Empire Company Limited

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Empire fourth quarter 2021 conference call. At this time, all lines are in the listen-only mode. But following the presentations, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. Also note that the call is being recorded on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021. And I would like to turn the conference over to Katie Brine, Director, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sylvie. Good afternoon and thank you all for joining us for our fourth quarter conference call. Today, we will provide summary comments on our results and then open the call for questions. This call is being recorded and the audio recording will be available on the company's website at empirecode.ca. There is a short summary document outlining the points of our quarter available on our website. Joining me on the call this afternoon are Michael Medline, President and CEO. Michael Veld, CFO. and Pierre Saint Laurent, Chief Operating Officer, Full Service. Today's discussion includes four looking statements. We caution that such statements are based on management's assumptions and beliefs, and are subject to uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to just materialize. I would agree to your news release and MD&A for more information on these assumptions and factors. I will now turn the call over to Michael Medline.

Thanks, Katie, and good afternoon, everyone. Last year's Q4 results were unprecedented. We were at the peak of COVID panic buying. We saw off-the-chart sales and margin growth. So we knew last year's results were going to be challenging to repeat, but we did match them. There are three things you should take away from our results today. One, we're making consistent progress on executing Project Horizon. It's how we matched last year's outstanding results. Two, we're driving real sales growth. Three, we're maintaining good cost control, even while investing more in our business. Our strong cash flows allow us to make these investments while returning more money to you, our owners. Like all of you, I hope things get back to normal soon. Most importantly, for the safety of our frontline teammates and customers in our country. But also, because when we return to normal, you will see clearly what a fundamentally stronger company we are. I want to cover four topics today. Our capital allocation strategy, our Q4 results, our future grocery market expectations, and our progress on Project Horizon. First, capital allocation. Mike and I have discussed this with you a lot over the last four plus years. We are strong believers in the power of a well-executed capital allocation strategy. The strength that we have built in our operations and merchandising, plus our strategic investments in renovating our stores, farm boy business, fresh gold expansion, voila and now longos, have put us in an enviable position. When Mike and I joined Empire, we lacked rigor here in our approach to capital projects. Today, our team has the capability to effectively manage capital in our organization. We have shown we can identify great projects with very good returns, and we deliver on them consistently. Over this time, we have also made two excellent acquisitions, reduced our net debt, and achieved an investment-grade rating from our credit agency. Returning capital to shareholders is an important part of our strategy. It's why we have continued to increase the dividend and have been buying back shares. To that end, today we announced a 15.3% increase in Empire's quarterly dividend per share, commensurate with our strong cash flows and continued and growing confidence in our business. We also believe that share buybacks are a useful tool to utilize excess cash. Today, we announced that we had renewed our NCIB to repurchase up to 8.5 million shares, or 5% of our outstanding shares. Combined with the prior NCIB, this enables us to buy back the shares issued for the Longo's acquisition and more beyond that. And we are doing this while still investing in future growth. For fiscal 22, we will increase our capital spend to $765 million, which includes Longo's capital projects. Capital will be deployed to renovate and refresh current stores, continue to build out our farm boy network in Ontario, and our discount network in Western Canada, advance our e-commerce expansion, and invest in advanced technology. All high return, dependable investments. And Mike will walk through all this in more detail with you in a second. Now on to our Q4 results. As a reminder, we are the first Canadian grocer to publicly anniversary the Extreme stock up phase of COVID last year. More than two thirds of our Q4 last year was impacted by the most extreme levels of stock up buying behavior we've ever seen. Same store sales last year were high and volatile ranging from a week that declined in sales to a week with growth of 52% resulting in unprecedented 18% year over year growth that quarter. With that in mind, we are very pleased with our performance this quarter and throughout fiscal 21. Our two-year sales stack for Q4 same-store sales was 10.4%. Because of the extreme COVID impact on results last year, we believe a comparison to two years ago is a more meaningful indicator of real growth. This quarter, our sales declined 1.3%, and our same-store sales was negative 6.1%. Well, you know I don't like negative numbers, but don't think anyone expected to see In e-commerce, Q4 last year saw our established ITA.net and Thrifty Foods businesses grow sevenfold. As expected, we saw these e-commerce businesses slow from the highs in Q4 this year, as all established e-commerce players will experience when comparing to the start of the pandemic last year. However, even with last year's extreme growth, in Q4, we still grew overall e-commerce sales by 15%. This remarkable net positive increase was driven by the exponential growth of our new voila business in the gta i'll speak more on our progress on voila in a moment covid also had a large impact on gross margin last year driven by sales mix and customer behaviors last year inventory shortages reduced our supplier partners ability to provide promotional items and customers shifted toward full service for a one-stop shop in q4 this year we held our gross margin rate flat to last year without the same extreme COVID tailwind. The recovery of our service departments and horizon initiatives, particularly our promotional optimization, offset the sales mix impact from the prior year to achieve this. And this year, combined with our sunrise and early horizon benefits, we delivered a record high rate of 25.5%, our highest gross margin as far back four years. EBITDA margin rate was 7.4% this quarter. The real story here is how we're closing the margin gap to our peers. In fiscal 2017, the average gap to our peers was 4.4%. In only four years, we have reduced that gap to about 1.9%. That translates to an increase in adjusted EBITDA margin dollars of approximately 170%, a colossal achievement for our team. We've shown we can drive meaningful, sustainable margin improvement, and we will continue to reduce this gap through Project Horizon. And we will not stop there, but we'll work to pass our competitors. Now to our expectations looking ahead. As more Canadians receive their COVID vaccinations, we expect to see three things. First, we expect many Canadians to gradually shift some spend back to restaurant and hospitality industries as lockdowns ease, Workplaces reopen and social gatherings resume. Second, many customers will start to shop more often and shift their basket mix. We expect basket size will decline somewhat and transaction counts will increase somewhat as some customers become more comfortable shopping multiple banners. Customers will also return to buying more prepared food and visiting our service counters as they reopen. We are already starting to see these trends in our stores. Third, we expect the split between full service and discount banners will stabilize but not return to pre-pandemic norms. We have revamped many of our full service stores and believe customers more than ever see the value in our full service offering. In Q4, we saw some impact to our market share as some customers returned to shopping multiple banners as they began to feel a little safer. But we expect to hold on to substantial market share gains as COVID subsides. We have also noticeably grown our discount presence, adding over 1 million square feet to the discount network in Western Canada to meet the evolving needs of the customers. In Ontario, we now have 95 stores, and in Western Canada, we have 40 locations confirmed, and we are on track to have about 48 stores open by the end of fiscal 23. As COVID subsides and CanNet is able to safely reopen, we believe we are very well positioned to meet these changing customer needs with our diverse network, and well-aligned offering. While we expect the grocery industry will shift towards some pre-pandemic ways, we do not believe it will fully return to the way it was. And we've been pretty accurate in our projections over the last while since the pandemic started. We've been pretty open with you. Finally, an update on Project Horizon. As of this quarter, we are one year into our three-year strategy. I am pleased that we are on track to deliver our goal of $500 million of incremental EBITDA and 100 basis points of EBITDA margin improvement over the three years. Despite some early delays due to COVID, our team has done an impressive job catching up on key initiatives. For example, our promotion optimization initiative continues to drive early results. Other initiatives like strategic sourcing are well established from Project Sunrise, but continue to build efficiencies and improve our bottom line. And I'll share a few updates right now on key strategic initiatives. First, we closed on our purchase of 51% of Longo's, including Grocery Gateway, on May 10th. We are thrilled to welcome the Longo's team to the Empire family. This acquisition is important to our strategy to grow our presence in the key Greater Toronto area, where we have historically been underpenetrated. As well, the addition of Grocery Gateway complements our goal to win grocery e-commerce in Canada. Second, FarmWorks. May 17th marked the halfway point in achieving our commitment to double Farm Boy store base within five years.

We opened seven new stores in fiscal 21.

One store opened one week into fiscal 22. In fiscal 22, we expect to open seven net new stores. We continue to be extremely pleased with our acquisition of Farm Boy, which has grown its industry-leading same-store sales growth since we acquired them. Finally, voila! My view on Voila does not change quarter to quarter. We have the best solution and are more confident than ever in it. Yesterday marks the one year anniversary of the first delivery to a customer, and that customer was me. And one year in, our average customer shops twice a month, and their basket size is 3.8 times greater than the average bricks and mortar basket. As I said, Voila is growing quickly. Over the last year, we've worked hard to build our workforce of talented delivery teammates fast enough keep up with growing demand. Even still, our core performance metrics have remained above target. We remain on track to open our second customer fulfillment center in Montreal in early 2022. This is expected to be even smoother than our GTA CFC. We already have customers helping us to scale faster, and we're very pleased with our store pick solution, very pleased with it. And we've launched in 30 stores in fiscal 21, and as we continue to build our CFC network across Canada, The store pick solution allows us to quickly offer e-commerce in regions where CFCs will not deliver or are not yet built. We need to be able to serve customers where, when, and how they want to shop. And by the end of fiscal 22, we expect to have up to 120 stores, which means we'll have e-commerce options in every province. We are well positioned to win grocery e-commerce in Canada. You know, sometimes I hear concerns we're doing too much, and maybe for some companies that would be a problem. but we've assembled the best team in Canadian retail. There is talent and structure in our organization that we never had before. We have bandwidth and see more opportunities to grow sales, improve margins, and reduce costs. With that said, although we continue to find new opportunities to improve our business, our focus right now remains on variety. Besides, we need to leave some upside for our next three-year strategy. And as a final note, I want to take this moment to wish the best to Canada's athletes heading to the Olympic Games in Tokyo this summer. Sobeys is the official and exclusive grocer at Team Canada, and I am so proud of the work we're doing to support our athletes. With that, I'll hand it over to Michael.

Thanks, Michael. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll provide some additional color on our results, our expectations for capital expenditures in fiscal 22, and some comments on expectations for next year. As Michael noted, we do believe the two-year stack is the best way to interpret our results as we start comparing to timeframes that are particularly distorted due to COVID shopping behaviors. During COVID, we drew our sales and market share to a level we didn't expect to see for several years, reflected in the 10.4% increase in same-store sales from the fourth quarter two years ago. Our gross margin rate was very strong. And as Michael said, the fact that we were able to match last year's strong COVID stock-up driven rate shows the positive impact of our Horizon initiatives and the focus on sustaining the margin focus in our teams. We continue to sustainably improve our gross margin performance as demonstrated by the increase of 150 basis points in our annual gross margin rate since sunrise began in fiscal 2018. We're now over two years into the expansion of discounts in the West. We've opened 28 FreshCo discount stores in Western Canada, 26 of them conversions of old food service stores. All stores opened in our first year continued to improve their results, and in aggregate are performing better than the full service stores they replaced. After we opened the first stores in the first year, we focused on operational improvements and margin management. As a result of that experience gained, stores that opened in our second year are performing better than those opened in the first. While the absolute net earnings of the discount business in Western Canada has been relatively immaterial to total earnings so far, we are seeing strong improvement in EBITDA and sales compared to the full-service stores that they replaced. This quarter, there were some significant items in SG&A. which resulted in our SG&A's percentage of sales being 20 basis points higher than last year. Not all of these items, however, will occur in the future to the same degree. We had higher incentive payments to our teammates in stores, distribution centers, and backstage. We do not expect to see these expenses at the same levels in fiscal 22. The new vol-out business now has its full back-office SG&A and supply chain costs reflected in the company's total SG&A at significantly higher rates from when we initially launched to customers a year ago yesterday. And these expenses will continue and will grow with the business. We also didn't see the same amount of sales leverage that arose due to higher sales in the stock-up period last year. And through the last year, we also hired new store personnel all the way through fiscal 21 to manage store safety and sanitization, which has increased as store labor SG&A. And finally, right-of-use asset depreciation under IFRS 16 is higher than last year, reflecting an increase in occupancy costs. While not as material, we also had longer disclosing costs this quarter, which will not be repeated. These SG&A increases were partially offset by lower COVID costs and benefits from our strategic sourcing initiatives. The temporary lockdown bonus of $9 million paid to teammates in regions that had government-mandated lockdowns this quarter was less than the hero pay paid to all teammates last year. We expect SG&A expenses in the first quarter related to the increased costs of maintaining sanitization and safety measures and other COVID expenditures to be between $50 and $20 million, less than the first quarter amount last year of $67 million. This quarter's effective income tax rate was 19.7%. As outlined in our news release, our income tax rate for the quarter was impacted by some revaluations of tax balances, not all of which will recur in the future. Excluding these adjustments, we expect our tax rate for the quarter would have been between 24 and 25%. The effective income tax rate for the full year was 25.8%. and excluding the effect of any unusual transactions or differential tax rates on property sales, we're estimating that the effective income tax rate for fiscal 22 will be between 26 and 28%. Earnings per share includes 4 cents per share of wallah dilution for the quarter and 18 cents for the year, less than our initial estimate of 20 cents. For fiscal 22, we expect to see improvement in the profitability of CFC1 in Toronto as volumes continue to increase and costs reduce to improved operational efficiencies. However, Vuala total costs will increase as CFC2 in Montreal begins operations and store pick e-commerce is implemented in up to 90 additional stores across the country. In total, we believe that the impact of Vuala's continued growth will dilute fiscal 22 net earnings by approximately 25 to 30 cents per share compared to 18 cents this year. Based on our current forecast of sales growth, we expect that fiscal 22 will reflect the highest net earnings dilution of the Wallach program, as CFC1 is expected to begin to reflect positive EBITDA results towards the end of the third year of operations, partially offsetting the impacts of opening new CFCs. Equity earnings increased year over year, mostly due to higher earnings from Crombie REIT, which continues to perform well despite ongoing disruption caused by COVID-19. Crombie has built a solid foundation and are well positioned to continue to deliver with a high-quality portfolio, over half of which is anchored by Empire Grocery Banners. 2020 was a big year for Crombie as they saw four major developments reach substantial completion, including our own CFC2 in Montreal. Cash flow generation continues to be strong with free cash flow of $745 million for the year. Our focus on returning cash to our shareholders continues. Today we announced an increase in Empire's quarterly dividend per share from 13 cents per share to 15 cents, a 15.3% increase. Our dividend per share has grown by a compound annual growth rate of 10.9% over the past three years. We also renewed our share buyback program, following buybacks of $153 million in fiscal 21. We intend to more than offset the shares issued as part of the long-term transaction, and have, since the year end, already purchased the equivalent of one-third of the shares issued in that acquisition. Capital expenditures, of course, are a key element of our capital allocation strategy. Our capital investment for fiscal 21, sorry, our capital investment estimate for fiscal 21 was between 650 to 675 million, and we ended the year at 679 million. For fiscal 22, we expect to invest approximately 765 million back into the business. About half of this investment will be allocated to renovations and new and converted stores, with 10 to 15 Frisco stores opening in Western Canada and seven net new Fonboy stores in Ontario. We continue to invest in our advanced analytics technology and other technology systems, which will be approximately 15% of the total investment. We will invest approximately $80 million in Voila!, which includes our share of the Montreal and Calgary CFC build costs, up to 90 new store pickup locations, additional spokes, and associated investments in technology. This estimate also includes capital for Longo's projects. As we begin fiscal 22, we know the year will continue to be affected by the pandemic, but it's really difficult to predict the net impact of low results due to COVID and the positive effect of Project Horizon initiatives. We expect that during fiscal 22, same-store sales will reduce somewhat as industry volumes decrease compared to the unusually high industry sales in fiscal 21. Fuel volumes are also expected to increase as we see travel restrictions reduce, and economic activity increase. We believe our margin rates will continue to benefit from Horizon initiatives, along with the addition of Longos, which has a higher margin rate than the Empire average. Margin will be partially offset by the effects of sales mix changes between banners due to the expected easing of COVID restrictions. Both comparisons in fiscal 22 for same-store sales and earnings per share in particular will be affected as we lack a full year of COVID results embedded in Fiscal 21. Finally, Fiscal 21 is a year we'll certainly never forget. We launched Voila!, our home delivery service in the GTA, our store pickup service in four provinces, and our new three-year strategy, Project Horizon. We made great strides with our Freshco and Farm Boy expansion plans and welcomed Longos to the family. Going into Fiscal 22, we are up against the tough comp of COVID, but we saw how Horizon Initiatives improved the comparison in Q4. Fiscal 21 was a solid year, and we are looking forward to what we will do in Fiscal 22. And with that, Katie, I'll hand the call back to you for questions.

Great. Thank you, Mike. Sylvie, you may open the line for questions at this time.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question, please press star followed by one on your touchtone phone. You will then hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request. And if you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star followed by two. And if you're using your speakerphone, we do ask that you please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Please go ahead and press star one now if you have any questions. And your first question will be from Karen Short at Barclays. Please go ahead.

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the overall environment. So I wanted to start with the promotional environment in 4Q and expectations for 1Q and beyond. And then I'm wondering if you could weave into what your thoughts are on inflation, both at cost and at retail in fiscal 22, what your perspective is. And then I had one other question.

Hey, Karen. I'll take the first question, then I'm going to Throw it over to Pierre and Mike if they want to say anything on inflation. And thanks for your question, appreciate it. We predictably see customers purchasing more on promotion right now this year for a few reasons that should be pretty obvious. One, because customers are not stocking up as they were last year. Two, planned shopping is increasing. And three, suppliers are more in control of their production and inventory than last year, not completely. back to normal, but more than last year. So there's more availability on the shelf. In terms of the competitive environment, it's always been a competitive environment, and we don't expect this to change. We're not seeing anything strange out there, and I don't think it'll be any different from pre-pandemic times as things get back to normal. So it's competitive, it's normal, and that's what we're seeing.

Okay, and then on inflation, cost, and retail?

I'll take it. So you have to remember we're coming up through a complex quarter compared to last year. Definitely not a good benchmark cost. There are costs that have been added to various supply chains across the world. Some of those were temporary. Some were not, for sure. So suppliers always ask for cost increase. and we have seen our share of those. We are not accepting all price increases, as usual, and we think the business in general is returning to more normal, which should result in a more normal inflation rate over time.

Okay. And then I wanted to just ask a question about FreshCo. So I'm wondering if you could just elaborate a little bit on what, if anything, changed from an execution perspective, for the fiscal 21 class of stores to improve the profitability? Or is that really just more a function of the pandemic helping with an improved profitability profile?

So it's not the pandemic. You know, our discount stores probably would have done better without the pandemic impacts. It was very hard to open them, hard to staff them. and starting a new business in a new geography was very difficult for the management team, and they did an amazing job opening the stores they did under the conditions that they had to deal with. So certainly they would have preferred to have done all of that in a more normalized environment. The reason that our second year of stores are doing better is about operational excellence. When you start in the market, You've got a new management team. You've got a new franchisee. The competition response is not entirely predictable, and you're learning. You're just learning lessons and realigning your supply chain, receiving product out of new distribution centers. So as we rolled into the second year and improved the efficiencies, moved our labor rates to where Our targets were a bit smarter with our promotions. All of that was experience that our new franchisees and our new management team in Western Canada were able to apply to the second year of stores. So it really is just more miles on the saddle. A management team that's on this rhythm and franchisees who were able now to learn from each other, from other franchisees in the same region. And they're all excited. They're doing an amazing job. And we're actually very happy with the progressive improvement that we're seeing in all of those stores in Western Canada.

Okay, and then just last one for me. In terms of the gross margin, obviously you talked about promotions resuming, but that was offset by Project Horizon benefit. I'm wondering if there's any way you could quantify the Project Horizon impact in basis points. And then on that note... Obviously, you had dilution from voila in this year, but when I look at the two-year gross margin change versus 2019, it was down pretty meaningfully, and I don't think that that is explained by dilution.

So a lot of the voila impact in SG&A, and in fact, the voila gross margin is quite healthy. The impact or the amount of Horizon benefits are very hard to separate out and put a number to. We're going to be in the position that we'll certainly give you a perspective on how we feel about the success of those initiatives, but we're going to need to be judged by our sales increases and our margin rate. And the offset that we referred to was last year, the margin rates we felt were artificially high because of the everyday pricing that a higher percentage of the basket was sold at. And we made up more so than this quarter. And we made up that headwind with improvements and efficiencies in our promotions work that was mostly the analytics and the work we've done on the Horizon initiatives.

Okay, great. Thanks very much. Thank you. Next question will be from Patricia Baker at Scotiabank. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much for taking my questions. Good afternoon, everyone. Michael, I just want to follow up a little bit on a comment you made in your opening remarks. One of the underlying tenets of Project Horizon is that the initiatives that are embedded in Project Horizon are designed to drive market share increases. And you stated that you expect that you'll be able to sustain the majority of the market share increases that you saw in the last year. And I'm just curious about what will be the drivers of that. And then more importantly, are you doing anything special to try and keep the new customers? And is there anything there that you can share with us?

I'll take that great question, and I'm going to answer the first part. I'll see if Pierre wants to answer and give away anything to you on the second part. I'm going to separate it into two pieces. I'm going to separate out COVID, and I'm going to separate out Horizon, because I think they're two different moving pieces. Customers turn to us during the pandemic more than others do. because we had the products and they felt we were a safe place to shop and that our operations were incredibly efficient, productive, more than any other time in our history. So we gained market share through that. We brought in new customers who saw the value in what we were doing in terms of pricing, in terms of offering, and we believe that we'll retain a good portion of those customers afterward. And we've done everything we can some of which Pierre will not tell you, to retain those customers. So good. So even if nothing else is happening, good. We got more market share than we had two years ago. Now turn to where we are compared to pre-pandemic and even compared to last year in terms of our operations, our merchandising, but especially our Verizon initiatives that are going to go – Most of what you're seeing right now from Horizon, almost all of it is margin improvement because we said that margin improvement would be in the first year and a half. Then in the last half of Horizon, especially the last year, you start to see even more market share. So right now, it's the operations and merchandising plus that we have more customers try us out like us that has driven the market share. And then we'll build on that and grow market share through our Horizon initiative and improve I mean, Pierre is always improving, and so is Mike Denton and everybody else in the company. And now we've got Longville. Farm Boy is always great. So that's what I want to separate out, because these are two different moving pieces. So gained market share, we're going to keep a good portion of it, and then we're going to go after more. Pierre, what do you want to say to us, Patricia? Anything you want to add?

Pretty well said. So we saw a change in customer behavior during the pandemic. And we strongly believe that we'll keep some of those post-pandemic. We saw some interesting growth in some category, and it's where we're seeing good stickiness. I think customers discovered better offerings we have been able to build over the last two, three years. So I think we'll benefit from that going forward. And yes, Michael is right. Now we're focusing on horizon, margin expansion through different initiatives and pricing, promo, own brands. And now we're working to continue to improve our productivity per square foot. So we're in much better shape than we were pre-pandemic, and we keep as much as we can from those increases.

Okay, thank you very much both of you for that. I just have a follow-up question. Just on Voila and your plans to roll out another 90 of your store pickups in fiscal 22, I'm just curious whether that would have been in your original plans or were you guided by the experience that you had with the first 30 to roll that out faster?

If I understand you correctly, Patricia, I want to make sure I understood the question. Are you saying that the rate of improvement was in our original plans, or are we going faster than what we'd originally anticipated?

Are you going faster than you anticipated because you might have seen good experience with the first ones that you opened?

Yeah, it's closer to what our original plans were. I'd say if you had to say are we going slightly faster or slightly slower, actually probably slightly slower just because... it's just limited by the pace at which we can put the new process into each store. In fact, we like the outcome. We've seen good volumes, and our customers really like it. And so that's what's driving us to put it into more stores. Okay, excellent.

Thanks, Patricia.

Thank you. Next question will be from Kendrick Tai at ATB Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon. Michael, you called out in your comments, you know, the IGA.com, your Quebec business online doing seven to ten times, you know, last year would have done the year prior and obviously cooled off this year. Could you provide any insight on, you know, while obviously you saw a decrease in that business, how that settled out with respect to your relative share in that market? Understanding obviously you didn't put up the same sort of growth numbers as it did. And then, you know, a follow-up to that would be, how do you think about, you know, moving that business forward as you launch, you know, your Wallah offering into that market, you know, later this year and sort of through our full-cost window here?

Yeah, I mean, I think that we've outperformed the market in terms of the – in the markets that we've competed in in e-commerce. You've got to remember, in Quebec, we had the number one market share – still have the number one market share. And it's just moving, depending on how safe people feel leaving their homes. And you think back, and when you're talking seven to ten times the volume that you would normally do, I mean, that's, first of all, unsustainable, and it's strange, right? And so that was always, I mean, we knew that was going to come off that kind of high. But what we're seeing is that... that the volumes in all of the markets in e-commerce are remaining at a higher level than they were, much higher level than they were pre-pandemic, but off the heat of what that was. And we're also, and you know what, you asked about Quebec CFC and our confidence in that. It's a different situation. In that market, we're going to be able to you know, transfer over customers to an even better solution and take more customers from our competitors. And what we also see is that, look at Katie, it seems like I'm allowed to say this, but we see that customers that start shopping on us in e-commerce spend more than one and a half times more weekly with us overall. And these our most loyal and our best customers. Very few customers shop only one way, especially in Quebec with us. They shop bricks and mortar and they shop e-commerce. So Quebec is, I wouldn't say easy because it's never easy, but we have already the biggest market share that will transfer over to Voila! And then it's efficient, makes more money. better service to our customers, and then that translates to our brand and to our bricks and mortars. So that's a win-win-win. I'm really happy about that one.

Great. Thank you, Michael. And if I could, just one more question. Just on the inflation discussion and the expected normalization of consumer behavior, increased restaurant visitation, et cetera, how do we think about the evolution here, or how are you thinking about the potential evolution of food inflation in given that one of the overhangs over the last, you know, period has been the, you know, sort of the supply chain and the redirection of a lot of fresh and related into grocery and out of restaurants. And clearly, you know, there'd be increased tension or tightening of the market potentially as more restaurants get back to something approaching normal, you know, hopefully sooner than later from a social point of view, but perhaps not from, you know, any other reason.

Yeah, I mean, Pierre and I are looking at each other. We don't think there'll be a major impact on it.

Thanks very much. I'll leave it there.

Thanks, Kevin. Take it easy.

You too. Thank you. Next question will be from Irene Natal at RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thanks, and good afternoon, everyone. As you were walking through sort of the improvements that you've made that are driving some of those market share gains, you mentioned private label and wondering – where you are right now would compliment how you feel about that compliments relaunch and whether it achieved your objectives.

Very good question. Thank you. So we now refer to private label as own brands at Empire. So own brand remains strong in the basket. Very happy with our progress. Rebranding is going extremely well. The business is generating improved results, and penny profits are improving in own brands. It's a huge opportunity, and we know that since a bit for us across the country, and we're still working on it. And as I've mentioned in the past, penetration is not our main focus in own brands. It's about playing the right role in the category and the profitability byproduct. That's our main purpose, and it's how we behave, and it's how we drive the business, actually, with that group.

That's really helpful. Thank you. And can I take it from that, from your comments, that you are, in fact, able to achieve the margin advantage with your own brands that you have been targeting?

Absolutely. It's one of its own brand program is one of the initiatives of Verizon. So with our own brand will contribute to the margin expansion.

That's great. Thank you. And then just switching over to FreshCo, you noted both in the release and in the remarks that although the stores in Western Canada are not delivering a material EBITDA contribution, they are certainly outperforming the conventional stores they're replacing. So how should we think about, I guess, the maturation cycle of those stores and the path to delivering a more meaningful EBITDA contribution?

I think the easiest way to put that, Irene, is as we gain more critical mass in the markets, we expect the efficiencies to improve in all of the stores. We do have a point of view as well that as restrictions continue to ease, particularly in the West, that we'll be in better shape to increase our sales and increase the number of customers in the stores. So it really is just consistent increase and consistent improvement. So as I mentioned, the stores are on a good cadence and a good rate of improvement, and really it's just continuing that.

That's great. Thanks, Mike. And then just one final one. I know it's been, what, about, I guess, six weeks that Longo's has officially come into the family. Just wondering about sort of anything you might be able to share with us in terms of, you know, thoughts around the integration, around, you know, sharing the best practices, around, you know, just anything you can share with us.

Yeah, sure.

Sorry, not the integration, because I know that it's going to be standalone, but you know what I mean.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, and, you know, it's early days, but we had great plans, Anthony and his team and our team, in terms of how to work together. We identified synergies. We're working on getting those synergies. We're working together and discussing ways to run supply chains and comparing notes on e-commerce, and I've got to tell you, Both Farm Boy and Longos, it's like a treat to partner with them. As always, our goal is just we're a big company and we're hungry and just not to drive them too crazy. Once again, we're simple folk, Irene. We're simple folk. If something works, we just keep doing it. The Farm Boy went so well. What did we do? We went to JL and Jeff and we gave them a menu. And what do you want to pick from the menu? And they chose it. And Longo's is looking at the menu, too. And they've got to figure out how much they want to eat at one time. But there's just so much when you bring these companies together. And to have leaders like JL and Jeff and Anthony Longo, I mean, these are pros. They know what they're doing. And, in fact, Pierre and JL had dinner last night together, and they were talking private label and produce and just what's But, you know, forget what we can bring to them. What they can bring to us has been awesome. And when Pierre talks about own brands, a lot of it are learnings from Jeff York and JL, along with our great team, and it just keeps getting better. So it's just not something that keeps me up at night.

Didn't think so. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next question will be from Michael Van Ice at TD Securities. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Hey, Michael. I wanted to go back to what you're seeing in the quarter and what you're seeing for fiscal 22 so far. Because you talked about in the gross margin discussion, you talked about some pressure on the margin for mix between banners. So I'm assuming you're talking about a shift towards discount as already started. Is that accurate?

In terms of the mixed comment, that would be correct, but relatively minor in the quarter.

Okay. So has that picked up recently as we've seen cases come down and mobility increase? And what are you doing to try to keep that customer? Because you did mention that you plan on keeping a lot of that market share. Are you fighting to keep that market share within the conventional banner or to capture it in discount as these customers – change channels.

I think it's a lot of what Michael just said previously. The customers are in our stores. The number one prize is to use our improved execution. The new banners that we have in Farm Boy and Longo's and of course the new stores we have in Frisco. to maintain them within the Empire ecosystem. Clearly, over time, as consumers shop more banners, we're going to have to be sharper, and we're going to have to execute well. But we set ourselves a target of maintaining and sustaining as much of that sales benefit as we can. And it is really about execution and making sure that all of our Horizon work, particularly work we're doing on analytics, personalization, and other initiatives like that, keep the customers within the Empire family.

Yeah, I think that's a good answer, like Gabe. I just don't want to overstate it. Sometimes, you know, these things are very small and incremental, but when you read them in not a slam in the media, but when you read them in the media, they seem like huge, titanic shifts, which just don't happen like that. So, Michael, we can't comment on quarters before the one we're talking about, but, you know, things change very, very slowly in this business, and customers are very sticky. But I also want to say, like, we were growing market share pre-pandemic. We grew market share through the pandemic, and we intend to grow market share Post-pandemic. The issue is how much of that, and we don't have every answer. We try to have a crystal ball, and we've been pretty darn good, as I've said, since the beginning of the pandemic. It's just trying to get how much returns to a little bit of normal and how much doesn't. And you guys have your own guesses. We have ours. We're bullish. But we do, you know, we're realists too. We know what we can keep and what we're not going to keep, and then we go after some more. So I just don't want to overstate it. It's just not as titanic as people make it out to be.

Okay. On the e-commerce side, so you've got your first spoke location up and running. Can you discuss the economics of those spoke locations? You know, what are the key benefits in delivery time or costs or whatever? And are these... It is also initially dilutive, and then they improve profitability with volumes as well, I'm assuming?

So the primary reason for spoke, Michael, is to, first of all, improve your range, which they do. The second, but really more important reason for having one is to reduce the congestion at the CFC. As the volumes increase, it just becomes logistically impossible to have all of these small cube vans waiting and lining up to take each of the orders away every day. So the economics of it for us is as you get to a point where your congestion at the CFC mostly vans loading, becomes significant. That's when the spoke makes sense, and then you reduce the congestion. The spokes are not massively expensive. They're relatively small pieces of real estate. They're principally cross-stock facilities, and they don't, in terms of the total results of the wall-out business, they're not that materialized. in terms of changing the trajectory of the earnings. So the voila business doesn't see a dip in the earnings when they open a spoke. That shows up on the radar. I mean, I'm not downplaying the impact because it is part of the business model, but they're just not at the same level of cost and complexity, obviously, as the big CFCs.

Does it affect your delivery times?

At the margins. At the margin. We still need to take the product from the CFC to the spoke, and you've still got that transit, which you don't save. The spokes are not in significant inventory locations. That's still the CFC. And so, yeah, at the margin, it'll improve your time. It really improves the efficiency more than it improves the time to delivery.

And how many do you expect to have of these when you get to the scale that you expect over the next few years?

I think, and I reserve the right to be wrong here, but I think the plan was roughly four in the GCA, with plus or minus one on either side of that. And then we would also have a spoke to service Ottawa as well.

Okay. And actually, last question. When you start, I guess, going forward now, will Longo's revenues be included in your same-store sales over the next four quarters, or are you going to wait until they've been there for 13 months or 12 months?

No, we'll include them.

Okay. Excellent. Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you. Next question will be from Mark Petrie at CIBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thanks, and good afternoon. I just wanted to follow up here just with regards to the comments on private label. Is it fair to say that it's still relatively early days in terms of the overall contribution from that initiative to the Horizon targets, or is the progress material at this point?

It's early. We followed roughly the same process we did for category reset. So we're doing things by waves, by categories. We completed wave one. So that will hit store in the near future. And then we're working already on wave two and wave three. So wave three will be in September. So during the year, we should see incremental margin expansion

these initiatives so early days so far in our in our budget okay thanks and then uh with regards to the efforts on uh promo effectiveness and efficiency i guess supported by data analytics and new initiatives there would you say that the gains so far have been pretty low hanging fruit and improvements from here get a little tougher or how are you looking at that um

No, I think very encouraged by the adoption of the tools by the team. Some surprise, obviously, because the engine is very powerful to crunch a lot of data. No, I don't think there's lowering food and more difficult things. I think that will be a constant progress, and it's all about every single promotion. and we have different seasonality, so over time we will continue to improve our ROI on promotion and on any investment on both sides, on our side and the supplier side. So very pleased also with the support from our supplier partners. They are highly interested by a result we have so far and we will improve both ROI on both sides, the ROI for them and for us. So more meaningful promotion and more efficient.

Okay, thanks. And then I got a couple questions just on Voila. I'm just wondering, you know, what have you seen with regards to customer retention? And what are the patterns that you've seen in terms of, you know, people trialing Voila and then evolving their shopping as your execution has also evolved?

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing... incredibly high rates of retention. So the key is to get someone to try Wola. Once they try it, the level of retention is extremely high. And then as they progress, they buy more and more product from us and a higher percentage of their total shop. In many cases, really good now and that we're seeing that really pop. And so now all the metrics are good. Just get someone to try it and most of them get on.

And relative to your expectations or plans, how aggressive have you been in ramping up the marketing and promotion side of it? I guess both around retention but also around attracting new customers.

I think I'd say medium. I'd say that because scale to us is really important, we want to attract the customers, but we don't want to do it stupidly where we're just getting customers because we're offering some ridiculous deal. We're offering value. We have delivery passes. We have all sorts of offers that are really innovative in terms of marketing to customers. We just had our first anniversary event. offer to our long-time customers as well. So I'd say medium. I think if we really wanted to turn up the number of customers, we could be more aggressive, but I think we're doing it in a really smart way.

Okay, thanks. And then just the last one maybe. With regards to the sort of flattish outlook for EPS growth this year and then the longer-term or three-year target for 15% growth CAGR, can you just help us understand sort of what the key levers would accelerate next year. I guess you sort of, Michael, talked about sales growth or market share gains accelerating, but I would guess that would be supported by gross margins continuing to expand, and is better SG&A leverage a key part of the plan, or is it mostly top line and gross margin?

Okay, Mark, I just had trouble getting a commute button there. I've I think we said consistently from the outset that we're going to be very focused on the SG&A line and reducing the costs, but the majority of the improvement in Horizon over the next few years, or at least over the Horizon period, is going to be in our top line in our margin rate.

Okay. Fair enough. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thanks.

Thank you. Next question will be from Vishal Sridhar at National Bank. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. With respect to your promo effectiveness initiatives and your data analytics, is Empire's reliance on a partner system for loyalty data, is that a hindrance at all, or are you able to get all the data you need in the manner you need it?

No, I mean, I think we've made great inroads with our partner, and look, it could always be better, and we're always looking for better ways to do it, but I think that the relationship we had has been much, much better, and that we get a lot of data that we need. And to be perfectly honest with you, Michelle, we have all the data in the world we need. It's a matter of what we and it's fueling all of our Horizon initiatives with that data. So, yeah, could it be a little better? Sure, but that's not the sticking point. The sticking point is to take what we have and make it efficient.

Okay. And, Michael, maybe thoughts on just strategic orientation. You know, Empire's acquisition is mainly focused in the conventional arena, you know, focused on GTA, let's say, but the fastest-growing demo is immigrants, minorities, and they tend to shop at discount more. I'm wondering if this is something that Empire reflects on and if they feel their mix of discounted conventional is appropriate in the GTA.

Well, I'll answer it a few ways. One is we're just digesting our partnership with Longo. Second, we feel that our offering to... To all Canadians, it's a shallow but also initiative that we don't talk a lot about because in terms of our full service is really great. We have great plans to be able to capture that. didn't have those assets and that we needed to grow e-commerce and we've done we've done everything we have to do now we just got to execute the hell out of it okay thanks i'll leave it at that thank you thank you your next question will be from peter sclar at bimo capital markets please go ahead okay thanks um i just have a few quick quick questions on voila

Michael Vells, you said that it lost 18 cents for the full year, and I believe you gave the loss for the fourth quarter, but I missed it.

Four cents, Peter.

Sorry? Say that again?

Four cents.

Four cents. Okay. And then, can you talk a little bit about the accounting for the launch of the Montreal CFC? Like, it's Launching in the next calendar year, when is the launch date and how do you deal with costs up until that time? Is everything capitalized or are there expenses that are falling to the bottom line?

So we don't have an exact date. We're saying early in 22. And we'll be more specific about that as the construction schedules progress more and we get... testing done with the installation of the OCADO technology systems because, and I know this wasn't your question, we have a number of customers, many customers that we're converting over and those customers need to see as good or better experience with the launch of the CFC and we're going to make sure that we're 100% ready. So we're staying a bit flexible on the exact date of the first order because we want to make sure our customers have a great experience. In terms of the accounting, it's, as you might imagine, anything that is, say, for example, a design cost or a construction cost is capitalized. Any of the back office SG&A that we're adding, and we are going to be adding that as we go through F-22, would be expensed. And then any... Any expenditures that Crombie does on our behalf ultimately is realized in the form of at least when we take possession.

Okay. And then Michael Medline, I believe I heard you say that you're going to try to convert people from IGA net over to Voila, the Voila CFC in Montreal. Is that correct?

Yeah, in the territory where the Vol-Au-Pas EGF covers.

So how does that work? Because I believe IGA is a franchise system in Quebec. So how do you deal with the franchisees on that issue?

I'll take it. We had discussion with franchisees on that. topic since many years. So, we all aligned on the purpose of having an automated CFC. So, the franchisees are well engaged in our strategy. We're not seeing any issue by doing it. By the way, we have a huge in Quebec market, and not only in our business, but in general, the unemployment rate is very low. There's a lot of a shortage in retail in general. So dealer will use their resources to serve customer coming in a store and will serve e-commerce customers on the most and the more efficient way through a CFC. So it's a win-win. Through the CFC, we'll have more window that is open. So we have more chance to meet the demand. And like Michael said, When we look at the profile of these customers, they're more loyal to the entire ecosystem by 1.5 times. So there's a win-win for us, for them, at lower cost and better efficiency. So these things have been shared with dealers over the last two years, so we have very good discussion. We have a very strong relationship with them, and they're really well-engaged.

Okay, and then just lastly, the CFCs require a lot of labor, particularly drivers. Given the labor environment, is that holding up the unfolding of these businesses at all?

Labor is tight all over the place, but we're doing a great job being able to find drivers and great people to work in our CFC and throughout our organization. But there's no doubt that labor is tightening.

Okay, that's all I have. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. And your next question will be from Chris Lee at Desjardins. Please go ahead.

Thanks for squeezing me in. Just one quick question on Ebola. I know food waste is a big expense, and I know Colorado has best-in-class food waste age of 0.4%. I'm just curious, where are you now in that journey for CFC1? And is improvement in shrink one of the key drivers to allowing you to achieve EBITDA positive towards the end of year three? Thank you.

We're happy with our experience today. We started off, as you can imagine, Chris, new business, and the only customer was Michael Medline. And he didn't buy everything that was available, so shrink numbers in the early days were high. As we've gained volumes and, of course, got more comfortable with our suppliers, our shrink numbers have reduced. And I think it'd be fair to say that We're not at our targets, but we're getting much closer. So part of the improvement through F21 has certainly been turned, but it's not the most significant driver of our numbers for F22 because the CSC is actually doing much better than when we started. And while they certainly can be better, it's tight today. It's just going to get tighter.

Thanks very much and best of luck.

Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.

Thank you. And at this time, Ms. Bryan, we have no further questions. Please proceed.

Great. Thank you, Sylvie. Ladies and gentlemen, we appreciate your continued interest in Empire. If there are any unanswered questions, please contact me by phone or email. We look forward to having you join us for our first quarter fiscal 2022 conference call on September 9th. Talk soon.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again, thank you for attending. And at this time, we do ask that you please disconnect your lines.