader for our digital services business, which includes offerings designed to help our customers and suppliers operate more effectively and to strengthen shopper engagement. In merchandising and supplier support, we rolled out a new digital marketplace called Endless Isle, that gives retailers an easier way to access innovative emerging brands, while also helping suppliers expand their reach with less friction. While it's still early, we're hearing positive feedback from partners who value the ability to test new products with greater flexibility, and we expect to continue to develop and test new solutions like this to help further support our stakeholders. We also continue to innovate within our private brands portfolio. introducing more than 30 new SKUs. These innovations aim to help our retailers differentiate their assortments and meet growing shopper demand for nutritious choices, which consumers are increasingly gravitating towards. As we continue taking steps to improve effectiveness and efficiency, we're beginning to see early benefits from the next generation supply chain capabilities that we're building across our network. For example, We expanded our AI-powered supply chain and procurement planning platform to all DCs in our network and are focused on completing the supplier-facing portion of this deployment. This platform is already helping to steadily improve fill rates and inventory management, while also enhancing free cash flow conversion. We also expanded the use of our AI-powered fleet management platform, Samsara, We recently began using the platform's features, including driver coaching to help strengthen driver safety processes, optimize routes, and improve delivery execution. Year-to-date through the end of the third quarter, our on-time deliveries increased by over 4% compared to the prior year period, while average miles per delivery has declined by nearly 5%. Additionally, We've expanded our cloud-based warehouse management system to five additional distribution centers, further strengthening reliability and consistency across our network. Collectively, these investments aim to enhance service levels for our customers and suppliers over time, while strengthening effectiveness and efficiency across the UNFI network. We remain confident that our value creation strategy and disciplined execution position us well for long-term sustainable growth and shareholder returns. In addition, we are strengthening our financial flexibility as we look to reinvest in the capabilities to better serve our partners and achieve shared profitable growth with our stakeholders. And we see continued opportunities to invest in commercial and supply chain technologies that benefit our customers, our suppliers, and UNFI. As UNFI marks our 50th anniversary, our team is working to build on and accelerate the company's legacy of helping retailers differentiate and grow in a dynamic marketplace. Together, we remain committed to delivering better every day as we work to become our industry's most valued partner. With that, let me turn it over to Matteo to share more detail on our third quarter performance.