Patrick Hatcher: On the Convenience pipeline, yeah, it’s been performing well. They’ve done a good job of continuing to work with customers and it is a long pipeline, so we know that, but we have a lot of really positive things in that pipeline.
Alexander Slagle: Okay. And on Vistar, can you expand on the new lines of business where you’re seeing accelerated growth? I mean, it sounds like you’re highlighting the micro markets and fulfillment and just to the degree this is a notable inflection or just a continuation of what you were seeing in the previous quarter.
George Holm: I would say a continuation, micro market just continues to be very strong. And what we call a micro kitchen, I don’t know where that term came from, but is basically where the employer is giving candy, snacks, beverages for no cost at all. We’re seeing more of that, and I think a lot of that has to do with people wanting to get the employee back to work. And I think that’s a nice enticement to do that. As far as our fulfillment business goes, that is growing at a very fast rate. It’s a great part of our business. It’s a great part of our future. It’s — I think a service that we’re able to give our supplier that is beneficial for both of us. And we’ve got good systems for it. We’re up to six distribution centers that do that type of fulfillment now, so it’s a good part of our business.
Patrick Hatcher: Yeah. George, I’ll also add. I mean, obviously with Vistar theater saw a really strong season with Oppenheimer and Barbie, so that that helped them a lot. So it just proves that when there’s content, breadth of content, depth of content, people will go back to the theaters. And then, we did see normally go into kind of a lull as people go back to school, a lot of seasonality with theater. There was a nice pickup with the Taylor Swift movie. And — but obviously that is a channel that does have some seasonality to it. And so we work with them on that.
Alexander Slagle: Got it. Thank you very much.
Operator: And we have our next question from John Heinbockel with Guggenheim.
John Heinbockel: Hey, George. Two things. What do you think the algo on the Salesforce and related to independent case growth is going forward? Once you normalize this 8%, is it 4% Salesforce growth, translates into 6% independent case growth. Is that the algo? And then do you guys have a good sense of where your average independent wallet share is? Is it 30% more, less?
George Holm: Yeah. Okay. As far as the Salesforce, we haven’t done this for a while, but I would say that we should be able to grow on a percentage base is about 50% faster than we had people. So a 4% growth in salespeople should give us a 6% growth as far as cases go. And then as far as the wallet share, we only have one point that we use that gives us a feel for what percentage do we have by different types of customers. Of course, we look close at restaurant because we do very little in healthcare contract feeding or lodging, and typically we’re in the low twenties as far as the share goes.
John Heinbockel: And maybe to follow up on that, so where’s the whole and/or the opportunity, right? Because I think years ago the idea was COP was a big hole and the specialists were getting more credit for their product than the broadliners were. Is that still true? And how do you address that?
George Holm: We are actually over-indexed when you get to center of the plate and cheese. So I can’t speak industry wide, but we’re over-indexed because the numbers we get are primarily just broadline distributors and it doesn’t include a lot of the specialties. So I’m not so sure that we can answer that question. But if you look at the world of broadline distributors, we are over-indexed on what we call center of the plate, which we put cheese in there because pizza’s a big part of our business.
John Heinbockel: Okay. Thank you.
George Holm: Thanks.
Operator: And we have our next question from Jeffrey Bernstein with Barclays.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Great. Thank you very much. Two questions. The first one, just on the broader restaurant industry. It seems like industry data over the past few months, and even restaurant commentary over the past week or so, shows that there was a slowdown sales trends in August and September. I think you corroborated that, at least in August. But the question among investors has really been why — obviously the one angle is the headwinds on the consumer, which gets plenty of attention, but the alternative has been maybe the return to some seasonality, and the fact that many restaurants talked about a recovery in October after maybe the August and September slowdown. I think more are believing that maybe a return to seasonality has been the culprit for the slowdown and then reacceleration, which I think would be encouraging because it would imply that the consumer actually is holding up quite well.
So I’m just wondering, being that you service so much of the industry, your thoughts on that idea that maybe seasonality has been the reason for the recent volatility, rather than perhaps consumer headwinds. And then I had one follow up.
George Holm: Yeah. I don’t see it with seasonality, but I got to preface that, this is our customer base and we’re a large company, but we don’t have real high shares. I mean, we’re pretty fragmented industry. August was certainly slower than July and slower than September, yet our share gains were about the same. So as far as what the broadline industry produces, so I don’t see it as necessarily a slowdown in the market. And we have not seen an uptick in October, really. I mean, October looks like the first quarter to us as far as case growth. And then I think in the chain business, I think that we probably — if you put all of our chain business together, I think we’re probably slower than the chain business would be, just because of our customer base. We’re — I think we’re going to see that change with some of the things we have coming up. But right now I think that our group of national accounts are probably lean towards the ones that are struggling to grow.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Understood. And then just wanted to follow up on the topic of penetration of existing accounts. I think, George, you mentioned that independent cases were up mid 7% and customer count was up mid 7%, which overly simplistically, I would think, would imply no further penetration of existing accounts. I think you mentioned you have maybe low 20% penetration of existing accounts. I’m wondering why that number wouldn’t be higher or at least trend higher. I would think your customers would benefit from having less distributors. I’m wondering, do you have initiatives to expand the share with those existing accounts? It would seem like it would be very profitable for you to just be dropping off more product than existing accounts and taking more share from the smaller foodservice competitors. So just wondering your thoughts on that. Thank you.
George Holm: Yeah. Well, a couple things there. Our penetration isn’t 20% within our existing accounts. That’s within the broadline market or information that we get. I would suspect that our penetration within our own accounts is much higher than that. I think what’s encouraging is that people are spending more money in restaurants, as I mentioned earlier, but even though our case count is only very, very marginally growing faster than our number of accounts, our SKUs within those accounts are growing comparable to what they’ve grown in the past when we’ve had better penetration. And it’s that the existing SKUs that they’re buying, they’re not buying as much. And I think that just has to do with, I think, more restaurants out there and the consumer having more choices and the business getting spread across more restaurants than before.
