Scott Mushkin: That’s helpful. Maybe a little follow-up to that because you were talking about like the company-specific initiatives, the winning of business if your core business or even the industries, I’m not really specifically thinking of UNFI, but like if your core — the core business is units down, which it is right now, pricing down, but labor costs up, which is really possible as we get to the end of calendar 2023, it’s possible, maybe strongly possible. What I mean, is there enough in that — in your business to offset some of those negative trends? Is there enough juice there with the company initiatives, maybe some other costs coming down where that’s okay. We had someone that’s a disaster, not for you guys, but for the industry.
Sandy Douglas: Yes. I mean, Scott, at this stage, I think there is a very significant relationship between prices being up strongly and the unit elasticity that’s creating weakness in units. If your scenario is that inflation starts to abate, the pressure on units year-over-year will also abate. Now, there’s the economic factors and there’s competitiveness factors in and around retail. But I don’t think that we are headed to a place where prices will be down and volume will be down. I see us in a place where price is up now. There’s pressure, the economy is softer, there’s pressure on consumers, and so elasticity is giving us a negative unit picture. But the consumer products companies will want to grow their business. However, their revenue management strategy guides them and that will include some combination of volume and price and our job will be to manage that in the best possible way to keep our customers competitive.
In parallel to that, as the supply chain incrementally stabilizes, and I think there’s still, as I mentioned, a long way to go, we have in place a series of more progressive programs around process and technology and automation and improvement and efficiency that will keep our expenses improving in relation to sales on a sequential basis. So, we’re going to play both sides of that. But at the heart of it is our ability to serve our customers and to have more customers and more categories as we go forward, which drives the flywheel that I talked about earlier.
Scott Mushkin: All right. Great color. I have more questions; I’ll just take them offline. Thank you.
Sandy Douglas: We appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks Scott.
Operator: And our final question comes from Peter Saleh with BTIG.
Peter Saleh: Great. Thanks. Most of my questions were asked and answered. But I did want to come back to a comment you made earlier, Sandy, on value. I think you mentioned consumers are seeking more value these days, but not necessarily the lowest price. Can you elaborate on that? Were you alluding to the private label or something else? Just trying to better understand that comment? And then I have one more follow-up. Thanks.
Sandy Douglas: Yes. Sure, Peter. Yes, I believe that — I mean everybody on this call understands that value is the relation of what you get versus what you have to pay. In this environment, I think it’s important for consumers to have options. That’s what our customers are telling us. Options can take the form of our private brands program, which I mentioned we’re investing in to make sure that we have the private brand offer that gives our customers the products and brands that they will want to merchandise to give their shoppers the best possible choice given the retailers’ merchandising strategy. And that’s a huge part of our focus there. The other comment I’d make, and I talked a little bit about changing and improving the way we do local merchandizing back to our — linked all the way back to our suppliers, gets into a little bit of how their portfolios are deployed and what their brand pack architecture is and how that changes as the month goes on, for example, later in the month, right before federal support comes out, we might need smaller packages being merchandised at lower price points just to help the consumers where they are in the month.
So, there’s a set of levers around value, but in the end, our particular initiatives to support it, our private brands program and our merchandising improvement, working with suppliers and our retailers to make sure that their offer fits their customer base’s needs throughout the month.
Peter Saleh: Great. Thank you for that. And then just lastly, I think your prior guidance on inflation for FY 2023 was low to mid-single-digits. Does that still hold for this year? Has that changed at all?
John Howard: Yes. So, from my perspective, by affirming guidance, we’re basically maintaining that. That guidance for the inflation was for the full year that we talked about. We’re one quarter in. We don’t want to make any adjustments on that right now. We still anticipate how that inflation is going to play out for the next eight or nine periods and baked into our affirmation of our guidance is a continued assumption.
Peter Saleh: Great. Thank you very much.
