And our job is to be front and center to try to help them, whether it's core execution or value added programming or connecting with suppliers. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. I'll make a comment on this and then pass it over to Eric again. We look forward to updating everyone again in December. I think with your questions there, I think I would say we were in line with what we're expecting for Q3 internally. Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. Steve Bloomquist, Vice President, Investor Relations, you may begin your conference. And that's why we wanted everyone to understand that it's over 20% of our EBITDA and it's growing at an accelerated rate and we've aligned our talent to take advantage of that opportunity. Terrific. These included a LIFO charge of $25 million, or $0.30 per share. We believe this will contribute most to shareholder value creation. And we are fortunate enough to be doing business with a lot of winners. Let me start by saying I'm proud of our team's work as we capped a year of improving operational performance, driving share gains and strong financial results. UNITED NATURAL FOODS, INC. : Press releases relating to UNITED NATURAL FOODS, INC. Investor relations | Nyse: UNFI | Nyse The steps we're taking in 2023 build on our fiscal 2022 achievements and will serve as the launch pad for our reinvigorated investment strategy and elevated long-term growth trajectory. Great. We don't do quarterly guidance, but you've got the pieces and ultimately, we think the number that we've provided is the right one giving the outlook. Your line is open. Thank you. Overview; Events & Presentations; News; SEC Filings; . So, we are clearly making progress on this front and that helps drive down the overall cost by eliminating third-party labor and the need for reactive versus proactive labor management. And finally, I believe a key differentiator is the talent that UNFI has at all levels of the organization. Our broad customer base also allows us to meet consumers where they prefer to shop. A higher gross margin rate before LIFO impacts was more than offset by a higher operating expense burden. As it relates to Q4 guidance, you're absolutely right, we generally don't provide quarterly guidance. During fiscal 2023, we expect a significant portion of our planned capital expenditures to be focused on initiatives to increase efficiency. Fiscal. Your line is open. have her join our team. As for adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS, our original ranges were $760 million to $790 million and $3.90 to $4.20 per share, respectively. United Natural Foods, Inc. Halie O'Shea Director Investor Relations & Corporate Strategy (401) 528-8634 or ICR Katie Turner General Information (646) 277-1228 Site Navigation Home markets experience. John Heinbockel -- Guggenheim Partners -- Analyst. And by increasing our full-year guidance, I think you can get into -- back into the Q4 number for you. And there's not many if any national fresh players. familiarity with our company and sales channels, and were excited to So I wanted to go on the buyback and some of the comments on potential M&A tuck-ins. Now that varies, because many of them are taking on new categories from us, that we have been able to deliver, because they value us is kind of a one-stop shop, and increasingly customers are seeing that value and taking advantage of it. We have been upgrading our DC network over the last many years. UNITED NATURAL FOODS, INC. : Press releases relating to UNITED NATURAL FOODS, INC. Investor relations | Brse Stuttgart: UN3 | Brse Stuttgart ET. That's really helpful. On the LIFO charge itself at $72 million, I mean the first half was $30 million. Your line is open. Supplementary Review: United Natural Foods (UNFI), September 28, 2022, Supplementary Review: United Natural Foods (UNFI), June 7, 2022, Supplementary Review: United Natural Foods (UNFI), March 9, 2022, $20 Billion UNFI Names Former Dunkin Tech And Strategy Chief As CIO, Despite Broad Food Deflation, United Natural Foods Produces Better-Than-Expected Fourth Quarter, RSI Alert: United Natural Foods (UNFI) Now Oversold, United Natural Foods Becomes Oversold (UNFI), United Natural Foods Enters Oversold Territory (UNFI), United Natural Foods Stock Sees Short Interest Jump 11.6%, First Week of November 22nd Options Trading For United Natural Foods, United Natural Foods Moves Up In Market Cap Rank, Passing United States Steel, United Natural Foods Moves Up In Market Cap Rank, Passing Molex. We also see meaningful opportunity to benefit from increased efficiency and growth enablement across this portfolio by strengthening best practices, employing technology and investing in automation. This increase was composed of inflation, net of elasticity of about 8.8% and a volume decline of less than 1%, our modest volume loss was significantly better than that of the broader industry for which Nielsen reported units declined by close to 3% for the same period. In total, we expect adjusted EPS growth of approximately 3.5% for the fiscal year. It is. Just a quick addition is, look, we saw the fill rates decline from Q4 to Q1 and then again, Q1 to Q2, but they stabilized in Q3, actually slight uptick sequentially. We appreciate you joining us for today's year-end call. That's what's driving that number. Making the world smarter, happier, and richer. We've successfully refinanced and extended the maturity on our $2.1 billion asset-based revolver by over three and a half years, which brings its maturity to June 2027. Over the last two years we've reduced net leverage over 1.2 turns and ended the year at under 2.6 times, which is just north of our current target leverage range of 2 times to 2.5 times that we detailed as part of our Fuel the Future strategy. And then as a follow-up just on the kind of the market share gains, how we supposed to think about that versus market wins that you guys have gotten that are driving volumes versus, kind of, the current customers. First, bringing value to our customers, then improving the way we partner with suppliers. Sales from its Wholesale and Retail segments were up 8.1% and 1.6% to $6.77 []. At the same time, our people plan aims to equip employees with the tools that they need to help the company achieve its goals. But more importantly, for that business, we invested in capability, in digital capability to craft more personalized promotions to understand pricing and revenue management capability and several operating initiatives. With the center store, the thing that we are focused on is making sure we have enough lead time to inform and adapt to our customers and making sure we're doing everything we can to get corresponding promo dollars to keep our customers -- keep the volume and our customers going. We're actively investing in people, technology, and infrastructure to deliver fresher produce and continued brand innovation at a time when customers and shoppers are increasingly seeing the value in these products and in services ranging from data analytics to revenue growth management that position us as more of a consultant to our customers. Sep 27, 2022, 8:30 a.m. Steve Bloomquist -- Vice President, Investor Relations. website at www.unfi.com. As outlined in our press release, we're raising our full year outlook for net sales to a new range of $28.8 billion to $29.1 billion, a 7% increase over fiscal 2021, reflecting the underlying performance of our business. The next question is from Eric Larson with Seaport Research Partners. Thanks you and thanks for all the color on the call this morning. We view this as a critical opportunity to innovate and leverage our scale to address the impact that our company and our partners have on our people, our communities, and our world. Are the values of the merchandising programs higher? I hope you've heard and take away from today's call that UNFI has momentum as we enter fiscal 2023. But they're roughly flat year over year. As an automation technology leader, we look forward to working with the company to help streamline and improve operations across strategic assets within our distribution network. I mean we saw some softness in units versus inflation, John went over how could unpack our sales report and we were -- we clearly have more customers now than we did a year ago, so that implies that the customers we've had for more than a year, have unit performance is weaker than the company's. Our results also included a modest net impact from higher fuel prices Sandy spoke to despite the portion of the increase shared by our customers, as well as the fuel hedges we have in place. As you've heard, today's operating backdrop continues to be both challenging and unpredictable, yet we remain optimistic about serving our customers and delivering on our updated outlook for the year. Theyjust revealed what they believe are thetenbest stocksfor investors to buy right now and United Natural Foodswasn't one of them! And then from there what our services platform does is it allows us to add value-added services that help them grow faster, become more efficient and generally more competitive. Notably, this market also continues to grow. Thanks for taking my questions. Definitions and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our press release. We believe diversification is one of our strengths as well. I wanted to ask a couple about retail. Given timing, is it fair to assume that this could be a material contributor to your implied expectations for EBITDA growth step up in fiscal 24 to fiscal 23? We've demonstrated our ability to take share in a $140 billion addressable market with upside from our services platform and plan to grow share within this market by continually looking for better. Is it to offset dilution, or is it to actually reduce the outstanding share count? As we announced in July, we've established a new internal organization that is now solely focused on growing this platform. Broadly speaking, we expect at some point for inflation to start to level off, and we expect suppliers then to want and need to drive margin through incremental sales. Our fourth quarter gross margin rate excluding the LIFO charge from both years, increased by around 20 basis points, compared to last year's fourth quarter. So, we've heard from some of the large pronounced merchants, they've seen some wallet share shift from discretionary categories into consumables. So, I think we're making the right choices, and we're keeping pace with the options we have to support our growth. On today's call, I'll provide further color on our sales for the quarter and our sales pipeline that we expect will deliver future growth. And that's exactly what we're going to do. Discounted offers are only available to new members. And when we think about that guidance what we're thinking about is trying to balance inflation, the impact on fill rates, the labor market, new business wins, all of those aspects that we tried to bake into our guidance to try to come up with a number that we believe is reasonable given that economic backdrop, particularly given our desire to maintain that flexibility that Sandy mentioned, so that we can continue to serve the customer as best as possible. And then there's an acceleration in own label. Sure. And could you comment, you know, how that is carrying through in the fourth quarter and your sense of the quarter on a profitability basis? How many customers actually have the ability to have one truck, one invoice? These were partially offset by some leveraging on our fixed costs. As you can see on slide 14, fiscal 2023 adjusted EPS is expected to benefit from about $0.44 from higher adjusted EBITDA about $0.11, due to lower net interest expense and by around a $0.01 to a slightly lower expected tax rate. The transaction pipeline is active and we are focused on investments that bring new capabilities, improve our geographic depth and further enhance our growth trajectory and cash flow resiliency. So I wanted to get back to the investments you're making in both technology and the DC news. Yes, I think our perspective around -- I think, think about it as three levels of practice improvement in our supply chain. Hey guys, thanks for taking my question. We're pleased that our performance reflects continued sales gains from both existing and new customers, and allows us to increase our full year sales and earnings guidance under what we believe to be a more transparent and meaningful definition of adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS, which John will address shortly. And a follow-up on the quarter, how much of the year-over-year SG&A increase as a percentage of sales? The shortfall in fiscal 22 was a function of the supply chain. While we expect many of these issues to persist through the fiscal year, we're encouraged by the improvements we're beginning to see. Hourly rate can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years . Yeah. These forward-looking statements include plans, expectations, estimates, and projections that might involve significant risks and uncertainties. We feel good about the $350 million based on what we know today. The decrease in non-cash pension income was that we experienced as a result of the progress we've made in de-risking the balance sheet, which has proceeded at an accelerated pace relative to our prior planning assumptions. We're also highly focused on enhancing our transparency and investor disclosures and as Steve noted we posted an Excel supplemental with our key financial information on a historical basis, alongside the rest of our earnings materials. United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI) the largest publicly-traded grocery distributor in the U. S., announced that Jack Clare has been named its new Chief Information Officer effective today. The average hourly wage for a Head of Investor Relations at companies like UNITED NATURAL FOODS INC in the United States is $164 as of March 29, 2022, but the range typically falls between $144 and $190. Turning to slide 13, our strong finish to 2022, operational momentum, investment initiatives, and improved balance sheet set us up well to deliver another year of growth across our key financial metrics, despite the challenging operating environment that persists. And by working hard to make them visible to each other and connect the dots, I think we're having pretty good success in terms of doing everything we can to help them be as competitive as possible. So we can better share those results with our customers and make them competitive. This is a significant focus of our 2023 investment program and a driver of the agreement that we just announced with Symbotic. As I mentioned earlier, we have a very large and attractive addressable market opportunity. Overview; Events & Presentations; News; SEC Filings; FAQs Today, this platform contributes over 22% of our adjusted EBITDA before corporate allocations and we expect this number will continue to grow. To that end, we've identified four focus areas to guide our execution of the Fuel the Future strategy that we believe will enable us to successfully deliver the three-year fiscal year '24 financial targets that we outlined at last summer's investor day. corporate strategy, working closely with the executive management team. As we noted today in our earnings release, our Board has approved a new $200 million share repurchase authorization that we can utilize over the next four years. We're looking at overall customer quality of orders and the improvement thereon order accuracy and order quality going out to the buildings. The volume in the quarter was market-competitive, but a number of initiatives that give us confidence that the outlook for our retail business is strong. And we have over 110 more private label SKUs and process, all packaged with our new look and clear organic communication. So, without actually talking much about any kind of fiscal 2023 guidance or anything, it sounds like the promo environment could be a bigger tailwind for you in F '23 than in F '22. I mean, I know there is a lot of moving parts in this environment? But any color you can comment on there? As Sandy just highlighted, we're pleased with the finish we delivered to fiscal 2022. As we enter the second year of our Fuel the Future strategy, we remain focused on driving operational improvement to optimize the value of our scaled and diversified platform across to $140 billion addressable market that we're pursuing in our core business. So, the net-net is we're pleased with our retail business. Consequently, any such data, information, or opinions do not in any way represent a personal recommendation to any individual investor or any entities, whatever the type. announced that Halie OShea has joined the Company as Director of This is John. Were these planned? John, maybe -- either John or Sandy, you know, in this environment that we're in, obviously it's pretty fluid, you've got high inflation, you've got consumers scrambling to probably, you know, pay their bills and meet their -- and get their groceries at a reasonable price. As we improve our execution and move further along the spectrum from distributor to value-added partner for our customers and suppliers, we continue to see the benefits of several clear differentiators that we're working to build upon: our core customer service capabilities and the over 30,000 independent, innovative, and segmented retail food locations we service; the scale and capability of our North American supply chain; the breadth of our product and services assortment; and finally, our talented, experienced and incredibly dedicated associates. Calculated by Time-Weighted Return since 2002. Hi. So, I can't really give you the color that you're looking for into kind of standard steady state, because there's not a lot of steady state in our business, which is by design. So just curious of how much of that is customer wins and cross-selling versus kind of underlying comp performance? Operating cash flow before changes in working capital has increased at a 16% average growth rate over the past two years to nearly $700 million in fiscal 2022. Great. It's baked into the guidance. You mentioned some of these investments, but could you help unpack that between gross margin, SG&A? We invested in promotional dollars. the food and beverage industry at Janney Capital Markets. As such plan assets are held in lower risk, lower return investments, aligning more closely with the duration of the pension liabilities. But to drive sales, we would expect suppliers to start to invest in promotions, and promotions will drive units. Yes. We plan to fund these investments primarily by streamlining and redeploying funds from lower return uses within our existing expense base. If you have an ad-blocker enabled you may be blocked from proceeding. 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 Dorne, our chief operating officer. So we -- our units are driven by the general health and elasticity in the market on one hand and then our ability to expand categories and/or expand net customers. We've also included a supplemental disclosure file in Microsoft Excel with key financial information. We've reduced the rates on borrowings and the unused portions under the facility, and we've transitioned from LIBOR to SOFR as the benchmark rate for the borrowings under the ABL in the term loan facilities. And we've seen in the cross-selling results, that Chris described, impact, impact to market share, impact to give customer flexibility. But as the situation normalizes in the supply chain, the labor environment and inflation starts to recede, then we'll be dealing with a growth environment where there won't be an accelerating headwind on the value of products. To make the world smarter, happier, and richer. United Natural Foods, Inc. (NYSE: UNFI) (the "Company" or "UNFI") today reported financial results for the fourth quarter (13 weeks) and fiscal year . We are focused on getting better at what we do. And then, do you see any opportunity in the more perishable side or is it just too tough to do that? Could the degree of contraction ease more than you were anticipating? Could you comment on that how that relates to -- is it inflation jumped that much? The Others segment includes the sale other activities of the firm. And can you quickly compare F '22 to F '21 on the promo rates and the programs? To improve the value we deliver to suppliers, we have a real opportunity to provide value-added insights to strengthen their segmented marketing efforts by helping our customers become more visible to our suppliers. On today's call, I'll cover our third quarter financial performance, balance sheet capital structure, and our fiscal 2022 outlook. Ms. OShea has over fifteen years of finance, investment and capital Thanks for the question. Based on 1 salaries posted anonymously by United Natural Foods Investor Relations Manager employees in Riverside. I'll give you a general answer and then I'll call in Eric to drill in a little bit. We're also communicating to our customer opportunities to drive business where national brands are in allocation or fill rates into UNFI are challenged. And, in fact, we saw independence actually start to gain share a little bit in February and March and April. And that, in turn will, drive value for our customers, and the flywheel that I mentioned will be started. Definitions and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our press release and the end of our earnings presentation. Price as of November 7, 2022, 4:00 p.m. These are important because they affect our need for third-party labor and over time, and they generally speak to the stability of the operation. This article is a transcript of this conference call produced for The Motley Fool. And promotions are a great way to do that, to help our customers stay competitive on key items, to help launch new items, and we're working hard to make them more visible so that suppliers can see the value of their investment. On the -- your units being down I think less than 1% versus the industry. We're seeing acceleration in owned brands in particular as almost in parallel to the spike up in inflation. And it mostly just offsets some, kind of, below the line items. We have buying power in our professional services business, where we're able to acquire services at rates of our scale that we can pass on to our customers. The vacancy rate declined from 9% at the end of Q3 to 8% at year-end. Mr. Zechmeister commented, Halie has a high level of By . We expect this number will continue to decline during fiscal 2023 and beyond. I mean, weve started the year in the mid-teens, weve narrowed it down to the low-teens. And as the fill rates have, I think we mentioned in the script, started to stabilize and slightly improve here toward the end of the third quarter, what we hope will happen is that we'll start to see further acceleration and promotional activity from our customers -- sorry, from suppliers. Our reported gross margin rate fell about 40 basis points. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. to that, she served as an Equity Research Associate Analyst focused on Our adjusted EBITDA net leverage ratio, which now also excludes the impact of LIFO in the denominator improved to 2.9 times. By segment, Wholesale and. And finally, our efforts to support our communities and the planet builds on our long-standing commitment to doing what's right and the recognition that better food can only come from a healthy planet and that clean air and water are crucial to a safe and nutritious food supply. Yes. Okay, great. But as you can hear throughout everything that we say, it is our strategy to grow our capability so that we will continue to earn the business of more customers and more categories. Yeah, I mean, as we mentioned, the volume that we saw in the quarter really was consistent from Q2 to Q3. We pass all of it through to our customers, and we have an administrative fee that goes back to our suppliers that's transparent in our value chain. These were partially offset by about $0.09 of lower non-cash pension income, $0.05 from a higher tax rate and less than a $0.01 from a slightly higher share count. We're pleased that we are getting our leverage to a position where we can execute on that. This includes an expected drag of around 4% from lower non-cash pension income and higher depreciation and amortization associated with increased investments. Is there any way to tell on a comp basis what volume or cases are doing? After considering funding for these investments, we will prioritize further debt repayment and pursue selective shareholder returns. This growth reflects elevated SG&A investments that we believe will better position us for accelerated growth beyond fiscal 2023. The environment remains unpredictable in several ways, but we're confident in our agility and our resilience as we help our customers succeed through all that UNFI has to offer. Quantalytics is not a registered investment adviser, brokerage firm, or investment company. UNFI reported an 8.0% year-over-year rise in fiscal 2022 Q4 net sales to $7.27 billion as higher inflation-driven pricing more than made up for a slight decline in volume. Over this past year, we've recruited senior leaders in areas where we see the great opportunity to drive value and we have a great mix of experienced food industry veterans combined with strong functional leaders to drive the next chapter of UNFI's growth. We're pleased with the performance of our recently remodeled stores, whose sales gains have significantly outpaced total retail, and technology investments have helped simplify the business and improve performance. Just trying to understand how you're thinking about that going forward? Consensus Price Target is the stock price analysts expect to see within a period of 0-18 months. I mean youre going to do five DC's over four years, kind of, how that rolls out?Any challenges right with retrofitting a facility upfront right in terms of cost, right? Well, I would describe the transformation as early stage on some of the supply chain and distribution changes. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. You're going to try to raise cases right per man hour. TurnerGeneral Information(646) 277-1228, Internet Explorer presents a security risk. Contact Investor Relations; Email Alerts; RSS; February 2021 term loan tax notice; November 2021 term loan tax notice; UNFI Acquires SUPERVALU. Image source: The Motley Fool. It's healthy for our customers, because it serves their primary purpose, which is to sell products to their customers. And for our shareholders, thank you for the trust that you place in us through your continued investment in UNFI.

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