Good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to HF Foods Group's presentation. HF Foods is a leader in the Asian food service distribution market in the U.S. Today's presenters are Peter Zhang, HF Foods' Chief Executive Officer, and Felix Lin, the company's Chief Operating Officer. Before we begin, I do need to turn your attention to this disclaimers page. Now, I'll turn it over to Peter.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Peter Zhang. I'm CEO of HF Foods. HF Foods is a leading national player of Asian food distribution market. Our mission is to help local and regional Asian business owner to fulfill their dream. And also, we're partnering with domestic and international supplier to bring boards of very high quality selection of Asian ingredient to create one-stop shopping to our customer need. We history of strategic acquisition. Today, we are leading food distributor in Asian food restaurant across the country. Today, we have total 18 distribution and cross-dock around the nation. And also, we have serving almost 15,000 of Asian and Chinese restaurant coast to coast. But we also have almost 400 truck on the road deliver to all these restaurant every day.
And then also, our distribution network is almost cover 95% of the United States, and our customer base is 98% is an independent restaurant, just like a mom-and-pop restaurant. And our management team, our workforce, relate to Asian community. Our management team and workforce relate to Asian community has a very unique ability to understand the language and the culture. That we also have call center service, we, who are in China, and service the language and dialect, they speak the restaurant owners dialect. That will allow us to provide solution and offer solution to fit each customer. Yeah, HF Foods actually founded in 1997, and also continued the B&R Global Holdings location in LA, was founded in 1999.
It continued to merge and expand our business to Florida and also to Atlanta and also on the East Coast and West Coast. In B&R consolidate all the West Coast facility during 2014. In 2019, we are merge, we Legacy HF becoming a public company. During the COVID, we also have acquisition Great Wall Seafood in 2021 and 2022. Also, we also acquisition Sealand Food in Virginia. Today, we have 14 warehouse and four cross-dock, total 18 distribution center around the nation. Over the few years, like four years, we've built a very strong management team. I just talked a little bit about myself. You guys probably can see, English is my second language.
So, over 20-some years, I'm becoming a restaurant owner and also founder of Best Food Group in Chicago, and becoming CEO in 2019 with the merger of B&R Global Holdings. Then we got CFO, Carlos P. Rodriguez, who just joined the company a couple years ago, and Felix Lin, who's COO, he's here today. He joined the company as a board member and becoming management. And Christine Chan is joined the company about three years ago, 2.5, becoming General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer. And our chairman of the board of directors, Russell T. Libby, is also come from the food, come from Sysco, retired. So, we build very strong management team within a few years.
Now, I turn over to Felix, who can talk in more detail about our company.
Thanks, Peter. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about HF, you know, how we're built, our transformation plan, specifically who we are, and then focus on where our growth is gonna be for the coming years. So as Peter mentioned, you know, the company was founded in the late nineties, started on the East Coast, HF. Peter is not only just our CEO, he's also the founder of our business. Specifically, for the space that we play in, Peter is also considered one of the founders of the Asian food distribution space. So if you look at our business, again, we're a leading food Asian food distributor.
We're a one-stop shop, considered a broadliner in this space, and our product offering consists of Asian specialty, seafood, meat, poultry, fresh produce, packaging, and certain key commodities. Our customers, again, as Peter mentioned, we service about 15,000 independent restaurants across the country, coast to coast. Most of them rely on our specialty product for their cuisine. If you guys have ever been to a Chinese takeout restaurant, you can, one of the things you probably notice is the variety and number of items on their menu. And they can't do that without a company like HF. Specifically, if you look at our product mix, over 20,000 SKUs, you know, nearly half of them are in the Asian specialty category.
So again, some of these items, as you guys can see, are quite familiar items that you guys picked up from the menu, and there's some, a lot of specialty ingredients in there. Talking a little bit about the space, you know, there's roughly about 94,000 Asian restaurants throughout the U.S., and HF have the capacity to service about 95% of them. And out of the 94,000 restaurants, majority of them are considered independent restaurants. And historically, these have been underserved by your larger broadliners. So again, our focus have always been on the independent restaurant side. Specifically, if you look at our mix in that segment, roughly about 94%-98% of the restaurant within the Asian category are considered independent.
So the national chain restaurant that you historically see in the larger broadliner business are considered a very, very small part of our business. So we like the space that we play in. It means that there's significant margin opportunity with a focus on independents. So what's different between us and our competitors? You know, HF is really the only company within our space with a national reach. Again, you know, we have the capacity to serve 95% of the economy of the US. We have a stickiness with our customer that is tied to our cultural connection with the customers, our ease of communication. That's not something that the national players can replicate, you know?
So specifically, some of the competition that we do have is probably focused and limited to more of a local and regional area. So again, the competition is very, very fragmented in nature. So, you know, we're the only one that's with a national reach and this stickiness with the customer. Talk a little bit about how we're built. Again, you know, we have 18 distribution centers and cross-dock operation throughout the country. You know, specifically all the way from East Coast to the West Coast, and with the recent acquisitions back in 2022 with the Great Wall, we now have presence in the Virginia market, Illinois, and Texas as well. You know, we have roughly about 400 trucks.
Now, what's different between our model and the larger broadliner is our routes are typically a little bit longer as we go out, because a lot of our customers are located in more remote and rural areas in the country. And that's also one of our advantages, right? As an example, you know, again, this space has just been very, very underserved. You know, Peter himself has been, you know, spent about 30 years within the space, about 10 years of that as a restaurant owner, and he's opened up shops throughout the country in very rural areas. And how this business kind of got started is because, you know, he couldn't find the supply that he need, and then eventually, "You know what?
I'm just going to open up my own distribution company." And so really, there's a strong connection between our business and the Asian, the growth of Asian restaurants throughout the last 20, you know, two or three decades within the U.S. Our sales model is a little bit different as well. Again, we rely heavily on our multilingual sales team. We have call centers, which speaks the native tongue of our customers. You know, frequently, they order whether it's in Mandarin, Cantonese, or other local dialects, Korean as well. So depending on what our customer, you know, specifically the type of restaurants that they operate. And again, this is one of the special, unique part about HF and are different from the other broadliners, the space that we play in.
Not only do we have a culture and language advantage that's hard to replicate, again, you know, given where our customers have come from, you know, a lot of them are first generation. Sometimes they also treat this as you know, one of the social events that they have on a weekly basis as they communicate and place orders with our sales team. Our supplier base is very fragmented as well. It's made up of a large number of smaller suppliers. Again, a significant portion of it is from focus on the Asian specialty segment. Again, we have a long tenure, long relationship with our supplier base, averaged about 6.2 years, but a significant number of them have actually grown and over the years with HF, and we're considered strategic partners to many of them.
There's a number of them, in fact, that are probably 10 or 20 years old from a supplier tenure standpoint. Now focus a little bit on our transformation plan. So, you know, 2024 and beyond, really, there's four significant buckets of our transformation plan. One is centralized purchasing, two, fleet transportation, three, around digital, and four, facility. Again, on centralized purchasing, you know, with the Great Wall acquisition in 2022, we piloted seafood, a number of seafood SKUs in 2023 and have seen significant progress in margin expansion there. And I think there's a significant amount of opportunities still left for us to nationalize some of the categories there. On fleet and transportation, again, it's all about how do we reduce costs and get more efficient at what we do.
The one thing I mentioned about our service routes is different than the others, you know, long-distance routes. We're looking to cut down on our cost to serve. Again, you know, we're going through a pretty significant digital transformation, starting with a new ERP system that we're going to launch in this year, get all the companies on the same platform, to improve a better decision making process and drive efficiency as well. We've recently undertaken a facility network study to get an understanding of, again, in the future, where the investment should be from a facility standpoint. And again, cutting down on our cost to serve and also tap into some white space that's still out there. Talk a little bit about growth opportunity.
Again, you know, if you look at this slide, this is a kind of a slide of where the concentration of Asian restaurants are located within the U.S. And again, most of the region, you know, we have coverage today, but there's still a significant amount of white space for us left to tackle. If you look at, just do a simple math, there are roughly 94,000 restaurants, and today we service about 15,000 of them. So in our existing market, there's opportunity to expand organically, and but certainly there's other territories that we can get into. Margin expansion is part of, you know, our plan to increase our share of the wallet with customers.
As we know, you know, pricing and quality and service is going to be the key. As we centralize our purchasing, our aim is to reduce our cost structure and, you know, try to utilize that and expand a little bit more of our share. Peter mentioned the Great Wall acquisition in 2022, and those were, you know, effectively 100% seafood businesses that we purchased a couple of years ago. So that'll give us a lot of cross-selling opportunities, you know, in those markets, specifically Illinois, you know, Texas and Virginia. Now, we have added several thousand seafood customers. You know, our aim is, again, through our facility upgrades and whatnot, you know, to expand product mix in those areas. So again, a significant amount of cross-selling opportunities.
Same with the other distribution business that we have both in the Southeast and the West Coast, which historically, we sell seafood, but not a significant part of our mix. We're looking to expand our seafood offering there. M&A again, over through our twenty-plus year of history, M&A has always been part of our DNA. I think in this business, you know, it's always a combination of organic growth and M&A. And given Peter's relationship and reputation within the space, you know, we are the acquirer of choice within our space. If you look at, you know, talk about our competition in the smaller regional and local areas, most of them are first-generation operators.
As they look to exit, as they look to scale, they're looking for partners and potential acquirers like HF, to, to do that. So we're excited about what our, what our pipeline, looks like, and focus on continuing to do that, and it's going to be another way of us getting into some of the white space I mentioned. Okay. So to kind of sum it up, you know, HF, I think we offer an extremely strong value proposition. We are focused on our transformation plan in 2024 and beyond. We're, we're very proud of what we have achieved, so far, and, and build a business to a $1.1 billion, you know, net revenue, a year business.
I think, you know, we look forward to showing some of the results here in the coming quarters, financially. Okay. Thanks for having us.