We remain confident in these verticals and are supporting our teams in accelerating growth in these sectors. As discussed previously, we are implementing improvements in our recruiting, onboarding and training programs for sales teammates, while also providing enablement tools such as improved collateral and sample kits to improve sales productivity. Our strategy to cross-sell additional products and services to existing customers in order to drive customer penetration comes with an attractive revenue flow-through and is progressing well and ahead of plan. Our route sales representatives or RSRs are doing a great job. Sales per RSR are up approximately 100% versus prior year, and we’ve seen a 20% increase in the number of routes with sales activity year-to-date.
We’ve instituted a twice daily process to manage and measure route sales, and I’m very pleased with the results we are seeing here. We’ve also seen demonstrated performance from teammates at the levels required to achieve the long-term growth rates in our strategic plan. Our focus is now centered around supporting all of our RSRs in achieving and maintaining these levels of performance. Now let’s shift to our strategic plan. We remain confident in our strategic plan, and we will continue to advance it. On Slide 7, this scorecard depicts our rating of how we are doing against several key initiatives. We talked a lot about sales today, and we are undoubtedly focused on accelerating revenue growth through addressing sales productivity. Customer retention is one of the single most important levers in our recurring revenue model and critical to our strategy to strengthen the base, capture share of wallet through cross-selling, to leverage idle capacity and fixed assets and enhance customer lifetime value.
We are hyper-focused on improving retention in support of our strategy as we already see the great progress we are making to cross-sell and gain penetration with our satisfied and loyal customers. Retention is moving back in the right direction. But even when at historical norms, we believe that it’s still lower than our peers. This presents a great opportunity for Vestis to create shareholder value as we enhance our service processes and ultimately increase retention and customer penetration. While we are working to enhance our service processes, we will be strategic about how and when we price so that we are building the company for the long term. Now turning to efficient operations. I’m very pleased with our progress related to logistics initiatives.
Our team is performing extremely well in this area. We are building momentum and have already completed 22 optimization events in the first half of the year versus a total of 23 for the full year in FY ’23. As a result, we are seeing improvements in logistics efficiencies in areas such as fuel consumption. We intend to introduce a metric in FY ’25 that will serve as a barometer for progress against this initiative. We are also ahead of plan related to our merchandise reuse initiative. Year-to-date, we’ve seen a 20% improvement in used fill rate and are on track to deliver an approximate $10 million in cash savings and an approximate $4 million run rate cost benefit in FY ’24. We also remain focused on capital allocation with delevering as a priority.
Rick will talk more about capital allocation in a moment, but I did want to mention the great progress we are making institutionalizing a sales and operations planning process that will further help us to improve inventory management. Our supply chain team is doing a great job here, delivering $34 million in cash generation improvements year-to-date as a result. Now I’d like to introduce Rick who will take us through the financials. Rick?
Ricky Dillon: Thanks, Kim, and good morning, everyone. I’ll start with more details on the second quarter results and then walk through drivers of the changes in our full year 2024 guidance and what it means for the back half of the year. So let’s start with the second quarter revenue bridge on Slide 9. Revenue of $705 million increased by 0.9% year-over-year. The impact of volume growth and pricing was offset by lost business in the quarter. Volume growth, including new customers and expanding our existing customer penetration through cross-selling, provided approximately 8% of growth in the quarter, with the contribution from new sales up 7% year-over-year. Customer losses reduced second quarter revenues by 9% year-over-year, more than offsetting our new business growth.
The impact of losses consists of 6% from the known customer losses as we exited fiscal 2023 and 3% from customer losses during this fiscal year. As Kim noted and in line with our expectations, we have seen a meaningful improvement in our retention rate year-to-date, and that will drive lower carryover losses in 2025. We are adding new business, but we are not ramping at the pace we expected heading into the year. Sequentially, compared to the first quarter, new business revenue is up 3%. Pricing contributed 4% to the top line growth, 3% from prior year pricing actions and 1% from current year pricing. As we noted earlier, while we continue to take annual pricing increase, the current year pricing impact was less than planned given our decision to moderate off-cycle pricing actions.
Excluding the impact of the temporary energy fee, revenue grew 2.8% year-over-year. The fee was discontinued in the second quarter of last year, so this is the last quarter of comparable headwinds associated with the fee. Our direct sales business is down approximately $2 million or 5% year-over-year as we continue to optimize that business. Excluding the direct sales, our Uniforms business was flat year-over-year and Workplace Supplies were up 2%. Moving on to Slide 10 and the adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted EBITDA was $87 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2024, down approximately $6 million or 6% from the second quarter of fiscal 2023. The operating leverage on new business and flow-through on pricing was offset by the impact of lost business in the quarter.
The incremental margin on new sales volume was approximately 33%, reflecting the increase in garment amortization on new customer wins and sales commissions on new sales. The approximately 60% decremental margin on lost business was net of final exit billings during the quarter. The elimination of the $13 million temporary energy fee this year had a negative impact on margin that was offset by approximately $6 million in energy cost savings year-over-year. The fee was favorable for us in the second quarter of last year due to the timing of implementing the fee versus the spike in energy fees. Energy cost savings this quarter were again driven by favorable rates for natural gas consumed in our plants and reduced fuel consumption from our route optimization efforts.
Incremental public company costs were $4 million in the quarter and $7 million year-to-date. We continue to expect full year incremental public company costs of $15 million to $18 million. Productivity gains in the quarter, including permanent structural reductions implemented last year and the continued benefits from our network optimization efforts were offset by the expected increase in labor costs year-over-year. Overall, adjusted EBITDA margins were down 90 basis points year-over-year. Excluding the net impact of the temporary energy fee and incremental public company costs, margins expanded 80 basis points year-over-year. Turning to liquidity on Slide 11. We generated approximately $76 million in cash from operations in the second quarter, an increase of approximately 25% or $15 million.
