Well, good morning, everyone.
I'm Mark Carden, the North American Food Retail and Food Distribution Analyst at UBS.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
We are thrilled to have the team from Chefs' Warehouse with us. We have Chris Pappas, the company's Founder, Chairman, President, and CEO, and Jim Leddy, the company's CFO.
We're going to dive right into questions and appreciate you guys joining us today.
If you guys do have any questions throughout the presentation, please feel free to use the iPad, and we can weave them into the conversation. But maybe to start, obviously, there's a lot that's going on right now with the consumer, and we'll get into the Middle East in a little bit, but we'll start more high level with the overall business. You guys have operated a really resilient business.
Traffic's been holding up better for you guys than it has been for the broader food away from home industry at large. Just what's the latest on the state of your consumer?
Well, our customer's customer.
Yeah.
I've always thought that when we started the business 40 years ago we you know went into different types of customer base food service trying to find our path. Obviously, we followed our passion, which was you know great food selling to great chefs. Not a lot has changed in 40 years. That customer's customer is very resilient. There's always conferences. There's always business dinners and luncheon.
There's always high-end travel. There's always birthdays, bar mitzvahs, holiday parties. It continues to be extremely resilient sector of food away from home. It's you know.
I think we said we saw last year was a great year, and we said coming into this year, we just saw the momentum continuing.
At the end of the quarter, there was some talk about disinflation coming into play, and that had been a bit of a shift. But obviously, there's been a lot going on in the world today.
Any shifts to how you're thinking about the inflation outlook over the course of the year ahead and just how it could impact your broader margin structure?
Yeah. It's a good question. We're very diversified, not just regionally, and categorically, but we have 90,000 SKUs going through our distribution centers around the country and in Canada and the Middle East. Within those, we might have hundreds of different products.
We're a solutions company. We provide our customers with solutions, and we import from over 40 countries around the world. Having that diversification allows you to really manage inflation and deflation very effectively. If you have a weather event in Spain, you can use your private label olive oil in Turkey or somewhere else to provide a customer with a really good solution. Things like tariffs, significant inflation.
We saw pretty significant volatility in protein this last year. Then also on the deflation side, we saw dairy products highly inflationary last year and then deflationary this year. Yet we continue to manage that very effectively. You may have significant inflation in certain products deflation, but if you look back in history, we always land in this kind of aggregate inflation environment of kind of 1-4%, and that's what you saw last year.
You saw about 3-3.5% inflation company-wide, despite tariffs, despite significant volatility in some of those products like protein. I think our team has just become very effective at managing that.
You touched on the point of tariffs. Obviously, we've seen a shift recently just with the courts rolling back the IEEPA tariffs, 10%-15% global tariffs potentially going into place. How does this impact your sourcing strategy with some of the specialty products that you guys import?
Just talk a bit about your detailed approach to your assortment and the degree of flexibility that gives you.
Yeah. I mean, it really doesn't change you know the way we go about. We offer good, better, best, right? That's what Chefs' Warehouse is known for selling upscale casual to you know four- or five-star best restaurants, hotels in the world, right?
We you know leave it up to our customers. I mean, we have over 1,000 you know people in our sales department, so of course, they're pitching you know what we'd like to sell. But ultimately, the customer makes the choice. I think when you're dealing with you know $20, $30, $40, $50, $60, $70, $100-dollar entrees that we're talking about no one's not going to order something for a dollar.
That's why I really like our sector. We continue to get better at every part of the business. yes nobody likes to see prices go up. Like Jim says, I'm amazed when I look at it 'cause you hear the news, it's either massive inflation or it sounds like massive deflation. We look at it and like, well, it's like 2% overall because we sell such a giant mix of products. The tariffs I think the first round our manufacturers, our farmers, growers, I think they passed on some, ate some of it. I think this time it's I think we're getting so used to it.
We're like, "Okay, what does this mean now?" I think at the end of the day, we really don't know because the new tariffs replaced the old tariffs, but a lot of products had tariffs anyway. I think the difference is not something that is significant. None of our departments, our category managers are panicking. Like Jim says we offer. Olive oil is a great example.
We import olive oil from Spain, from Italy, from France, say, from Greece, maybe from Tunisia, even from Argentina, from Australia. We have lots of different options, and we leave it up to the customers what profile they want. Do they want to save a dollar? They want to stay where they are.
I think it after 40 years of building this thing, it works because we do have the solutions and the options for customers to make their choices.
Interesting. Were the customers as nimble as you would have expected, call it a year ago, just in terms of switching from maybe that olive oil that was maybe going from Italy to a product from Italy, to a product from Greece, to a product from Tunisia?
Yeah. I think again, our group of customers goes from a really good takeout coffee shop that wants better croissants and a better assortment of things to sell that's not $100 an entrée, right?
Customers like that may choose to change. More of our middle to higher end customers, I think they play with their menus more than anything else. They're really good at it. a lot of our customers we've been serving them for 40 years. If you start to pay attention to menus, they start to adapt.
They'll go to market price on certain entrees, and they'll mix the menu up where they don't have to raise prices, even though some of their costs have increased on some of their entrees. They'll have other appetizers, entrees, beverages that they can make back the $1 or $2. They're really smart. They're entrepreneurial.
M ost of them are independents, and they find a way to make it work and keep their customers coming back, and they'll make their profits.
Got it. Another big event this year, of course, is the potential for higher tax refunds, potentially some more cash in consumers' pockets overall, just from One Big Beautiful Bill, SALT reform. What's your take?
Would you expect for that to have a material impact?
We don't. I think we've gotten this question about the potential tax refund bump and also the World Cup.
Yeah.
Did we build that into our guidance? The answer is no. We think it will be some upside. We saw that with some other events that happened. We see it when F1 comes to Vegas or to Miami. You'll see a bump, but they're temporary.
It'll be good. It'll be good for us, but we don't actually build it in.
Yeah. I think until the war, whatever you want to call what's happening in the Middle East, I think we were cautiously optimistic.
Like Jim says, we don't build it in, but we thought it could be a big bump because the amount of people that were coming.
Yeah.
They were going to need to stay in hotels and they were going to need to eat. A lot of these people are celebrating, some more than others, depending on how your team is doing.
Just from other World Cups and reading about the uptick where the games were, you would have to expect there was going to be a good uptick. Now TBD, I guess. We'll see.
Yeah
how everything's playing out.
Maybe on that, obviously a big subject with everything that's going on in the Middle East. You guys have a very successful business in the Middle East. I think you guys, what, about 9% of your overall sales are international, with the Middle East being obviously a component of that.
How should we think about the impact of recent events on your Middle Eastern business?
Good question. I just came back. I came back right before the bombs started falling. I'm like, "Wow, if I was 30 years younger, I'd move here." It was so dynamic, the feeling the amount of cranes and building and new customers. Again, it's a small part of our business, but it's a very exciting part of our business. It's amazing how resilient it was.
Obviously, there was days that business was really impacted. then even during this, we saw really good days of business. Still a lot of people live there. Obviously, if they're hitting the airport with drones, it's not going to be a good day.
I think it's resilient. Who has the crystal ball?
The amount of infrastructure and commitment in Saudi and Dubai and Qatar, again, we just finished some new facilities. I think that who knows how long this goes on, but I think there's so much money there committed to people that want to live there.
It's clean, it's safe, it's got an unbelievable airport. I get it. It took me a while to really understand, like how is this city just blossoming and continuing to grow. It finally made sense before the drones started coming, why so many people were putting their money there.
It's becoming a financial capital, tourism, obviously, clean, safe place, good schools, great medical. So, I'm still very bullish on it.
Got it. It sounds like demand's fluctuated kind of on a day-to-day basis that.
Yeah. it was a lot better than I expected.
Interesting.
Yeah. Now it's of course we'll see how this thing is playing out hopefully in the next week or so.
Got it. Outside of the direct impact to your Middle Eastern business, obviously big issues and implications from oil. How do you think about any incremental risk to your supply chain?
Would you expect this to be material to your expense structure? How are you thinking about that?
We have some challenges on the supply chain, obviously, in the Middle East right now. Our team navigated that really well a couple years ago when you had the issue with the Red Sea, and you had to bring them around Africa, they navigated that really well, and so we're in contact with them every day and assisting them any way we can. Overall, our supply chain, we don't really see major issues.
D uring COVID, you had a container coming across the Atlantic go from $1,500-$13,000. That obviously came way back down, so that was temporary. We think.
We estimate that if there's anything, it's going to be somewhat temporary, but we don't see a macro impact to our supply chain right now.
Got it. Are you expecting any material implications to inflation from fuel costs going up?
Not really.
Diesel prices kind of spiked up. They've leveled off a little bit. It's not our biggest cost, and we we manage it, centrally, by managing through contracts with fuel suppliers.
We're obviously on top of it, and our team, our operating teams are working on it, but we don't see a huge impact right now.
Got it. Is a large percentage of the fuel prices simply passed through, or how does that structure tend to work for you guys?
We do in certain circumstances we'll put a fuel surcharge on the invoice. It really depends on the market, the region, the customer. It's something that we don't do lightly.
It'll be in a situation like maybe you had a few years ago where you had a significant spike for an elongated period of time.
Yeah.
Yeah. We don't have a lot of contracts, but the ones that we do, there is a trigger where
Sure.
Diesel passes a certain point, there's an upcharge on the invoice. Like Jim said our drivers, our trucks go 20-30 miles. You're looking to roll around New York, they're not going very long distances. It's really what the supply chains what triggers their.
They'll look to see if they could put a surcharge on our deliveries for product. again we sell expensive boxes, so 20-cent surcharge on a $100 box is not going to be tremendously impactful.
Got it. Let's pivot over quickly to your sales force. You guys have made a lot of progress pursuing a hybrid selling model with more customers using digital tools as well in recent years to kind of complement the face-to-face interactions from your sales force. Can you walk through a bit on just how this has changed your selling strategy and the extent to which it can impact how you think about headcount growth over time?
Yeah. Again, we are celebrating our 41st year now.
Forty-first.
Hard to believe. The way we envision this business, 'cause I guess we've been in it so long and we speak to customers, we monitor our customer base, we see the interaction, and we see how the industry is constantly going to change, right? Technology is always going to change industries. we saw how to use. we've been using AI, we just called it something different.
Obviously, our digital team has been getting more more and more of our customer base online. We saw that evolution coming.
We also saw I wanted to have an option where as we grew, 'cause remember, we were mostly a Northeast company, and then we started to stretch out all over the country and then went east. How are we going to sell all these products?
Watching all these other companies do it wrong, in a way, gave us you know a map of you know if we're going to sell more categories, and especially to the best chefs in the world, we have to be experts. We have to have the best of all offerings. The people that we send there have to know what they're talking about. We started putting together this puzzle a long time ago.
when people see our success right now in a population growth is really not there, right? You look at us growing round numbers close to 10%, you're saying: Well, where's the growth coming from? It's not a surprise for us. I mean, we're happy about it, but it's come from a lot of tactical, strategic investments over the past a amount of years building our cut shops, so they were closer to the busy markets, so we had the service, adding experts. We call it team selling.
I think we started calling team selling before people knew what team selling was.
Even I didn't know what it was, but I knew it sounded good, and I wanted to build the team. But having people that my experience growing up in the industry that nobody knows 20, 30, 80,000 items, you know. I used to watch salespeople come into our accounts and, especially from big broadliners and they're selling gas stations, convenience stores, and they're selling prisons, they're selling hospitals, they're selling. How do you walk in there and start talking about caviar and foie gras and some of the high-end ingredients. I'm like, it's. I don't think it's going to work.
I think for us to be successful to be, we're the chef shop, we're going to have to have real departments with expertise and walk the walk. It's more expensive, right? You gotta build the departments, you gotta acquire the talent. We had to buy certain businesses to get the talent, to get the expertise, and then we had to get the technology, the computer systems to integrate.
Maybe they won't integrate 100% overall, but we have tremendous new ability to make it easier for the team to be able to sell and for the category managers to watch the inventory 'cause it's not just making the sale, it's making sure that you have it. A lot of it's perishable. Is it going to make the truck?
Is it going to slow up the truck? everyone even my daughter say, " it sounds easy, Dad. You bring product and you sell it." I'm like, "Really simple." You know? just snap your finger, the stuff comes in.
Again, a lot of products are simple, but what we do is really hard, and that's why I wanted to make sure we built this moat around the business with all these categories and expertise and, it's not easy.
Yeah.
Yeah. We like it that way because it makes it more difficult for anyone really to disrupt us, you know. I mean, we always have competition. There's always somebody selling something, and you're never going to sell everything. I think our team the more mature they get, the better trained they get. We have our Chefs' Warehouse University, we're upping that investment into better curriculums. how do you turn somebody into a chef, a Chefs' Warehouse expert? Not easy. No matter what your background, it takes time.
First year, second year, I always say, "I don't even want to talk to you till you've been here five years." Right. Because you're not really not going to know what you're talking about. You'll know enough.
Yeah.
To make me upset. Okay? Because it just takes time to understand it all and the logistics side and the customer side. That's why when I hear people are, "We're adding reps," and yeah, we're adding reps. We're always adding reps.
You don't want to lose mature reps.
Yeah.
It takes too long to teach them.
It's interesting you bring up that 5-year point, just as you think about that ramp from a maturity standpoint. I mean, is the biggest gain we hear from sellers could be from year 1-2? Is it 2-3?
Is it not until you get to 5?
How do you think about that curve, so to speak?
I have a future son-in-law who's a doctor. Watching him go through medical school and now residency and all that, I'm like, they're not becoming doctors.
I would not want to go to a doctor who had one year of medical school. I mean, they know enough to be dangerous, right? They're smart, they're learning, but every year they're going to learn more.
Yeah.
It's kind of the same when you're selling these many products and the complexity of logistics, supply chains, things are constantly changing. Is it free range? Is it organic? Is it almost organic? Is it really organic? And on.
Yes, the technology we have right now and with AI and building the information for customers, it makes their job so much more efficient and easier from back in the day when we wrote on on little cards information for them and say, "Just read this to your customer
Sure.
Tell them all about this. Now you can go online, you can watch our videos, you can come to our shows.
Our shows, our New York show had I think 3,000 customers who came and we had hundreds of vendors, so that's part of the education. But, kinda like medical school there's
Yeah.
There's people that they finish the fourth year, then they go on to do a specialty.
Yeah.
That's kinda like our specialists.
They're going further, they're going really deep, you know. In our cut plants, we want them on the floor. We want them to really learn how we cut the steaks or cut the seafood filets. We have tremendous amount of trips all over the world for them to go visit our farmers, our producers. I say, want to give them a lapel thing that said, "You know what? I'm here for five years. I actually can go see Chris.
Good stuff. That's a big step.
Yeah.
Maybe one more on the sales force before we pivot on, but just in terms of as you think about those AI tools that you guys have been rolling out and how they help salespeople understand your more complex assortment.
You also talked about team selling. I guess the first part would be, how has uptake been on the AI tools relative to your expectations? Have people embraced them as quickly as you had hoped for? Has it been faster than expected? The second part is just when you think about team-based selling, is it still the same number of people on a team? Is it smaller teams, so you just have more of them and you can reach more? How do you think about that interplay?
I mean, the goal is to do more with less, right?
Sure.
That's why you're watching our EBITDA percentage EBITDA start to climb. We're getting leverage on our overhead. I mean, this is not brain surgery, you know. The more money that's on a truck in the same amount of hours, you'll make more money, right? The more boxes they can pick on a shift, you'll make more money. I think all the tools are to make every department more efficient, and we are seeing that. It's getting better and better. How many less people will you have, say, per dollar spent is the question, you know?
Maybe I thought it would be more rapid, but what we're still seeing is quality people produce. We're not slowing down on hiring, but I think we're able to get more with less.
Yes.
I think that's the goal.
Hardie's obviously gave you guys scale in Texas. You've been making a lot of changes within that organization. Can you walk through essentially where you stand with Hardie's today?
Yeah. Well, with Hardie's, we're in the process of integrating a kind of legacy CW specialty business. We built an Allen Brothers protein cut shop in Dallas, located very closely to our Hardie's business there, as well as CW. We're in the process of securing a new facility to consolidate, similar to what we've done in New England. We also have presence in Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. The focus right now is to consolidate in Dallas. It's going incredibly well.
It's a process of combining the sales force, gradually integrating the cultures. We'll really get the aha once we get the facility in place, where you have everything going on the same truck.
Our produce business, which is Hardie's, our specialty, legacy specialty business, which we've already integrated from a commercial perspective. We are getting a lot of those boxes cross-selling on the trucks.
We bought Hardie's not because they were making a lot of money or they were a specialty company. They just had a really good customer base for a portion of their business. There was a smaller portion that I think you're aware we've been attriting out of over time, and those are kinda some big, what we call big chunky corporate business that didn't make a lot of money, didn't make sense to point our resources at.
We've been tried out of most of that, and now it's a process of kinda doing what we did in New England, taking combining our companies, and over time turning it into a true The Chefs' Warehouse. We're in the second inning of doing that. We've already started to get their EBITDA margin up on a combined basis. It's really the goal is just to get it to higher than our average as a company.
Yeah.
Beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Yeah, quick one.
in ways. Yeah, we're really proud. The team there is starting to really find their legs.
Yeah.
Not easy. Multiple warehouse, multiple computer systems, different customer base. We knew it would take five years when we bought it. We bought it, we thought for the right price. It wasn't a company that was exponentially growing. Like Jim Leddy said, they had a great base, great. They were great at what they did in deliveries and logistics, handling produce.
Our experience from before of of having done this is once we get people trained, which is the hardest part, I forget what year we're on now, but you could start to see it happening. You're starting to see all the new items on this, going to customers. You're starting to see the EBITDA margins rising.
You're starting to see people get confidence and to sell more and more products that they never sold before. I think Hardie's over the next five, six, seven years could be top three markets for Chefs'.
Top three?
Yeah, I think so.
What are the other two?
Hmm?
What are the other two for you?
I don't want to upset any of our people listening.
I won't begin.
'Cause we love all our children.
Well, we can leave all that.
We really love Florida right now.
Okay.
I mean, Texas and Florida obviously have population growth. It's no secret. A lot of companies moving there. Money's growing. Everyone likes to make fun of California. We do unbelievable in California.
Yeah.
every time I go out there, I expect to see, like, a line of people leaving the state. Like, there's a lot of people here.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're eating really well.
A lot of money.
Yeah.
Always.
The same with New York. They make it sound. You listen to the news like, "Everyone's leaving New York." me and Jim look at our numbers every day and I'm like, "New York's doing really well.
Jim, you pointed out just in terms of some of the attrition that you guys have done with Hardie's. Just, can you talk about the capacity that maybe has freed up, how quickly you can essentially use that to help Chef inside the business?
Yeah, It's created some capacity in the near term. I think, like I mentioned, the real aha will be when we secure a new building and then really consolidate. That's where you get the operating leverage.
Sure.
That's where you get all the categories in one building. It's a place where you bring customers to see how it works. They see a cut shop. They see us cutting fresh fish, proteins. They see produce.
They see specialty. We have state-of-the-art test kitchens where they'll test their products and that's a great networking tool and a marketing tool. Yeah, it's similar to what we've done on the West Coast. We've created some capacity on the West Coast with some attrition out of some non-core business there. We've done that in Texas, and that allows us to grow the what Chris talked about in the whole sales discussion and how that works. Yeah, it's
Yeah.
Just the fact that we're growing and the EBITDA margins are going up is just a testament to the team. I mean, we couldn't make it more difficult for them right now. Multiple facilities. They're touching things 3, 4 times. Multiple computer systems. It's just a testament to that the market is there, the market loves our products, and we're able to do business and grow it. We started in Florida. We had 1, 2, 3, I think 4 outside storage facilities, 2 other cut shop facilities. Once we consolidated in Florida, it just exploded.
Yeah.
You know? It just know to grow exponentially 'cause it's. I always believe as a salesperson selling has to be easy, right?
Yeah.
Easy is going to win. You have to make it easy for the customer, easy for the salesperson. Once these facilities are retrofitted in Texas, it's going to be so much easier. it's going to be like lifting a weight off their back that all they have to do now is focus on selling.
Got it.
We know the market is there.
We just see the sales coming in, the inquiries, the amount of new customers, and they're growing even in this environment. We're really excited about Texas.
You guys point to Sid Wainer a lot as a parallel with the Texas conversion, just the operation that you guys bought and really chef sized it over time. How long did that process take, I guess, when you got in there at Sid Wainer from when you bought them to, like, when you were happy with them? Is Texas-
Boy.
More or less complex?
You really want to go back in history. We bought Sid Wainer & Son. We got hacked. .
After surviving the hack, somebody lit explosives in the parking lot and blew up trucks and part of the building, and then COVID hit.
A month later.
It was. I'm like, "I don't know, I don't know if this was a good idea." Yeah. we put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We started letting go of non-profitable business. Sid Wainer & Son was a great brand.
It's historical. It's been around, I think, three generations. It was not really making any money for many reasons. We knew that we were going to have to go backwards before we went forward. Today, even without the right facility, we're still touching products in multiple buildings. They're making really good money. It's, again, a testament to the team. We have great leadership. The product mix, the the customer base.
You're going through Vermont, New Hampshire, all the way up to Maine, all the islands. Boston's actually a it's a small town overall compared to some of the other big cities. It's logistically challenging.
We're great at that. The leadership there now has figured out the balance. I mean, the best is yet to come there. We're building them a new facility, so we think it's going to be exactly like Florida. They're doing great, but once they're in that new facility, they're just going to explode.
Yeah. Let's pivot over to M&A, area that you guys took a little bit of a breather from after doing a spate of M&A post-COVID. You guys
We're getting a lot of good deals right now.
A lot of good deals.
On the border of Iran. There's going to be a lot of opportunity. I couldn't help that one..
We've been really patient. We did a lot of M&A for a lot of reasons. We had to just to get the footprint. Then, coming out of COVID, it was all the deals that were in the hopper were so backed up, so it just we did one after the other, and it was extremely challenging. Kind of took a break to get everything more organized, and I think the numbers are showing. the efficiencies gave the team time to catch up. We're open for business.
Like I tell all the brokers that want to sell us something, you just gotta bring us something that's priced correctly or something that we really need. Except for a few little deals we look at it and, like we're growing organically at such a high rate. It has to be something compelling, 'cause I think we have a lot of our pieces. We still have that white space in the South to connect Virginia to Florida.
Other than that we want to do tuck-ins 'cause they're very low risk. As we build facilities that have a lot of excess space, tuck-ins are extremely accretive. We'd love to buy something great. We're a growth company.
That's something that we think is going to grow, but it just has to be compelling at the right price. Right now we're just focused on growing the business and being disciplined and usually opportunity will show up.
Fair enough. Now, when you think about that area in the white space opportunity you guys have in the Southeast, how do you think about the balance between. Do you have to acquire to get scale there? Can you see yourselves growing organically and reaching into those regions?
Organic is hard. We're starting what we do normally is we start to send trucks to a depot, and then we start to grow an area. We are doing that already and we know they want Chef-
Yeah
Down there. We're starting to hire people, and at a certain point, we'll find somebody that we can acquire that gives us routes, and then we can roll out from there. Yeah. Just like Texas, there was nobody to buy, really.
Yeah.
I mean, there was nobody which told us the market was open for us. There was I would say the good thing about Chef, there's nobody like us. The bad thing is there's no one exactly like us to buy. We have to buy somebody to get us into the market, and then we start to bring the teams in and the inventory and the experts and we start all over. It's like rebirth all over again. We'll get there. We're patient. We've been talking to a lot of people. We're seeing ways that we can get into that market.
Again, what's going to drive a lot of it to the bottom line right now is our big core markets, right?
Yeah.
Growing New York, growing California, growing Florida, growing Texas, continuing to grow the Midwest. Obviously, all our small markets the Pacific Northwest is doing great. They're moving into a new facility up in Portland. We have a new facility in Seattle. L.A.'s got a beautiful, big, new facility. They can triple their business. We have a new facility up in Richmond, California, for Allen Brothers. It's not like we have nothing to do.
Yeah.
You know? We have lots of ways to really drive growth, and it's where the people are, right?
We get really excited. We go into Nashville. Nashville's doing great. Still a small market, you know. It'll grow, but we really need to continue to grow our big markets.
We can grow 7, 8, 9, 10% in a big market. Those are numbers that move our needle.
Building on that point, you guys have added obviously a lot of capacity in some of these growth regions over the course of the past few years, and you still have some that's underway. Just how has the ramp gone in these regions relative to your original expectations?
I think they've done better than our expectations in a number of them. I mean, Chris already talked about Florida. Texas is still early innings. Dubai has been amazing. We've expanded three of our facilities in Dubai, Qatar, and Oman all over the last couple of years, so we've made that investment. They're investing in people.
Obviously, you got the short-term issue with the war, but that's still a big growth market for us. Chris mentioned some of the smaller markets, even like the Northwest is growing really high single digits sometimes double digits. I would say that they've gone as expected or even better.
Great. Italco gave you scale in the Rocky Mountain region. How's that gone so far? I don't know if we'd say scale. Maybe not scale.
We're excited.
Capabilities?
Eventually it'll start snowing as well. Yeah, we're retrofitting. We got lucky. We found a building that doesn't require a huge amount of CapEx that will allow us to move them into that and quadruple or more the business. We think it'll scale pretty fast. Again, it's small. It's a great market, you know. Our team loves seeing our trucks in Aspen and getting stuck in the snow when there's snow up in Breckenridge or Vail. It's a great customer. It's our customers' customer base that gets us excited. There's a lot of money, a lot of upscale tourism, a lot of people with second homes there now. Denver is growing.
It's sunny 300 days a year, okay? People forget that. We're excited about it, but it's still a small market, but it will scale.
Got it. Drop ship model is something you guys talked about briefly at the Analyst Day. Just curious how initial uptake has gone on that front in terms of customers starting to utilize that service.
We've always had some sort of drop ship. I think we called it something else. I think it complements the business well. The driver of our business is to build the demand, have it for next day. I like it when it's on our truck. It makes me feel much more in control. It definitely complements and gives our customer base. We call it the the magical sale.
We look at what comes in from not in the warehouse and not on our trucks a lot of times, and it just goes to the bottom line. It's a good addition.
Maybe pivoting to some broader topics, just obviously artificial intelligence is a big source of discussion really across the consumer industry. Talked a bit about how you guys are able to use it with your sales force. How do you think about artificial intelligence and your ability to deploy to the broader organization? Related just conceptually, how do you think about that balance in that there's all sorts of opportunities to save money.
We do see unemployment go up, potential demand implications. I think it's something that a lot of people are really grappling with trying to figure that out.
Yeah. I mean, I think for our industry whenever we have a lot of our corporate meetings discuss our challenges. When I hear that, it's hard to find drivers. I wish I would've saved, like, recordings of our first meeting 41 years ago. It's impossible to find drivers. Really, it's a challenging job. It's a hard job because it's not just driving. You're going downstairs, heavy boxes. We take care of our people.
We try to pay as much as possible. Any technology to make their job easier is welcome. I don't see the robots that can replace people that can deliver products and go downstairs in New York yet.
I think that's that's still a bit away. Back office, I mean, we've been using AI for a while now. I mean, we must have systemized so many of the back office functions.
Yeah. I mean in corporate, we use a lot of third-party provider, software providers, and they're all integrating AI. I would say where it's been most impactful for us is with our digital team and also our operations team.
We're starting to use drones to improve inventory management. On the digital side we've put in a really dynamic team over the last couple of years, and they've really exponentially grown our digital platform. Elements of AI help our sales reps have more real-time information on our customers' behavior, and it gives our customers, our chefs and their buyers a better buying experience. Gives them a window into inventory. Chris talked about how a sales rep could never know 90,000 products, right?
Our search engine is so much more improved through AI that they'll buy things and see things that they never knew we had. That's been a real differentiator on the sales side. I would say that's the most impactful. In operations, I think we're still in the second inning of integrating AI and robotics. I think it'll be bigger five or six years down the road, but we've started the process.
Fantastic. Well, I think that just about brings us up on time. Please join me in thanking both Chris and Jim today. This is awesome.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Thank you for having us. Thank you.