United Natural Foods Q2 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
March 11, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • UNFI reported 5% net sales growth to $8.2 billion in Q2, led by over 8% increase in its natural products business and a 3% rise in wholesale volumes.
  • Adjusted EBITDA jumped more than 13% to $145 million, lifting the margin to 1.8%—the highest rate since Q3 FY 23—and driving adjusted EPS of $0.22 versus $0.07 a year ago.
  • Free cash flow swung to a positive $30 million in the first half—up roughly $250 million year-over-year—enabling net debt reduction to about $2 billion and net leverage to 3.7x.
  • Management raised its full-year guidance, now targeting $31.3 billion–$31.7 billion in sales, $550 million–$580 million in adjusted EBITDA, and at least $150 million in free cash flow.
  • Key strategic initiatives advanced, including the realignment of wholesale into conventional and natural divisions, expansion of lean management into nine distribution centers, and ongoing distribution network optimization.
AI Generated. May Contain Errors.
Earnings Conference Call
United Natural Foods Q2 2025
00:00 / 00:00

Transcript Sections

Skip to Participants
Operator

Thank you for standing by, My name is Karen, and I will be your conference operator today, At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the UNFI Quarter Two Fiscal 2025 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, you may press star followed by the number one again. I will now turn the call over to Steve Bloomquist, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Steve Bloomquist
VP of Investor Relations at UNFI

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on UNFI's Q2 Fiscal 2025 Earnings Conference Call. By now, you should have received a copy of the earnings release issued this morning. The press release and earnings presentation, which management will speak to, are available under the Investor section of the company's website on the Events tab.

Steve Bloomquist
VP of Investor Relations at UNFI

We've also included a supplemental disclosure file in Microsoft Excel with key financial information. Joining me for today's call are Sandy Douglas, our Chief Executive Officer, and Matteo 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 today's comments made by management may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include plans, expectations, estimates, and projections that might involve significant risks and uncertainties.

Steve Bloomquist
VP of Investor Relations at UNFI

These risks are discussed in the company's earnings release and SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from the results discussed in these forward-looking statements. I'd like to point out, during today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Definitions and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our press release and the end of our presentation.

Steve Bloomquist
VP of Investor Relations at UNFI

Finally, as we stated on our last call, we've changed the sales reporting on the face of our press release, which now breaks down our revenues in a manner consistent with the previously announced realignment of our wholesale business. To provide historical context, last week we posted prior quarter sales under this updated approach to our website. We believe these changes will give you additional insight and transparency into our multi-year strategy and sales performance. I'd now ask you to turn to slide six of our presentation as I turn the call over to Sandy.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Thanks, Steve, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. As we shared in our release, we delivered another quarter of improving financial results and operational execution while achieving key milestones of our multi-year plan. Our results also reflect solid sales growth and adjusted EBITDA growth of over 13% and significant improvement in year-over-year free cash flow.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

As a result, we've again raised our full-year outlook for all financial objectives other than capital spending and remain firmly on track to deliver our longer-term fiscal 2027 targets and to continue creating sustainable shareholder value. Today, I'm going to focus on three key areas. First, I'll describe how we are working to increase the value we offer to both customers and suppliers. Then I'll discuss some accomplishments within our multi-year plan and highlights from our results in the quarter.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Have outlined our strategy of adding value for our customers and suppliers while also improving UNFI's free cash flow and strengthening our balance sheet. We believe our recent results validate our strategy and demonstrate that we are delivering improving operational execution as we work to embed lean management practices throughout the organization.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

We have strived to learn and adapt as we have implemented our plans, soliciting feedback from both customers and suppliers on what we are doing well and, importantly, areas in which we can improve. We routinely evaluate our potential to improve and create more value for all of our key stakeholders, and by so doing, we believe our value creation opportunity continues to grow. We expect our focus on continuous improvement to increasingly benefit the customers and suppliers we partner with, driving greater sales and profit opportunity for our mutual businesses.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

In turn, we anticipate we will continue to create sustainable shareholder value. We have identified new areas to add value and increase effectiveness and efficiency. This includes opportunities to improve the customer and supplier experience in our wholesale distribution business, expand services catering to key customer groups that have historically been underserved by the digital and professional services available in our industry,

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

elevate our merchandising capabilities, and make targeted investments in our private brands program to ensure that we have the unique, innovative items retailers need to drive relevance and value with consumers. These are all opportunities that would be incremental to our multi-year strategy. While we've been identifying new areas of value creation, we've also had another strong quarter achieving key milestones within our multi-year plan.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Matteo's leadership has helped us become more effective and efficient across our operations, and our teams are embracing the principles and power behind lean. We've extended lean daily management into additional distribution centers and continue to see indications of success, including reducing shrink down to the second lowest level as a percentage of sales in the past 10 quarters.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Lean daily management is now practiced at nine DCs, and we plan to continue to methodically expand this discipline across our network. Importantly, these practices not only strengthen our operating efficiency but also deliver improvements in effectiveness and accuracy that benefit our customers and suppliers. We also continue improving our effectiveness and efficiency through targeted optimization within our distribution network. We successfully consolidated our Fort Wayne, Indiana, distribution center in mid-February and transferred its volume to other, more modern and efficient facilities nearby.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Our previously closed DC in Billings is also now under contract, and the sale is expected to be completed in the Q4 of this year, with proceeds to be utilized to further reduce net debt. Our Fort Wayne and Bismarck DCs are actively being marketed, and as we've mentioned, we will not trade time for value as we seek to maximize our proceeds from these sales.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

As part of our network optimization, we're also working to evolve select customer relationships to drive win-win solutions that are mutually beneficial to both parties. We've already completed extensive work across our customer base to improve key agreements, and in most cases, we've successfully achieved mutually beneficial outcomes for UNFI and our customers. We're now focused on doing the same for a few remaining agreements.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

While our goal is always to reach a win-win agreement, when a win-win agreement is not possible, we'll explore a mutually agreeable exit plan. In all cases, we are continuing to take actions that support our customers and suppliers and accelerate our multi-year financial targets to create shareholder value. Lastly, as we announced in January, we have taken steps to realign our wholesale business into two product-centered divisions that we expect will enable us to offer more differentiated and tailored solutions to customers and suppliers.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

One division will be focused on conventional grocery products, and the other will be focused on natural, organic, specialty, and fresh products. The basis of our multi-year strategy was a deep understanding of the unique ways that we can add value for customers that are included in the growing $90 billion-plus target market we previously described.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

We believe these new, more focused divisions, supported by centers of excellence that will scale enterprise-wide capabilities, will enable our commercial teams to provide a more customized product and service-centered experience. This increasingly effective and responsive operating model is intended to help our customers and suppliers differentiate, compete, and grow profitably.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

We expect most of the organizational changes required to support this realignment will be completed by the end of this fiscal year. The strategic actions we took during fiscal 2024 and thus far in fiscal 2025 to strengthen our foundation and execute our multi-year plan are delivering results. During the first half, adjusted EBITDA grew nearly 14%, free cash flow generation climbed nearly $250 million, and net leverage has been reduced to 3.7 turns. This is the lowest net leverage level since fiscal 2023.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

As Matteo will describe in more detail, we expect to build on this performance during the second half of the year. In closing, as we execute our strategy, we become even more confident in our multi-year objectives, long-term trajectory, and in our ability to add value for retailers and suppliers across the food retail industry

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

As I described, we're also continuing to identify further opportunities for value creation. We are focused on becoming the most efficient value-creating partner for our stakeholders, which in turn creates more opportunities for the approximately 27,000 UNFI associates who serve our customers and suppliers with dedication every day. Together, we remain confident our plan will continue to drive sustainable shareholder returns. Let me turn it over to Matteo to discuss our Q2 results, lean progress, and revised outlook. Matteo?

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Thank you, Sandy, and good morning, everyone. Thanks again for joining our Q2 earnings call. As Sandy stated, our operating momentum, execution, and performance have continued to accelerate during the first half of fiscal 2025. We remain confident in our multi-year strategy and the corresponding longer-term financial objectives we outlined during our fiscal 2024 year-end call.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Today, I will provide additional insight into our Q2 results, including our free cash flow generation and capital structure, and comment on our updated outlook for fiscal 2025. With that, let's review our Q2 results. Turning to slide eight, you will see the walk on this slide reflects the updated sales disaggregation Steve described earlier. Our Q2 sales grew nearly 5% to $8.2 billion.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Our gains in the quarter were led by our natural products business, where sales increased by over 8% compared to last year's Q2, primarily reflecting higher sales and category penetration with existing customers. Our conventional products business was up just over 2%, reflecting new business wins and new customers over the past four quarters.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Across our wholesale business, volumes were up about 3%, which represented another quarter of sequential acceleration and a continuation of the favorable trends we cited as we exited fiscal 2024. This broadly outperformed the key industry Nielsen benchmarks and partially reflects the benefit of new customer additions we will begin to cycle later this year. Inflation was largely unchanged sequentially at approximately 1.5%, which was close to a percent lower than last year's Q2.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Total sales in our retail business were down about 3% compared to last year, primarily the result of five store closures over the past 12 months. On an ID basis or same-store sales basis, sales were down about 40 basis points, a sequential improvement of about 100 basis points compared to Q1. This also reflects positive ID sales at Cub, the larger of our two banners, after being roughly flat in Q1.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Moving to slide nine, let's review profitability drivers in the quarter. Overall, you can see that our wholesale business drove the growth in the quarter. Wholesale gross profit dollars, net of higher operating costs, were up nearly $20 million. This was largely due to higher volumes. However, our consolidated gross margin rate, excluding LIFO, declined 20 basis points compared to the prior year period to 13.2% of net sales.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

This was driven by a lower wholesale margin rate, as well as a mix shift toward wholesale, partly offset by a higher rate in retail. In wholesale, our gross margin rate declined about 10 basis points versus last year's Q2, largely due to changes in customer and product mix and some targeted strategic commercial investments.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

These impacts were nearly offset by innovation and efficiency initiatives, including value-adding supplier programs and the lower level of shrink Sandy referenced. More than offsetting this gross margin rate decline was continued solid execution and management of our operating expenses, which compared to last year's declined by approximately 40 basis points as a percentage of sales. As we've emphasized before, we are laser-focused on improving processes and removing waste, so we are better able to bring value and improve service levels to our customers and suppliers.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

This improving efficiency also partially reflects some benefits from the customer mix shift impacting our gross margin rate. Growing more quickly with large existing customers has benefits to route optimizations and drop sizes that benefit our operating expenses. As Sandy mentioned, we have now rolled lean daily management out to nine DCs, and we're pleased with the improvements we are seeing.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Several of the newer implementations have already seen initial low single-digit productivity gains, which is a good progress to the higher gains we ultimately expect. This is coupled with improvements in safety and delivery quality. Equally as important are the lessons that we have learned and the skills we're applying to become more proficient. Teams are strengthening their ability to problem-solve, to effectively identify and document countermeasures, and a culture of championing breakthrough thinking has been embedded across our organization.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

These actions, along with the other strategic initiatives undertaken in fiscal 2024 and to date in fiscal 2025, drove adjusted EBITDA to grow over 13% compared to the prior year quarter to $145 million. Our adjusted EBITDA rate expanded 13 basis points compared to the prior year to nearly 1.8%. This represents the highest adjusted EBITDA margin rate since the Q3 of fiscal 2023.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Our adjusted EBITDA, combined with some benefits on below-the-line items, led to strong adjusted EPS growth, with adjusted EPS in the quarter of $0.22 compared to $0.07 in last year's Q2. Turning to slide 10, our improved profitability and continuous focus on deploying and adhering to lean principles helped drive $193 million in free cash flow in the quarter, which was approximately $77 million more than last year.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Working capital in the quarter was an approximately $100 million cash benefit, which, combined with our stronger adjusted EBITDA, more than offset our capital investment and interest expense. This brings our year-to-date free cash flow to slightly more than $30 million. This represents an improvement of nearly $250 million compared to last year's free cash flow use of $212 million in the first half. It also brings total free cash flow generated over the last 12 months to over $150 million.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We continue to make earlier-than-anticipated progress on working capital management, including a net reduction in days on hand of inventory, which has been achieved through further refinement of the decentralized procurement model and improved forecasting, concept I explained last quarter. Importantly, we're doing this while also driving fill rate improvements where supply is not constrained.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We deployed our free cash flow generated to reduce our net debt to close to $2 billion and lower our net leverage to 3.7 times, which is about a half turn less than last quarter and the prior year's Q2. It is also the first time we have been below four times since fiscal 2023.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

This keeps us firmly on track to deliver our longer-term deleveraging goal of less than 2.5 times by the end of fiscal 2027. Looking at slide 11, halfway through fiscal 2025, we continue to build confidence in our momentum and execution against our broader strategy and multi-year plan. We're again raising our full-year outlook for all financial metrics other than capital spending.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

As outlined in our press release, the updated guidance for net sales is a range of $31.3-$31.7 billion, which represents a 3.6% full-year increase at the midpoint compared to fiscal 2024 when adjusting for the 53rd week last year. This represents about a 2.3% increase in dollars from the midpoint of our prior outlook.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

This increase partially reflects higher customer retention than what was previously expected as part of our network optimization. This revisited outlook also implies an expected sequential deceleration in sales growth from 4.6% in the first half of fiscal 2025 to around 3% in the second half of the year. This anticipated cadence is largely due to the impact of timing associated with when we onboarded new customers in the prior year period. It also reflects the expectation that natural products will continue to lead growth across our business.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We have raised the bottom end of our expectations for adjusted EBITDA by an additional $20 million, bringing the new range to $550-$580 million, which is more than an 11% increase over the last year at the midpoint.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

The midpoints of our sales and adjusted EBITDA outlook imply that we expect adjusted EBITDA margin rate acceleration of around 10 basis points in the back half of the year compared to the 1.74% of sales in the first half. This reflects the benefit of the initiatives completed already, as well as those we expect to take during the remainder of the year. Given the seasonal nature of our business, we expect total dollar sales in Q3 to be sequentially lower than in Q2.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

As a result, even though we expect our adjusted EBITDA margin rate to be higher in the second half, we'll likely see adjusted EBITDA dollars in Q3 decline marginally sequentially from Q2, while still growing solidly compared to the prior year.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

This reflects the benefit of ongoing strategic initiatives, which continue to ramp, driving a better margin rate. Including the benefit of lower forecasted interest expense based on our year-to-date free cash flow performance, our EPS and adjusted EPS ranges have increased as well, with adjusted EPS now expected to fall within the range of $0.70-$0.90 per share compared to $0.14 last year.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Full-year free cash flow is now expected to be at least $150 million, an increase compared to our prior outlook of greater than $100 million. This represents a roughly $250 million increase compared to fiscal 2024 full-year free cash flow. As Sandy mentioned, in mid-February, we completed the closure of our Fort Wayne distribution center and consolidated the volume into other nearby, more modern, and efficient facilities.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Our previously optimized Billings DC is under contract for sale, and we are actively marketing the owned real estate for the other two DCs that have been closed in the past six months. As I have stated before, we will not sacrifice value for time. We will continue to evaluate other opportunities along these lines, but have not included any incremental strategic actions in our updated outlook.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Flipping to slide 12, we are off to a solid start at the midway point of fiscal 2025, and we are encouraged by our operating momentum and the work streams in place to add value and better service our customers and suppliers while making UNFI a more efficient partner for both.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Our efficiency initiatives, powered in part by lean principles, are largely generating the operating benefits we expected, while our volume trends reflect the successful execution of our customers as well as the trust they place in us every day. Importantly, we're finding more ways to improve to bring even greater value to both ends of the supply chain and ultimately create additional shareholder value, and we're aggressively pursuing these opportunities.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

The strategy we have outlined of bringing value to our customers and suppliers through a differentiated go-to-market proposition and strengthening service levels while improving UNFI's free cash flow is simple and powerful, and our progress to date reinforces that we're working to accomplish.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We remain confident and optimistic about our future and the value creation opportunity we have as we work to improve our capabilities and customer-facing execution. Our mantra of delivering and deleveraging remains intact, and we look forward to updating you on our progress again this summer. With that, Operator, please open the line for questions.

Operator

At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We ask that you limit your question to one and one follow-up. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. The first question comes from John Heinbockel from Guggenheim. Your line is open.

John Heinbockel
John Heinbockel
Managing Director at Guggenheim

Hey, Sandy, on the wholesale realignment and the new sales breakdown, one, can you touch on functionally the changes that have occurred, how that will change your go-to-market day-to-day, interacting with your customers and the biggest benefit you see? Just so I understand, natural and conventional, is that natural products that are sold to any customer or all products that are sold to largely natural customers? The same thing for conventional?

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Good morning, John. The second question you asked is yes. It is all customers. What we learned from feedback that we have gotten from customers and suppliers is that product expertise was a principal focus for them. What we have done is taking that feedback, we have aligned the wholesale business into two product-centered divisions.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Each focused largely on functional dedication in sales, procurement, and merchandising. We kept the scale enterprise-level capabilities behind them in supply chain and IT and across the company. What customers wanted from us was really focused product expertise around the key levers that drive those categories, and we organized that way.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

It is transversal across customers. To the point of your second question, natural products will be represented in an expert fashion by natural people, but the customer manager, if the customer is principally conventional, will come from conventional.

John Heinbockel
John Heinbockel
Managing Director at Guggenheim

Okay. My first part of that, right? How does this change? I guess it doesn't change that much in terms of how sales are interacting with the accounts.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Yeah. It's not a big change, but I guess the best way to think about it is the customer who's principally focused on natural and organic products, they're very interested in innovation they're interested in things that are changing. Whereas the conventional products, a lot of those are big brands, and they're looking for the best promotional activity and sharpest price points. It's a different merchandising motion it's not completely different, but it's enough different that we felt that segmenting them was the best way to serve our customers.

John Heinbockel
John Heinbockel
Managing Director at Guggenheim

All right. Just my last quick thing. You referenced four incremental areas of potential to the strategy. Of those four, which one or two are the furthest along and you think are the most impactful if one or two stand out?

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Sure. I mean, from my perspective, the services for customers who have typically not been well served by pro services and digital services are the best. While it's in development, I think it has tremendous potential. One of the things that I like to say internally is that UNFI needs to be in the retail media networks of the future in year one, not year four. We're catching up quickly, and we have a whole pipeline of products and services there that we think will serve customers very well in the future and give them the edge that they need to compete more favorably.

John Heinbockel
John Heinbockel
Managing Director at Guggenheim

Thank you.

Operator

The next question comes from Bill Kirk from Roth Capital. Your line is open.

Bill Kirk
Bill Kirk
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital

Hey, good morning, everybody. I had a couple of things related to the closure of the Fort Wayne DC. I guess first, were there duplicate costs while it was still open that are now gone? Is there a step-down in depreciation expense with the closure, and how large would that be? And then finally, what did you learn in the process of closing that and rerouting that will help inform future facility closures and help inform customer and facility kind of optimizations?

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Hey, good morning, Bill. It's Matteo here. On the question on OpEx and duplicative cost, we are ramping down very quickly the Fort Wayne operations and with that, the operating expenses. We had a little bit of kind of double dipping or double costing in the Q2, but from now on, we should expect to basically just transfer all the activities to the receiving DCs.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Scaling down significantly the OpEx and the fixed cost at the Fort Wayne DC and see the full benefits for the rest of the year, which is part of the reason why we built a high confidence case to increase EBITDA 10 basis points in second half versus first half. There should be some step-down in depreciation and amortization as well. Relative to the learnings, the customer experience has been the first priority over and above the cost out or the free cash flow benefits.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We spoke before about the safety quality delivery cost, always in that order set of priorities. Understanding, first of all, how we were increasing operations and ramping assortments at the receiving DCs while ensuring that the customer experience was as smooth as possible while closing a DC and ramping others was top priority. This is what we continue to embed as we continue our journey in terms of DC network optimization. Billings and Bismarck, we are smaller scale in a way, Fort Wayne was more meaningful. As we always say, as we look at underperforming DCs, the journey continues.

Bill Kirk
Bill Kirk
Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital

Thank you, Matteo.

Operator

The next question comes from Scott Mushkin from R5 Capital. Your line is open.

Scott Mushkin
Founder, CEO and Director of Research at R5 Capital

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I just wanted to go back to what John was talking about as far as the realignment of the business. When the merger was done, the idea was putting the two entities together a long time ago now, that there was leverage in putting those Supervalu together with UNFI, the idea of one truck, one bill, maybe even one DC. It sounds like you guys are saying, "Hey, maybe that's not ideal." I guess the question is, do the two assets belong together over time, or is that something you guys will consider as the years go on?

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Yeah. Thanks for the question. From my perspective, the answer is kind of both. Scale is good where scale is good, and specialization is good where specialization is good. What we were hearing from customers is if my main product set is conventional, I need really good pricing i need the promotional intensity and focus of vendors.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

If my principal product set is natural, organic, and specialty, it's all about product and innovation and speed. Generally, those motions are two different types of processes, and therefore, we found specializing that part of the organization to be in the interest of our customers. From a supply chain and IT and back office standpoint, there's a lot of synergy available that we've been capturing. Through those centers of excellence are places where efficiency can be captured through enterprise-wide capability. Scott, it's really both.

Scott Mushkin
Founder, CEO and Director of Research at R5 Capital

Okay. My second question is actually a really short one. The conventional was up, I think, 2.1% on revenues. I know there's some wins in there, Can you talk a little bit about kind of core sales growth, core volumes with continuing customers, kind of X the wins?

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Sure. Good morning, Scott. The overall volumes for UNFI were up 3%, and within that, natural grew at a more accelerated fashion than conventional. With that said, what we saw is that conventional was roughly flat from a volume standpoint and slightly better than the US food kind of traditional grocery indicator. Conventional have improved in part from adding business from existing customers.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We also believe that our volume changes have outpaced many of the conventional peers. We are pleased with the sequential progress that we have seen there. We remain cautious with the kind of overall dynamic going on, but pleased with what we've seen in the Q2, knowing that, again, broadly, we picked up favorable volume in early July of 2024. It grew to 1.8% in the first quarter, grew to 3% in the Q2.

Scott Mushkin
Founder, CEO and Director of Research at R5 Capital

Okay, guys. Thanks very much.

Operator

The next question comes from Mark Harden from UBS. Your line is open.

Mark Harden
Mark Harden
Analyst at UBS

Good morning. Thanks so much for taking the questions. You guys put together strong results, brought up your guidance. At the same time, we've seen some pretty big shifts in consumer sentiment over the last few weeks. Are you seeing any changes in end customer behavior in the early weeks of 3Q across really any of your channels, or has your momentum really been pretty much sustained?

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

We're really not seeing anything change. In fact, over the last year or so, we've continued to see generally very strong performance by our customer base. A whole lot of the causals in our growth are the success of an excellent group of customers performing very well in the marketplace. Obviously, the really well-differentiated sharp strategy retailers are doing very well.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

In general, we have not seen consumer behavior change significantly over the past few weeks. There may have been a little bit of upstocking in some categories, but beyond that, nothing that we could call a trend.

Mark Harden
Mark Harden
Analyst at UBS

Great. That's helpful, Related to tariffs, how much exposure do you guys have to imports overall? Would you expect to fully pass through the impact either on a dollar or percentage basis? If we do see sustained tariffs, how do you think about the balance between incremental trade-in from food away from home and any potential demand destruction as consumers potentially control their own shrink, so to speak?

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Yeah, that's a good question those are the variables that we're thinking about as well. I think, obviously, the most important message here is this all continues to evolve. We will be paying attention to it. Our teams are obviously very agile in thinking about diversification and resiliency of supply chains and options and levers that they can pull. Ultimately, we learned a lot from the supply chain disruptions and COVID. We are running some of the same plays to make sure we maximize optionality for our customers.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

I think you can, over time, the premise of your question is true that it could start to change the value equation between food at home versus food away from home. It is really too early to tell. What we are trying to do is make sure we are doing the best job we possibly can for our customers in any environment.

Mark Harden
Mark Harden
Analyst at UBS

Makes sense. Thanks so much. Good luck.

Operator

The next question comes from Andrew Wolf from CL King. Your line is open.

Andrew Wolf
Andrew Wolf
SVP at CL King

Hi, good morning. I wanted to start, I guess, with Matteo on the lean principles in the nine new DCs being. I guess at least you gave a productivity trend in the low single digits i think last quarter in the two pilots in Texas and Colorado was mid-single digits. Is there anything other than just timing? It's sort of newer in these new in the nine, or is there anything that we should know about, or are your expectations kind of similar that they'll trend up?

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Good morning, Andrew. Expectations remain at mid-single digit plus in terms of productivity gains. When you think about what we've been able to deliver in throughput, for instance, in the last several quarters, it's close to a 10% improvement or lower or higher cases per hour. We see the benefits.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

I would say that on the fact that for the new DCs that moved to LDM, lean daily management recently, it's just timing. We see the ones where we had lean daily management implementation six months ago, reducing or improving safety, improving delivery quality, and starting generating more and more productivity, We expect to see the same from the seven that moved to lean daily management and adopted lean daily management in the last three months.

Andrew Wolf
Andrew Wolf
SVP at CL King

Got it. Thank you. Excuse me. Just back to the top line that I think some folks have been asking about, you had this nice acceleration in volume and sequentially. You have talked about a lot of things some is supplier partnerships and how you changed some of the, well, a big change in you're addressing fees and so on and sharing data back to the suppliers to help them with their merchandising. I think, obviously, this realignment, I think Sandy already referenced, procurement, merchandising, sales, so on.

Andrew Wolf
Andrew Wolf
SVP at CL King

How do you—I could hear this and thinking in conventional, maybe that's a more sophisticated suppliers using the data, coming to you with programs and partnering that way. In the natural, it's more internal, like, "Hey, we really got to put some resources against this. There's a lot of growth here we're leaving on the table." Is that kind of conceptually and qualitatively, is that accurate, or is it a little more nuanced than I'm kind of portraying it, my takeaway?

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Andy, I think you've got it. I think the main thrust of the conventional product set is making sure that we're priced right and making sure that the promotions are focused. Like any generalization, there's significant nuances. Across our conventional customer base, we've got ethnically positioned customers that are doing as well as any retailers in the country.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

We have other customers who are working hard on building new differentiated programs, e-commerce, etc. What they all have in common is they've got to be priced right on the key items. We're devoted to helping them do that. On the natural side, obviously, value is very important, but innovation and uniqueness is really important. I mean, we've set a huge show on the West Coast called Expo West, and there were 80,000 people out there trying to get advantage over each other.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

We had a large team of merchants out there looking for new items and talking with customers to figure out what was going to create news and enthusiasm in their retail outlets in the second half. There are different bases of competition. At the end of the day, it's all about retail execution. I would say the biggest driver of our growth is the success of our customers.

Andrew Wolf
Andrew Wolf
SVP at CL King

Okay. If I could just sneak one in on the gross margin, the contraction rate was a little better than last quarter. I think I asked about it last quarter as well. Is there anything particular, or is that just sort of that in your own metrics, or was it more realization or pricing, or was it mixed out better or better shrink? Is there anything significant that improved the gross margin rate sequentially?

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Yeah. Andy, we grew gross profit dollars by about $35 million, mostly through volume, but we also continue to see improvement in shrink and the progress with the suppliers' programs that are a very important part of our strategy. The rate was down about 20 basis points from 13.4% last year to 13.2%. What we see is progress with reducing shrink. Sandy mentioned that we're at one of the lowest levels that we've seen in a long time.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We continue to see a ramp of our suppliers' programs that you may recall aim at reducing friction and improving transparency, while being accretive at the gross profit level. We also started seeing some of the benefits of the commercial value creation and stronger underwriting activities. It is very early innings, We know that it takes time to convert underwriting improvements into a margin and backlog, but we started seeing signs of it.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We are also focusing a lot more on understanding mix with the stronger analytical tools that we have, whether it is customer or category, and we actively work on those. More to do there, but pleased with what we see, at least with the controls and shrink suppliers' programs and the overall kind of underwriting environment.

Andrew Wolf
Andrew Wolf
SVP at CL King

Thank you.

Andrew Wolf
Andrew Wolf
SVP at CL King

Again, if you do have a question, kindly press star followed by the number one. The next question comes from Kelly Bania from BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Kelly Bania
Kelly Bania
Analyst at BMO Capital Markets

Good morning, and thanks for taking our questions. I wanted to just ask what you're seeing with regard to demand for natural and organic by conventional retailers. I guess the idea several years ago was that the cross-selling opportunity was quite significant to get that kind of product into conventional retailers. Just wondering if you're seeing a change in their interest in kind of stepping into that further, or if there's a change in even the marketing or sales effort to kind of do that cross-selling given just kind of the realignment that you're discussing.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Hi, Kelly. Good question. I think the answer to that is yes. That opportunity that the team saw a bunch of years ago is still a very large one. There is a whole lot of category momentum for natural, organic, and specialty, regardless of the channel. We're seeing that both across branded and then also across our own brand portfolio, particularly our Wild Harvest brand, which is doing extremely well in multiple channels. We're seeing a very broad-based consumer trend towards better-for-you products, and that would show up in our natural portfolio.

Kelly Bania
Kelly Bania
Analyst at BMO Capital Markets

Okay. That's helpful. Just a couple more questions. With the lean daily management and Matteo, some of the figures you gave there, it sounds like it's been implemented in the nine DCs. Are those more conventional DCs or natural DCs? Is the opportunity different as you look at those two sides of the business with this initiative?

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

Good morning, Kelly. It's a very good question. It is a mix and a balance of natural and conventional DCs. We obviously want to make sure that our teams embed lean and lean daily management principles equally, especially as we continue to evolve this kind of more decentralized model that Sandy described on natural and conventional it is in both. We see positive results in both.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

We really like the fact that now every day we have nine teams that get together around standard KPIs on safety, quality, delivery cost, and getting to problem-solving with the idea of fixing and developing countermeasures very quickly.

Kelly Bania
Kelly Bania
Analyst at BMO Capital Markets

Okay. Thank you. Just one more, I guess, on the new customer additions that you mentioned, Matteo, starting to cycle later this year. Any help you can give us on the magnitude of that, the channels that that impacts, and any insights into the pipeline for additional customer additions as we move forward?

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

When we think about the second half growth of 3% versus 4.6%, I will have a couple of considerations. First, we continue to see several opportunities to find profitable growth in natural and in conventional. Obviously, faster growth in natural, but several opportunities in conventional as well.

Matteo Tarditi
President and CFO at UNFI

The offset to that is the fact that a few customers that we onboarded in the second half of 2024 will start cycling. We will have tougher comps in a way while still delivering the same absolute dollars in the second half of 2025 and beyond. I would only think about a growth that we kind of enjoyed in the first half kind of decelerating on lapping the second half of 2024 for the remainder of the year.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Kelly, Sandy here. The one thing I would tack on, though, which was part of your question, is what does the pipeline look like? What I would tell you is it's very strong. It's strong across the $90 billion addressable market that we've identified, and we continue to see opportunity. I think the guidance we've given you is our high confidence guidance, but we're continuing to work to be there.

Kelly Bania
Kelly Bania
Analyst at BMO Capital Markets

Thank you. That's very helpful.

Operator

That concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn the call over to Sandy Douglas, CEO, for a closing remark.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

Thanks, Operator. As you heard on today's call, we continue to make solid progress on executing our multi-year strategy and delivering our full-year outlook. We have an excellent and very focused team in place with capability growing every day.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

We remain laser-focused on creating value for our customers and suppliers while making UNFI a more effective and efficient organization. We again delivered strong sales, adjusted EBITDA, and free cash flow growth compared to last year's Q2, and our increased outlook reflects our year-to-date performance and growing level of confidence in our business model and customer base.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

As we implement our strategy, we've continued to gain additional insight and believe that the opportunities before us are greater than the progress behind us. To capture this opportunity, we know we must stay focused and strive to get better every day, and we're committed to doing just that. By embracing lean management, we're becoming a more efficient and effective organization and creating sustainable shareholder value.

Sandy Douglas
CEO at UNFI

For our customers and suppliers, we thank you for your continued partnership and the business we do together. For the UNFI associates listening today, our thanks to each of you for everything that you do for our business, our customers, our communities, and each other. For our shareholders, we thank you for the trust that you continue to place in us. Thanks again for joining us this morning. We look forward to updating you on our progress in June.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining, and you may now disconnect.

Analysts
    • Steve Bloomquist
      VP of Investor Relations at UNFI
    • Sandy Douglas
      CEO at UNFI
    • Matteo Tarditi
      President and CFO at UNFI
    • John Heinbockel
      Managing Director at Guggenheim
    • Bill Kirk
      Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital
    • Scott Mushkin
      Founder, CEO and Director of Research at R5 Capital
    • Mark Harden
      Analyst at UBS
    • Andrew Wolf
      SVP at CL King
    • Kelly Bania
      Analyst at BMO Capital Markets
Powered by Quartr