US Foods Holding Corp. (NYSE:USFD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Dave Flitman: Yes I appreciate the question. It’s early days for me. I’m six weeks in. I’ve got a good sense of the focus that we have. I think it’s in the right areas. I’ll tell you 100%. Our team is focused on this and focused on accelerating the results in our business. There’s a lot of differences between us and our competitors in terms of the P&L and how that’s constructed and all that, but our focus is continuing to expand those margins in a way that makes sense for us and provides the efficiency that we need for our customers. And as excited as I am about the momentum, you also heard me say that there’s tremendous upside opportunity in this business everywhere I look, we talked about growth already, productivity and efficiency. We’ve got good momentum but there’s tremendous upside to go and our team is laser-focused on it. I would expect continued expansion of profitability through the course of time.

Jeffrey Bernstein: Great. Thank you.

Dave Flitman: Thank you.

Operator: Your next question is from Mark Carden of UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Mark Carden: Good morning. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. And Dave congrats on the new position. So to start and I know it’s still early. But joining on to US Foods, it’s an organization that’s structured in a bit of a more centralized fashion relative to performance. So I’d love to get your take on some of the opportunities and challenges you see with building and implementing strategies just given the difference in backdrop.

Dave Flitman: Yes. I mean you’re right to point that out in the difference. But I’m not really hung up on any particular organization structure. I think ultimately our success comes down to people and having the right processes in place and executing extremely well. Our team is clearly focused on that. Obviously, I’m making assessments on things like people and organization structure and all that sort of stuff and I’ll have more to say about that in time. But as I highlighted, I don’t expect any wholesale changes. I think we’ve got the right focus and really good momentum. You start playing around with organization structure, you tend to do a lot of internal navel-gazing and lose a lot of efficiencies and get distracted. I don’t sense any need to do that here. We’ve got great momentum. We’re going to continue to build on that.

Mark Carden: That’s great. And then on the solid independent case growth during the quarter, just curious about some of the cadence. One of your largest competitors saw some labor disruptions early in the quarter for service some underground noise just in terms of the consistency did you see bumps in some months relative to others? Your overall take that would be great.

Andrew Iacobucci: Yes. Thanks for the question Mark. It’s Andrew. I think we were pretty much in line with what we expected the quarter played out pretty much exactly as we had anticipated with continued momentum, particularly in independent restaurants. We saw a little bit of bumpiness in terms of the way the holidays fell this past year. But other than that I wouldn’t say there was anything there that was of any concern. And indeed, we’ve continued to see really strong momentum coming into the New Year, where we’re at or slightly above our forecast in January. So we really feel good about the stability of that. We’ve been paying very close attention obviously to that case line to just look for signs of softness. And so far we’ve really not seen that.

Mark Carden: Great. Thanks so much. Good luck, guys.

Dave Flitman: Thank you, Mark.

Operator: Your next question is from Alex Slagle of Jefferies. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

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