Morning everyone, and thank you for joining PFG's 2022 Investor Day. For those of you who have joined us in person, we appreciate your willingness to travel to our beautiful Core-Mark campus. For those joining on the webcast, we have a great lineup of presentations and appreciate your support of PFG. Before we get started with the formal remarks, a few housekeeping items. Our presentations today will run for about three hours. You will hear from leaders across our organization. We've also saved plenty of time for questions following our prepared remarks. Those of you in the room will be able to ask your questions directly to management, and those on the webcast can enter your questions into the virtual platform and I will moderate the Q&A.
We will try to address as many questions as possible during the Q&A session, before breaking for lunch immediately following the presentation. Speaking of lunch, I wanted to thank our team of chefs who have been busy preparing the wonderful menu for all of you today. At the heart of our organization is food, and we are thrilled to be able to share some of our delicious offerings our company provides. Finally, during our presentation today, we will discuss GAAP and non-GAAP measures adjusted for certain items. The reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their corresponding GAAP measures can be found at the back of the presentation materials. Our presentation will also contain forward-looking statements and projections of future results.
Please review the cautionary forward-looking statement section in today's press release and presentation and our SEC filings for various factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking projections, and statements. With that, we'll watch a quick video, and then I'll turn it over to.
When you see a Performance Food Group truck on a highway, a busy city street, or on a back road, you know there's quality food and products being delivered. They might be going to a five-star restaurant, to universities, to micro markets, to hotel pantries, to your local convenience store, or even a movie theater. Performance Food Group is an industry leader and one of the largest food and food service distribution companies in North America, with more than 150 locations in the U.S. and Canada. This is just the beginning of our story. Not only are we delivering quality food and products to over 300,000 locations, we're providing unmatched customer service.
We owe our success as a Fortune 200 company to our more than 30,000 dedicated associates who are committed to building strong relationships with each and every customer, supplier, and community we serve. These associates believe in our mission and our core values, which can be summed up in one statement: Founded on Food, Focused on Service. That's Performance Food Group.
Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us here at Core-Mark's headquarters. It's nice to meet in person, but it's also very nice to see a lot of familiar faces. What we wanna show today, first of all, we wanna highlight our management. A lot of our people who will be presenters today are people that many of you have met in the past. We also wanna display the great confidence we have in our business moving forward. We're a very customer-centric company, and I think that that's something that most companies say, and I think for us, it's just part of our DNA. It's part of what we do every day. Well, I hope that's not anything I did. All right. This page just gives you a feel for kind of our. Is this better?
No, same thing still. It's the same thing. Okay. Well, I think it's still the same.
Okay, thank you for your patience, and we are back. The next slide we have up here just gives you an idea of kind of the breadth of our business. I think the most important part of it is that we are growing our people, we're growing our suppliers, and we're growing our number of products on a very consistent basis. We're a very locally based decision-making company in our Performance Foodservice business, where other businesses are more centralized. We feel that's very important. We have about 12,000 people that interact with customers. We do everything we can to keep those customer-facing decisions as close as possible to the customer. If you look at the pie graph there, it'll give you an idea where our revenues and our EBITDA exist within our businesses. Foodservice, certainly our largest business.
Vistar, we have our highest share. We have varied EBITDA margins based on the business and the product mix, but we're confident in our ability to continue to grow our EBITDA margins in each one of those businesses. This here is a map of what we would call our broad line businesses. You can see, we have a tremendous amount of white space as you get, west of the Mississippi. I think that bodes really well for our future. The map here adds our Customized business, which we do primarily, large casual dining chains, and it adds our legacy Roma businesses, which are, primarily pizza and Italian distribution businesses. Okay, this here is our Vistar business. As you can see, we have national coverage. We sell to virtually every ZIP code in the country.
We also have three retail distribution centers, which are pick and pack automated facilities. One you can see there is in Pennsylvania, one is outside of Memphis, Tennessee, in Mississippi, and one is in Reno, Nevada. Patrick will be speaking to those in his presentation. This is the map for Core-Mark. As you can see, national coverage very similar to Vistar. We are in the English-speaking part of Canada. We also have seven RDs, which Scott will speak to in his presentation. We have a company there, you can see that dot in Iowa. It's by the name of Farner-Bocken , and that's an interesting business to us in that they're large in convenience and they're also very large in Food service. This is the map of all of our businesses.
You can see it just shows clearly that we have a tremendous amount of scale, and we have a tremendous amount of scope. Also wanna speak to our marketplace. We have a very large addressable market, and we have a very large serviceable market. We're fortunate that we're a large company, but we're in very large industries, and we still have fairly low shares. I would say that Food service will be, you know, our key growth area, but we expect to see all three businesses grow. Food service, we can do that both organic and M&A. Vistar, we feel like a good bit of our growth will come from our e-commerce and from our pick and pack automated facilities.
In convenience, the ability to do more Food service, some of which will come out of our Performance facility, Foodservice warehouses. We also hope to get more into the products that are currently serviced by DSD. Okay, this kinda shows where our sales and EBITDA have gone in the past. We've really had consistent growth. We've had very consistent independent growth. Also, we define independent and Foods ervice as having less than 5 units, and we've had that same way of measuring that business throughout our existence. We've also, of late, our independent business has been growing very quickly in our Core-Mark Eby organization. If you look back over the entire time that we've existed, we've always had a good mix of M&A and organic growth.
We feel like, pre-COVID, we were really peaking, particularly our independent growth. If you think about since then, we have got the Reinhart acquisition done, and Reinhart is doing exceptionally well. Great growth. We knew that when we purchased the company, we'd been around it for a long time. We knew it was a very well-run company. We didn't also know that they struggled to grow. That's the component that we've really been able to add to that business, and it has really significantly outperformed even our expectations were. Then with Core-Mark, we're early, and we're doing really well. We've been putting out great growth rates in that non-nicotine area, which Scott will speak to. Then there's synergies. We've done a good job with both businesses as far as synergies go.
Reinhart, we got a long way to go. We really have done nothing to address where we're both in the same marketplace. Much of that is because our SKU base is very different. The biggest reason, though, is that we have filled their capacity with business so quickly. It's a good reason not to be able to move with those future synergies, but I think it's important that everyone know that they're out there, and we will get to those. Then in Core-Mark, the kind of back-of-the-house type of synergies that you get, the corporate office type synergies, we were able to get very quickly as we were with Reinhart. I think that we'll get further along from a synergy standpoint there because the inventories are so similar, the businesses are so similar.
It's many ways an overused word, synergy, but we've done a good job with it. I think that where we've backed up on it has been because of our success, not because of our inability or unwillingness to continue with it. What I wanna really emphasize is that we did feel we were peaking pre-COVID. We were doing exceptionally well, and we feel like we have another peak to come. We continue to gain share. We have a really robust pipeline of new business. I needed a little cheat sheet here. I'm gonna introduce our President Chief Operating Officer, but we put him through so many different positions. I need to make sure I went through this. Craig Hoskins has been with us for 32 years.
He's been in the industry for 32 years. This of course goes back to predecessor company from our acquisition of Multifoods Distribution Group. Craig has been involved with procurement. In Vistar, he has run sales in Vistar, overseen OpCos in Vistar. He has run sales at Roma, at Performance Foodservice. He's been the president of Customized, the president of Performance Foodservice, and now our president and chief operating officer. With that, I'll turn it over to Craig.
Well, thank you, George. I appreciate it. Do you have my clicker? There you go. Thank you. First, thank you for coming to Dallas. We appreciate all of you being here. It's nice to be together again with people post-COVID. Today, we're busy creating the country's best food away from home distribution company. Today, you'll meet many of our talented team members. I wish you could meet our entire senior management team. You'll meet some of them today during lunch and Q&A. I also wish you could meet our field leaders. In our business, especially Food service, it's really where the rubber meets the road. It's a talented group of people. We're now 30,000 people strong. Proud of what our team does every day to serve our customers. As a customer-centric organization, we believe that products and people matter.
We are committed to meeting the customer where they wanna be met, not where we want to meet them. I know you'll hear a bunch about that today, and we're excited about it. As you see here, we're showing a few of the early wins we've had as an organization. Rutter's was a Core-Mark customer, longtime customer, and we came together with them, and now we're serving their food service business. With QuickChek, that's a longtime Performance Foodservice customer, and now we're doing the center of the store through Core-Mark. Met with them last week, with Scott. They're pleased with the progress that we've made, pleased with the service we're providing. Gopuff is an interesting story. You'll hear a little bit more about it later. Gopuff was both a customer of Vistar and Core-Mark. It's growing rapidly. They needed solutions in food service.
We were brought into the fold, and now we're doing their food service distribution for Gopuff. There's a lot of opportunities that are similar to that, and our teams are out executing against those today. We're already seeing wins. We're sharing best practices between companies. We've developed great brands over the years. You'll hear about that later, but we're also developing programs designed to help operators succeed. So be it a chicken program or a deli program or a barbecue program, turnkey for our operators to go to market. One thing that's important for you to hear today, we have a diversified model. I'll talk a little bit about that here in a moment, but we can weather tough times like we have in the past. Here's an example of the number of times we and our customers can hit a consumer during a week.
On Monday, returning from a trip, going through the airport, hitting the airport gift shop, hotel pantry, right? Perhaps dinner afterwards. On Tuesday, you're back in the office, grabbing a cup of coffee on the way to work, coffee service station at the office, a micro market. On Wednesday, it's movie night, so you go out. On the way, you might stop and get some candy, or preferably, you're getting that candy from the theater. Maybe a dinner out afterwards. Next day, you go to see your kid at campus, right? You've got an opportunity to go to the college bookstore, pick up some snacks, have a nice dinner, perhaps order something in from somebody like a Gopuff. On Friday, you're gassing up, you're heading off to the big game. You have an opportunity to grab drinks and snacks on the way.
You've got an opportunity to, on Saturday, go to the big game, go to a catered event, have dinner after. Sunday, hitting the theme park, grabbing some pizza. Over the course of a week, there's so many opportunities for us to hit America's consumer through our operator customers. Some of you may be concerned about how we manage inflation. I'd encourage you to look at our past performance. We have so many different levers to help our customers manage inflation as well. Know that our customers are extremely creative and resilient. They've done a great job in navigating COVID, and they continue to find ways to solve the issues that they face as operators and to continue to provide what Americans crave, which is the ability to go out, be with others. As a customer-centric organization, we're very focused on providing them solutions.
Know that we have leading positions in very resilient channels. Those include pizza, convenience, and many different grab-and-go concepts. As George mentioned, we have experience in delivering success against large acquisitions, large and small. Every time we do one of those, we're looking for cultural fit. Liz will talk about that in a moment. We're looking for creative people. We're looking for talented people to build our bench and to fold into our company. In addition to that expanding talent pool, we still have synergies, as George mentioned, that are available through our acquisitions. Be it food inflation, we have ability to manage through food inflation as we have over the last several months.
Be it labor inflation, we have the relationships with our customers and the contracts and the clauses that allow us to manage through that inflation, or be it fuel, our ability to develop costless collars, the ability for us to pass through fuel increases in the form of surcharges, and just our normal day-to-day course of business conduct where we're managing our fleet, we're managing our routes through route efficiency software. Looking forward, our deep team and our model will deliver solutions. Many of our markets are still recovering. Some examples of that would include in our Vistar channel, where our offices are still recovering. Again, our operator's very resilient, very creative. We're excited about what our team can do in the future. We've got an opportunity to continue to grow our share in the restaurant business.
We still have synergies to capture through our acquisitions, and we still have plans to grow in our targeted market share areas such as independent restaurants. With that, I'll turn it back over to George. Thank you for your time.
Thanks, Craig. Okay, our next presenter is gonna be Steve Broad. He's an executive vice president for our Performance Foodservice division. Steve, like Craig, has been 32 years in the business. 18 of those years have been with PFG. Steve took a real, what I consider a conventional, trip to what he's doing today. Steve was in sales. He was in sales management. He ran an OpCo. He oversaw several OpCos, and now he oversees what we call field operations, but basically it's all of our people out in the distribution centers. Steve?
All right. Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I'm gonna talk about why we win in food service. It all starts with our customer-centric approach that's been talked about. Okay, this fuels our sales pursuit to develop high-integrity relationships to serve our customers' business needs with top-caliber associates, distinctive products and service excellence. To do so, we have to impress at the point of sale. We train our sales team on an integrated methodology, a set of proven tactics that enable us to best identify our customer's needs, then target our expertise on providing the right products, the right resources, the right ideas that enable their businesses to be successful. This approach gets us behind the veil, if you will, of what's your price on every item to become more involved in their business and ultimately be that most valuable resource to their prosperity.
We're very effective in this realm, okay? We have retained our sales force through all of the turbulence that's been experienced. We never wavered. We retained key relationships, and in many cases, we enhanced those relationships because of our ability to help our customers navigate those challenging times. We're growing our sales team. We've continued to enhance our place in the market. We're now a top 50 direct sales force in the United States. So we're blessed with a lot of talent, we're blessed with a lot of tenure. We've got a lot of spirit in our organization to deliver on our customers' expectations and help them succeed. Sometimes that spirit questions, "Well, do we really need this training? You know, we weathered the storm. We're successful in the marketplace.
We're gaining share." Well, I'll tell you this, whether you're brand new with our company or a seasoned veteran, we are going to invest in your effectiveness. We sum it up this way. There's not a chef out there that doesn't sharpen his or her knives on a regular basis. We are gonna stay sharp in front of the customer. We're gonna provide those resources necessary for their success, and we're gonna continue to be that most valuable resource to their prosperity. We've touched on our customer-centric approach, talked about our sales effectiveness. Here in a few minutes, Eric's gonna talk about our incredible array of products that we have available to the marketplace. I wanna dial in for a minute on the 12,000+ associates that interact with our customers on a daily basis.
Once we set the table and impress at the point of sale, like we talked about, then we have to impress at the point of delivery. We've got a very robust service excellence program that measures the key elements that literally deliver on customer satisfaction. Okay, this is what our associates do day in and day out. They're aligned with this philosophy and this approach. They are backed by some of the best technology in the business when it comes to warehouse and transportation. We have a safe organization. We have a productive organization. We have an accurate organization that literally delivers on the needs of our customers and helps them in their prosperity. Okay? We never back down from that. We've also enhanced our customers' digital experience.
The development of our customers' first digital ordering platform is well underway, and our design has been very complex, yet straightforward, right? We wanna make it profitable, make it smart, make it easy. We know by doing so we're going to have larger basket size, we're gonna have additional users attracted to our format, we're gonna reduce customer turnover, and I'm really excited about the future pilot of the endless aisle, where customers will enjoy a single point of entry to access the vast array of product across our entire enterprise and have at their disposal and their ability to advance their prosperity, right? So Food service customers will be able to tap into Vistar or Vistar into convenience into whatever channel makes sense to help their customers prosper.
I think it's a great thing, and there's more greatness to come in this area, and we're really excited about that development and enabling that capability, very unique in our industry across our customer base. Are these things really points of differentiation? Well, our performance would say so. Our independent business has never been a greater portion of our overall mix. Okay, that says something. Equal, if not more important, our customers realize our efforts. In the elements that are most important to customers in the engagement of their business from their food service distributor, PFG ranks number one in each one of those components. We are out there impressing at the point of sale. We're impressing at the point of delivery. We've got a well-trained, educated, properly compensated, and motivated sales force that's delivering on the customer's expectation of our service to their business.
I will tell you that there's nobody out there that's better positioned to take market share than we are. I'm excited about our future. I'm looking forward to getting out there and being more aggressive than we even are today and looking forward to the prosperity of our customers going forward. I'm gonna turn it back over to George. Thank you.
Thank you, Steve. All right, our next presenter is Erich Schumann, and Eric is also Executive Vice President of Foodservice. The difference between their two responsibilities are that Eric handles everything internally, kind of the corporate functions of Performance Foodservice, plus he oversees our meat cutting and seafood cutting operations. Eric has been with this industry for 40 years, and he spent 20 years with PFG. Couple other things that I think are real interesting that's gonna really help Eric. In 2012, when we bought IFH, of which there's two of them in the Carolinas, we moved Eric as president of our company in Virginia to head that up. The person that was doing it at the time was retiring from the organization.
It was an extremely good acquisition, where we more than doubled the sales, we more than doubled the earnings. He's been through that experience of converting brands, really getting involved in what the right geography was. We have that ahead of us still in Reinhart, and that's gonna be a big part of what he does. In his previous role, just before this, where he oversaw OpCos, he was very involved with these Reinhart OpCos as well. I'll turn it over to Eric.
Thank you, George. Welcome, everyone. I have the pleasure of talking about our exclusive brands this morning. You know, within Performance Foodservice, quite frankly, people and products are our passion. Nowhere is that more evident than within our exclusive brands. They absolutely fuel our growth within Performance Foodservice. Those brands are made up of kinda two different types. First one being our umbrella brands, and that would be represented by Nature's Best, Roma, West Creek. These brands typically are tiered, different quality levels to meet different applications that our customers are asking for. Then next, we have strategic brands. These brands tend to be more innovative, oftentimes first movers, represented by brands like Braveheart Black Angus Beef. Gonna talk about that a little bit more here shortly.
Coda Coffee, a recent brand that we actually are able to use now due to an acquisition a few years ago. Then also Bacio and Contigo on our Hispanic label. Why are these brands important? First of all, for our customers, they represent value, oftentimes better quality or equal quality, better pricing. They also provide consistency and reliability. Our customers get what we benefit from on the purchase side with our supplier partners that often those relationships are decades long, okay? You know, we've seen over the last 2.5 years, very turbulent supplier issues and supply chain issues. What's been very evident is within our brands, our supplier partners deliver, quite frankly.
Our AMs, our area managers, our sales team, how they benefit from our brands, it insulates them from our competition. It creates loyalty with our customers. Then on the company side, we use our leverage with our exclusive brands and that volume to drive great cost of goods through the organization and to our customers. When we think about our brands and we start thinking about, okay, let's develop a brand. Really the work goes into keying in on especially those strategic brands and defining our key attributes. Nowhere is that more evident than with our Braveheart Black Angus. Here's a brand 14 years in the making that we control from start to finish, okay? Rancher, farmer, feeder, processor. Along that way, we've defined attributes that make that product special, okay. What I mean by special is nobody else does this.
We do things like, we have specifications that say U.S. Midwestern grain product only. Oh, by the way, it's toasted flakes our cattle are fed, produces a richer product. We also determined that it was better for those animals to be closer to the processor. No feeder that handles our Braveheart Black Angus cattle can be more than 150 mi from our processor. What that does is creates, number one, a smaller carbon footprint, less miles to travel. Number two, less stress on that animal. What stress does to an animal if it's allowed to releases adrenaline, makes for a tougher eating steak, quite frankly. Another key attribute for that product is we've specified that we're only going to have smaller carcass weights for our Braveheart Black Angus product.
What that does is it defines what the size of that strip loin is gonna be or that rib eye is going to be. It's going to create a thicker steak when it's on the plate. It allows our customers to give their customers a better eating experience. As a processor, we actually pay a premium to have our processors slow down their line speed. That enables them to have a tighter trim spec on the product, quarter inch or less, when the industry standard is one inch or less. What does that do for us? Whether it's our internal meat processing centers that we have or our customers in the back of their restaurants cutting steaks, less labor, less trimming, less waste, better product. We think that's very important as we develop our brands.
Then when you look forward and think about it, next step in the process is training our folks. Steve mentioned earlier, we need to continue to sharpen our knives. When we have this great brand, we have to develop that rigorous training program to really set our sales team apart from the competition. That's done with our performance academy, where every area manager that comes into the company is required to either attend live or virtually a one-week session that is just an absolute deep dive on our exclusive brands. We also have a team of national sales specialists and local sales specialists. These are folks that are absolute experts in their field and have extremely high culinary IQ in areas like center of the plate, produce, Hispanic and Latino, pizza and Italian, so on and so forth.
These folks, whether it's a national level or a local level, are tasked with training our sales team on a weekly, daily basis, being in the cars with our sales folks, meeting the customers in the back of the restaurants, showing them our exclusive brands, features, advantages, and benefits that they're happy to receive to their restaurants. We also provide on an annual basis, three different THRIVE summits a year that really are more of a train-the-trainer session for us. Our national sales specialists are in training our local sales specialists in areas like pizza and Italian, which we just had about two months ago at Richmond. Attended by over 200 of our folks out in the field, again, sharpening our knives. We wanna back that up with a very robust digital branding strategy.
Our digital branding assets go out to over 10,000 recipients on a very regular basis. Steve mentioned our customer satisfaction survey, which clearly showed that we are winning. In key metrics that our brands touch, it shows that here as well. Things that are important like food quality, value, food safety, and variety. Again, we're winning, and we're outperforming our customer or our competitive set, excuse me. I absolutely think this slide is huge, okay. This shows that the work is paying off for us, right? We've developed the right brands, we're training our people properly, they're connecting to our customers, and our customers are responding. How they're responding is they're ordering over 50% of the cases coming into the back door of that restaurant is in our exclusive brands. It's very important. It's a very powerful graph that we have there, right?
Then you can also see where we had the Reinhart acquisition. From that point on, we've absolutely exploded with our exclusive brand sales, and we see no stop to that. I wanna shift gears here just a second and talk about investments and innovation. We're gonna continue to invest in our capacity to support the growth that is key to our success at Performance Foodservice. We're also going to invest in innovation, right? Specifically in our warehouse. We're gonna have auto scrubbers, we're gonna have robo wrappers, we're gonna have self-advancing pallet jacks, all in an effort to make us more efficient and more productive. We're also gonna have a keen eye on safety.
We've employed technology like Kinetic, which is a wearable device that tracks the movements of our associates within the warehouse, make sure they're doing proper lifting methods, keeping them safe, keeping them healthy, keeping them involved in our business. We're also going to pilot and are piloting Fit For Work, where we have an on-site training coach, if you will, that interacts with our associates every day, helping them when they feel a strain or, you know, need some help stretching, if you will. We're excited about the company that we have, our associates that are out there leading the way, and the products that we're proud to sell. I wanna just one more plug about our brands.
For those of you that are fortunate enough to be here on our campus today, please make sure that you check out our Coda Coffee rubbed Braveheart Black Angus Beef tenderloin at one of the carving stations. I guarantee you it will not disappoint. With that, I'll turn it back over to George. Actually, I'm sorry. We're gonna go to a 10-minute break. Thank you so much.
Well, our next presenter is Scott McPherson from Core-Mark, and Core-Mark's been a great addition to our company and Scott equally great addition. The first time we formally met when I'm talking about formally when we were really talking about putting the companies together, it started out about like we did with our microphones today. We were meeting at a restaurant called Truluck's, which is very close to here, and I had a car picking me up and taking me there. I get in the car and immediately get a phone call. It was a kind of a somewhat important phone call. I'm lost in this phone call, and I get done. I'm like, "God, we've been gone a long way.
He wouldn't make it this far away." I said to the driver, "Could there be two Truluck's?" He goes, "No, there's only one downtown." God, that makes sense. I, of course, went to trusty Google and put in Truluck's, and it brought two up. I called. I said, "Man, I'm really sorry, but I'm gonna be quite late." That's how we got off to a start. We did have a great dinner. We actually came to this building afterwards, about 10:00 P.M. Scott's got 35 years in the industry, and his dad actually owned convenience stores, so he's run convenience stores before, coming to Core-Mark. I think one of the great things about having Scott with us is he's run a public company before.
He knows what I deal with and what we deal with as a company. He has a tremendous amount of M&A experience. This last time he was on the other end, getting bought. It was a great experience because we both had to fight really hard. I thought we overpaid, and he thought we didn't pay enough. We had a couple conversations that probably weren't the greatest, and from the minute we were done, we've never had a bad conversation, and I'm sure we won't. He's also done a great job with the EBITDA synergies. His company today, Core-Mark, is really a mix of both companies and a very good mix from a senior management standpoint. It's a good company. I will turn it over to Scott.
Well, thank you, George. I really thought he was standing me up on our first meeting, so it was about 30 minutes of really precarious time there. Hopefully everybody that had a chance to visit the COE for convenience this morning enjoyed themselves, got an opportunity to really see how we approach the business. We're really proud of that Center of Excellence. It's done a great thing for us with our customers, creating an environment where they can really experience something different. That's really how we approach the business. We're trying to create differentiation in our marketplace. I'm honored to be here representing the convenience segment of PFG. I'm gonna jump right in and just kinda hit on our convenience priorities. I think anybody in here that knows George knows that he is maniacal about growth.
I think that's something that aligned with the way we think. When I think about growth in the convenience industry, it really starts with account penetration. That's same-store sales growth for us. That's something we're hyper-focused on. You know, then when you think about how we add Food service into convenience, that just accelerates that and really helps us with that same-store sales growth. The other thing that helps us too is gain market share. When I think about market share, we're pretty balanced between chain and independent. You know, that's the other way we think about growth. The next thing I'd touch on is operational excellence. You know, it's something that both on the Core-Mark and Eby side, we really focus on. It's something that we're proud of.
I can tell you the last couple years, that's been challenging. Obviously, with the workforce issues, that brings challenge, and that brings challenge in being able to leverage the technology. We've really worked hard on that. You know, I think that's a big part of our go-forward strategy is to regain that operational efficiency. That's gonna help us when we think about driving EBITDA and EBITDA margins, which I'm gonna get to in a minute. The other thing is just leveraging the scale, you know. When I think about leveraging scale, I think about leveraging product selection. I think about leveraging cost. We're just starting, I think, to scratch the surface of, you know, turning over some of those stones in the business. I've definitely seen that scale come to bear.
I think you heard about some of that in the COE this morning. You know, the next thing I wanna hit on, and I had growth and EBITDA and EBITDA margins kind of at the top of my page for a reason. Obviously, that's something as a public company that we're very focused on, both just the dollar growth of EBITDA but also the margins. For us, when we think about what is the driver of that, the driver is clearly one thing, and that's growing non-nicotine sales. Without a doubt, that has been our focus in this business for a long time, will continue to be our focus. That's where we drive margin, that's where we drive profit. You know, with that, and especially with the inflationary challenges that we face, we worked really hard on how we approach the market from a pricing standpoint.
From a strategic pricing standpoint, I think we've done a great job to help combat some of the inflationary pressure. Maybe lastly, on driving EBITDA and EBITDA margin, it comes back to operations, right? We have to operate efficiently to be able to consistently drive that growth, and that's something we're very focused on. The last thing, you know, I touch on is anytime you have a big acquisition, you know, there's integration and synergy are the two words that everybody talks about. This one is a little different in the sense that, you know, there's two convenience store companies that have been acquired over the last two years. We spent a tremendous amount of time bringing Core-Mark and Eby-Brown together.
I would say that, you know, in the nine months, I'm really proud of the steps that we've taken to bring it together as one convenience. That's really what I'm talking about today is one convenience. I'm not talking about two separate companies. That's been very powerful, and I think we're on a great path with that horizontal synergy and also the vertical synergy and integration into PFG. That kinda comes back to that $40 million of synergy that was called out. I think we have a great runway there. I wanna take a step back and just talk about the convenience industry, the whole industry as a whole. You think about convenience stores across the U.S., there's 150,000 convenience stores. You've got another 25,000 or so in the Canadian region that we service.
When you think about inside sales, and this is excluding fuel, you're talking about $278 billion in revenues. You know, I think when you think about the thesis of why do you bring food service and convenience together, I think this next block really shows that. 23% of the sales in convenience are in food service, and 67% of that is in basically what I call broad line food service or prepared foods. You know, I think that's where the marriage really, you know, resonates to me. I wanted to touch on a couple other things, you know, as far as industry landscape. When we think about our total addressable market, it's about $195 billion. So a very vast industry. Our serviceable market at about $127 billion.
I think most importantly on that, on that upper right-hand corner is really our non-nicotine serviceable market, which is about $48 billion. I think the other misconception about us is that we're just in convenience. We have a great partnership with Walmart in mass. We do direct to consumer with DoorDash and Gopuff, as Craig mentioned earlier. We're in the drug channel with Rite Aid. We also do what I'd call other convenience retail. We're in liquor stores, we're in airports, schools, casinos, hotels. We serve a broad array of customers. Maybe taking another step back and just looking at our convenience snapshot. The convenience segment of PFG, we do about $23 billion in sales, about 50,000 customers, with about 39,000 of those being convenience stores. convenience clearly is our primary segment.
We have 10,000 associates that service those customers over 50 distribution centers, and I'm gonna drill down into that distribution center breakdown. Before I do that, I did wanna just touch on kind of our mix in convenience. This is kind of our mix, and the one thing that a lot of people will jump to is if you look at cigarettes and tobacco in that convenience sales mix, it's about 70% of revenues. I think the more important thing to look at is the gross profit breakdown. It's about 39%. Nicotine is about 39% of our gross profit, leaving 61% in that non-nicotine space. I think it answers the question of, you know, why are we so focused on non-nicotine to grow our EBITDA, because that is the growing segment of convenience. It's also the most profitable segment of convenience.
The last thing I touch on, I think I touched on a little bit, is we're about 50/50 chain to independent, you know, which I think is a good place for us to be. It's good balance. I think that's good representation of our industry. Oops, wrong button there. Shifting gears, if you look at the convenience network, we have 37, what I call traditional OpCos across the U.S. and Western Canada. We have four Walmart OpCos, and those centers are basically in the parking lots of our traditional OpCos and service only Walmart. We basically do chips, candy, and then all the candy aisle in those Walmart locations. It's a great partnership. I think it's one that has the opportunity for growth. We also run two 3PLs. Those are in Arizona and Texas, and that's for Couche-Tard.
Those are dedicated to their stores, and that's also a great model for us. I think maybe the most powerful thing that we have when it comes to distribution centers is redistribution. We've been in the redistribution space for a number of years. We have seven redistribution centers. Really what that allows us to do is get products efficiently and cost effectively to every one of our OpCos across the U.S. and Canada. When you think about, okay, we're gonna add food service SKUs, or we're gonna add additional items, fresh items, that allows us to get that across the network very quickly. That's, I think, a big differentiator when we think about our convenience network versus the industry. Continuing on that theme of differentiation, you know, I think about the benefits of belonging.
I made that phrase up, but that's what I think about when I think about belonging to a bigger umbrella, to PFG. The first thing that comes out is obviously synergy. We're on a great track from a synergy standpoint. We have captured in the first year annualized $15 million of synergies. Craig talked about earlier. We've also had great partnership alignment with Rutter's and Murphy USA. I'll talk a little more about Rutter's in a second. Then you think about the bigger potential. What does that mean? It means $40 million in synergies. I think we're on a great path there. It means accelerating food service growth and convenience, which I think you got a great taste of in the COE this morning. It also means continuing down that path of differentiation.
I kind of broke that into the three buckets below, which is really, one, convenience. Bringing Core-Mark and Eby-Brown together, in my mind, it brought together the best sales organization in the space. I think it clearly brought the best technologies, category management opportunities for our customers together in the space. I think this is very powerful. We are the largest convenience store distributor in the U.S., and I think that's a powerful thing. Those two companies coming together, I think, provides us great leverage. Thinking about leveraging scale, you know, I kinda touched on this, but to me, it's about item selection, it's about cost leverage, it's about human capital. We've already shared employees across segments, which is really powerful. You know, it's about trade spend and non-trade spend. I think it's just bringing that leverage to bear.
That last bucket, the PFG umbrella, I really think about that as food. I think about product development, the branding that Eric talked about, building out food service programs, new technologies, all of those things I would say weren't core competencies of a standalone convenience distributor. The last thing I'd say is from an ESG standpoint, I think that PFG has done a great job of building out that platform, and that's really kind of helped us with a framework to move forward in convenience as well. If I move forward on expanding food service, I kinda everybody thinks about food service and convenience and how does that all play out. To me, it breaks into four buckets.
You know, the first one, and you saw this this morning, is we saw a couple opportunities this morning where we talked about bringing in new items into convenience distribution centers. If you were in the COE breakouts, we were kinda talking about that top 250 core items that we could bring into convenience distributors. A lot of those are branded items. I think those are, you know, gonna be cost-advantaged items. That's something as a standalone, I remember I used to go out and sell against the broadlines, and I'd be like, "Okay, I'm gonna sell a chicken strip." They would be selling their house brand at a much lower cost than I'd be selling a name brand Tyson, so I could never compete. That's really the advantage of bringing this together.
It gives us items, and it gives us cost leverage. I think that's the low-hanging fruit of bringing foodservice in. I think the second piece you saw clearly is the branded foodservice programs. You saw the five programs, whether it be pizza, Mexican, you know, those things are turnkey solutions that as a standalone, we had a really hard time building out. We have five of those in our portfolio today. The other thing that I think may be underestimated, and I'll use Rutter's as the example, is there are convenience stores out there, and you can think of some of the big name brands of Sheetz or Wawa. They're essentially running a restaurant in a convenience store. In the near term, you won't see a traditional convenience distributor, even our OpCos out there servicing a restaurant-quality supply in a convenience store.`
That's why we, in the Rutter's case, partnered with our PFS division, and we have PFS servicing the food side. We're servicing center store. It's a powerful combination. We're really sticky with the customer. I think you'll see a lot of that across the industry, and it's something that only we can do today. I think that's a key point of differentiation. The last one, as you saw with the chefs that are preparing food today, is just that culinary expertise. That's something that a convenience store distributor does not have. It's something that I think, you know, we have a really distinct point of differentiation over anybody in our space. Before I close up, I wanted to just touch on the core pieces of differentiation.
Outside of food service, we've worked really hard in convenience to create points of differentiation. We have a fresh program that goes across every one of our distribution centers. We're the only one in the industry that can take fresh sandwiches, fresh salads, fresh cut fruit multiple times a week to every OpCo that we have. Nobody else in the space can do that. We use our redistribution center to do that. Now we can take that on to Vistar and other segments of the business. We have exclusivity in the space with Cuties, and that's an orange product. You've all seen them, but that's something that, you know, we try and do is negotiate exclusivity on certain items. I think from a technology standpoint, there's nobody that has the technology suite that we have for our customers.
Whether it be loyalty, frictionless payment, we are partnered with the best players in the space, and I think we have a real key point of differentiation there. Category management, hopefully in the COE, you walked away today knowing that we are the front runner in category management, hands down, in the convenience space. Then lastly, I'll just hit on a couple other things. You saw our kind of core convenience. I think we have great turnkey solutions for core convenience and also do a great job with product innovation. I'll close up with this slide, and I just want you to walk away with, you know, thinking about the rationale of bringing food service and convenience together. Really, I think it brings companies of growth together. You know, George is hyper-focused on growth.
PFG as a whole is hyper-focused on growth and us as a segment are aligned with that. I'd say the same thing about EBITDA and EBITDA margins. You know, operational excellence, that's gonna be critical for our success. Obviously, that's been a big challenge the last couple years. I feel like there's a little bit of traction from a hiring standpoint, but we have a ways to go there. That's gonna be a hurdle that's gonna be critical to success. Obviously leveraging PFG to grow food service. The last thing is just continue on that path of integration, continue on that path of synergy capture. That's a long roadway. With that, I'm excited to be leading the convenience segment. We've got a great organization. I think we're best in class and so look forward to spending more time with you all.
Thanks so much, Scott. All right, our next speaker is Patrick Hatcher . Patrick Hatcher has been with us for 12 years. He's been 12 years in the industry. We got him, fortunately, from MillerCoors when they were relocating. Patrick was our CFO for quite a while within Vistar. Pat Hagerty came to me and said, "I wanna put Patrick Hatcher in charge of sales." Well, I don't know. He's a finance guy, you know. You gotta go sell stuff. He said, "Well, I think he could be my replacement one day, and I think we should do that." Pat's been the best, really, at our company at developing people and particularly even senior management people. We went with it. He did a terrific job running sales, and he's got some great information for you today.
All right. Well, thank you, George, and good morning, everyone. I'm excited to share with you Vistar's future. Let me go forward the slide here. Okay, in today's business update, you're gonna observe three key themes. They are the backbone to Vistar success. The first one is we innovate, the second one is we focus on growth, and the third one is we think differently. What I mean by that is we're constantly reinventing ourselves, but we stay true to our core strengths. Here's a snapshot of all the sales channels that we currently serve. What you'll see is we focus on the consumer when they're at work, when they're at play, when they're on the go, and even when they're at home. We're focusing on serving them and providing them indulgent or healthy snacks, meals, meal replacements and beverages.
Now I wanna take you through a little bit of an evolution of Vistar and the different channels we served. You can see that going back to 2000, we're a $1 billion distributor, but we're primarily focused on vending and office coffee. Now you jump to 2008 and we're a $1 billion distributor, but you can see that we're adding new channels. That's what I mean that we're constantly thinking differently, adding more theater and concessions, adding c-stores, travel, hospitality. Now if you go to 2022, we're a $3.4 billion distributor. Again, we've continued to add channels like value, office supply, campus. This slide is just a summation of the previous three slides, but you can see that the pies continue to grow and the slices within each of the pies continue to grow.
The key point is there's not a single channel now that represents more than 42% of our sales. I'd like to take a few minutes and talk about some of the trends that are going on with some of our biggest channels. The first one being vending. Within vending is micro markets. Micro markets are nothing more than unattended retail space with a self-checkout kiosk. You can see that they were born around 2009 with our vending operators, and you can see they had pretty good growth. 2014, they absolutely took off. Even during the pandemic and post-pandemic, they have continued to grow significantly and are growing at double- digits. Now, if you think about why micro market versus a vending machine. When you walk up to a vending machine, it's highly transactional.
You have a very limited assortment, very limited sizes. You have to purchase the item before you get it. You never get to touch it or look at it. In a micro market, you're gonna have a cooler that has fresh sandwiches, fresh salads, cold drinks. You're gonna have a freezer that has frozen foods, ice cream, and then you're gonna have all your candy, chips, HBA, which is health and beauty aids, and then hot drinks. The consumer goes to these micro markets, and they bundle their items, whether they wanna create a meal or just have a quick snack. The market basket for the operator is much higher. The consumer experience that's shopping the market is much better. They've seen that these markets are incredible in terms of what they can do for the consumer and for the operator.
The operator, the other benefit is because it's now a point of sale with these self-checkout kiosks, they get all the information of exactly what that consumer bought, when they bought it. When they have to replenish that market, they know exactly what to bring to that market on the route truck. Now, these markets continue to evolve. You'll see that micro markets really grew up in the office workspace. So whether it's blue collar or white collar, that's where micro markets began. Mainly a private area. Now you're starting to get to see these markets appear in public areas. So the smart coolers are coolers you can walk up to and unlock with your phone or a credit card, stock the cooler, and it'll charge you.
You start to see these in bus stations, you start to see them in train stations, you start to see them in stadiums. Then micro cafes are really large micro markets, but they have lots of pre-prepared food in them. Why that's important is as employers are bringing their employees back into the office post-pandemic, excuse me, they're trying to not have the cafeterias as much anymore, and this is a great way to bring those employees back in, have them have a great experience, be able to have meals, again, snacks, drinks as they need them. Then finally, you have just walkout stores. These are similar to an Amazon Go, but you check in with your phone, you shop the whole market, it's watching you with cameras and sensors. It knows exactly what you have, and you just walk out.
We continue to see a lot of growth here and a lot of evolution. The other trend I wanna talk to you about is our retail centers. During the pandemic, we consolidated all of our business for retail into three facilities. These are small parcel shipments. What's important about these facilities, you can see in the picture here, is they're highly automated. We've brought a lot of automation and a lot of technology into these centers to make the pick and the pack as efficient as possible. In these centers, we are breaking open cases, pulling out boxes and niches, and shipping to our retail partners who want just the items that they're gonna merchandise at that checkout counter. We can get to 80% or 96% of the population in one to two days from these centers.
We do about 3 million parcels annually through these centers. Again, we're shipping these on FedEx and UPS, and we're using protective packaging to make sure that the products get to our customers in perfect condition. I'm gonna talk about some other fulfillment opportunities that we have at these centers in a minute. Growth trends. Here's some areas that we think that we have a lot of upside to grow, and we're already in them, but we're seeing some trends that make them really attractive to us. Both military bases and gaming, they're seeing the same trends that we're seeing with micro markets, hospitality, and travel, where they want these self-checkout kiosks, unattended areas, so people can go shop for a meal, a snack, or a beverage.
We are, like I said, already in these spaces, but we continue to see a lot of upside in both of them. The other one, which I was just talking about, is e-commerce and Q-commerce. For e-commerce, using those three facilities, they're highly suited for any type of e-commerce shipments, whether it's B2B or B2C. In this case, we're working with our manufacturers and our customers who've built out great e-commerce platforms. The hard thing about e-commerce is the actual shipping or fulfilling to that consumer's home because you're picking into a kit or each or maybe a box. We're providing that fulfillment service to our manufacturers and to our customers, whether they have a pure-play website themselves or they're using a third-party website, we're doing the fulfillment for them. The other piece is Q-commerce. Q-commerce stands for quick commerce.
It's for Gopuff, DoorDash, the Getirs of the world. You've heard about Gopuff a couple times today. We've seen a really explosive growth with these guys. We're bringing, in this case, our trucks to their micro fulfillment centers, and they're doing the last mile delivery for us. We've talked about understanding the customers and meeting them where they are. I wanna just make a couple of final points on this. We have a fleet of trucks. We have 22 distribution centers across the country, so we're nationwide. We have the three small parcel fulfillment centers. Between all of those, we can ship a truckload of product to a customer, we can ship pallets to a customer, we can ship boxes, each is through our fulfillment center. We can meet the customer and meet their needs, whatever they are. Categories.
Scott touched on this a second ago. Fresh Take, we're very excited about getting into fresh sandwiches, fresh salads, and leveraging what Scott's doing at Core-Mark. We've also created additional categories like Good To Go, where we focus on healthy snacks for you, or Grab & Go, which is, again, healthier, refrigerated type items. We continue to meet the consumer where they are. We continue to track what the new trends are and follow those and add categories as appropriate. Our innovation, our focus on growth, and our thinking differently has positioned Vistar as the right partner to help its customers with the ever-changing needs of the consumer. Thank you. I think we're now going on a 10-minute break.
Okay. Our next presenter is Liz Mountjoy. She asked me if I was gonna tell you about all her years' experience in the business. She's been with us two and a half years, but she's been here a long time in dog years 'cause we have put her through a lot in two and a half years. She heads up our M&A and strategy area. You know, for us as a company, we've been very successful in M&A. Probably not in the best of ways. We basically bought people I knew and had long-term relationships, and Pat Hagerty went out and very successfully bought companies that got us into different channels within discount, and that's about what we could do.
What Liz has done in just a couple or two and a half years' time is put together a more professional view. It's great when you can look at something and hand it off to somebody who knows what they're doing. Her and Jim work real close and work real well together. I think you'll see from us a company that will continue to be as opportunistic as we've been. Also, we will look at a whole lot more acquisitions. I think that for us, most of what we look at, we tend to do, and that tells me that we're just not looking at enough. With Liz on board, I see us looking at everything that can come across her desk. I'll turn it over to Liz.
Okay. I'm gonna try to look at these things, and I think I'm gonna sit. Good morning, everyone. I have a short and sweet little section for you. I'm gonna talk about the framework we use for decision-making with M&A. A little bit about our track record of success and why I believe we've been so successful with M&A. Then a little bit around our future and where we're focused as we look forward. Let's see here. All right. This framework should look familiar to some of you. I think we shared it at CAGNY one year. This is really about the lenses through which we consider our M&A pipeline. It's a balance of these three things, and I'll talk about each of them. Growth is a word you've heard a lot already today.
We think about, you know, PFG has a really solid growth story. As you all know, M&A has played a big role in that story. We're going to continue to look at our pipeline, look at opportunities, and think about how and when we could use M&A to continue that growth story. The second lens up here at the top is about market dynamics, and it's really important for us to step back on a regular basis and think about what's going on in the broader environment in which we operate. That means spending time as a team talking about consumer trends and what's going on from a consumer perspective, where they're headed in the future. It's about thinking about our operators and some of the challenges that they're facing and how we can help address their needs.
Of course, thinking about the broader macroeconomic environment. Thinking about these things helps make sure that we're making the right decisions with regard to M&A at the right time. It also ensures that we're thinking about where we're going down the road longer term, and that any M&A decision we make today is setting us up for that success over the long term. Looking more tactically on your bottom right-hand corner, it's about strategic fit. That's really thinking about for each deal, does it make sense in fitting with our operational and financial targets? Obviously, we have to think about that for each deal. It's the balance of all three of these things that we consider. In that strategic fit, we've talked about culture a little bit today, and I wanna spend a little bit of time there.
We are not a company that dictates culture from on high, yet it's a really important differentiator for PFG. Since we're not dictating what our culture needs to be, we have to obviously screen for that when we're doing M&A. We spend a lot of time with our board. They ask us always questions about any target we're looking at and what their culture is like. We spend a lot of time with the leadership team understanding the culture of each target, and then obviously with the target itself. It's really fun to be here in Core-Mark after all the conversations we had about the culture. I think that culture is a big driver of why we've been so successful with M&A.
Speaking of which, we have some of our recent acquisitions along the bottom of this page, and I think that we've been really successful, largely because we've been so thoughtful about ensuring that there's a cultural match between PFG and these companies. Really, if I think back, my personal view of what's differentiated about PFG, why have we been so successful with M&A, and like George said, I've been here two and a half years, so I kind of have an outsider's view, and I've gotten to step back and appreciate what's different here. It boils down to me to two things. It's the experience of our organization, and it's the people. Obviously, those two things are very interrelated.
From experience, I mean, when I think about the deals I've worked on so far, and George has kept me busy, I think about the teams, and we pull people from across our organization from the different functional areas. Without fail, there are folks on the team who have experience working on deals of a lot of different sizes, structure, scope, and they're bringing that experience to our process. We talked a little bit about formalizing the M&A process, and we've been able to do that so successfully because we have folks who have been involved in a lot of deals in the past, whether that's with PFG or even before they came to PFG. An example of where that's brought us success is in our integration work. We've developed an integration playbook. It's scalable, it's repeatable.
We used it with Reinhart very successfully. We're using it now with Core-Mark. I think the experiences that we've had have all taught us best practices, been useful in informing that playbook, and now we're delivering synergies ahead of schedule. It's a really great story. I wanna turn to people. That was the second thing I thought was really differentiated about PFG, and we've talked a lot about our people. My gosh, the years of experience that George introduced people with, that matters a lot. It's not just the people in this room, it's the people in our field. The people in our field have so many great relationships across the industry, great reputations, and that makes my job really easy from a deal sourcing perspective. People know PFG's reputation. They want to do a deal with PFG.
They know we run a fair process. They know their business will be in good hands with us, and they know their people will be in good hands. Gosh, I think, a couple of folks you heard this morning, already came in through an acquisition. That's just testament, I think, to the fact that we bring people in, they become a part of the PFG family and ultimately lead to our success. That's a little bit of bragging about our track record. As we look forward, there are a couple of focus areas that I wanna highlight for you. Filling in white space, that means geographic white space. We showed you all some maps earlier. We have some white space to fill in geographically, and we will continue to focus on that from a broadband food service perspective.
We also have some capacity opportunities, areas where we may be tight on capacity, and we could use M&A to help alleviate those constraints. We'll always be looking at that as well. The second focus area is around our existing channels, and you've heard a lot about the channels we operate, our diversification and how important that is. For all of our channels, we're looking at how can we use M&A to expand scale, and then obviously to drive more capabilities into those channels to make sure that we are winning in all of the channels we operate in.
With those being our focus areas as we look forward and the framework that I outlined for you earlier, I think it's important for you all to understand that we have a great structure for making the right decisions for PFG and for our stakeholders, obviously including our investors. That's all I have for you. Hopefully, that was nice and short, and I will pass the mic.
Thank you, Liz. Well, our next presenter is the one you've been waiting for the whole day, so that you can get numbers. That is Jim Hope. Jim's been in this industry for 34 years, and he's been 8 years with PFG. Jim and I have a history that goes back much more than 8 years. We worked together at our predecessor company. I gotta have notes like I did with Craig for him. Jim is started out as an analyst, a financial analyst in our industry. He's run audit. He's been in finance at corporate headquarters. He's been the CFO of an OpCo. He's been the president of an OpCo. Really valuable experience with being able to relate to what our people deal with.
He went through an IT transformation, and we all know how difficult anything is when it comes to IT and how much you learn. Just a wealth of experience, which has been great for us as a company. Now I'll turn it over to Jim.
All right. Thanks, George. It's good to be with you here this morning. Thanks for coming in. I do have some good information to share with you. You heard from a large number of people, and you heard from folks that have a lot of food distribution experience, have been in the business for quite a bit of time. You also heard from a couple of folks that are new to the industry, and they're a lot of fun to work with. They bring new ideas, they ask a lot of questions, and make us think about how we do our business. It's that balance of people and the blend of talent that helps a company become a great company. That's what we have, and it's so fun to be a part of that.
We're all aligned at the end of the day around three very important things. Those things you see here today that we're gonna talk about are consistent organic sales growth, ongoing EBITDA margin expansion, and paying down debt. We wanna do all three of those. In addition to everything else good companies do, we're keeping our eye on those three things. Now, we have a good track record of consistent organic sales growth, and we have our own playbook that helps us deliver that. It's tested, it's proven. I'll show you some statistics about the past years that are very simple to see that substantiate why we believe and are confident in it. We have a great sales force you've heard about today, very talented, experienced, motivated sales force. We have really solid private brands that our customers like.
The reason we know they work for our customers is we spend time asking our customers what they want. We don't really spend a lot of time telling our customers what they want, and that matters. We have a very strong supply chain that's recovering through the pandemic, and we have a lot of opportunities to improve operational efficiencies within that supply chain just to get back to where we were pre-pandemic. It's a good spot to be in. From a debt reduction standpoint, when you think about a few things that are really important to an acquisitive company, we have good, solid, powerful liquidity, and that's very important. We have really strong integration bandwidth in the food service division and in the Vistar division, and that's really important.
Don't wanna go out and buy something if you can't integrate it because you're consumed with work. Now we need to pay down debt, deleverage, so that when that next big target becomes available, we can take advantage of it. I talked a little bit about our track record of consistent independent organic sales growth, and I wanted to show you several years of that number. As you can see, aside from the one year in the pandemic, which we're all painfully aware of the impact that has on metrics, that's the one anomaly. Steady independent case growth. It's been consistent year after year. Now, it's a little bit high in the last two years. We know why. We're building that history. It's recovering. The first three years pre-pandemic, we're very strong in our industry. The other thing that's consistent is how we've defined an independent customer.
We've never changed that definition, and we don't plan to change the definition. An operator who has four units or less is our definition. When it comes to disciplined use of capital, we are very disciplined in how we manage our capital. We put a lot of thought into it. We have plenty of good process and good governance about how we make those decisions, and we're looking for the best return on invested capital that we can get, and we're making all those trade-off decisions on a regular basis. Our priorities are facility expansions and then strategic M&A and de-leveraging. Probably not a surprise. It's all built around driving growth. It's fun to be a part of a company that knows how to grow and grows.
Last, here, very important, we don't do this often, and we thought it was important to do today, to provide you with our three-year financial outlook. We've got two stakes in the ground that tell you what our measure of success is. In 2025, we are saying we're gonna deliver $62 billion-$64 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue, and we're gonna deliver $1.5 billion-$1.7 billion in Adjusted EBITDA. When I think of the top end of that range, I think about at $1.7 billion, we're contemplating a strong economy moving forward. The midpoint considers a short-term slowdown, but nothing serious. That low end of the range at $1.5 billion, that takes into account a mild recession. Those are the three ways I bracket in my mind that outlook.
Last, you know, the entire PFG organization is structured to deliver growth. We've talked to you a lot today about why we can deliver sales growth. We've shown you several years of consistent organic sales growth, and now we've given you a message around our three-year outlook. I think that through the pandemic, it's clear that we not only managed ourselves well, and I hope you saw that through the pandemic, we positioned ourselves well by integrating Reinhart, and we never stepped back from the integration work on Reinhart. We kept moving forward by acquiring Core-Mark to make sure that we increased not only our SAM, but our space and our ability to operate within a convenience store and provide all those synergies that Core-Mark and Eby-Brown bring to us. Now we're gonna go out and continue to drive private brand product growth.
We're gonna continue to work with our sales force and train our sales force, and we're gonna drive additional operating efficiencies and pay down debt. That's my message for today. At this point, I'll turn it over to Bill Marshall for the Q&A.
Thank you, Jim. Actually, I'm gonna invite George and Jim up on stage. Thank you. We have plenty of time for questions. We'll take questions right through lunch. I have a virtual portal here, but if you have any questions, please raise your hand. I would just ask that you wait for the microphone so that the folks on the webcast can hear you. I see Mr. Heinbockel on the end. We will get you a microphone. Gentlemen.
Thank you. Maybe two quick ones, or not so quick, but for Jim, right, 60 basis points of margin improvement between this fiscal year and 2025, you know, is mix about half of that? You know, other than mix, what would be the other big driver? On the C-stores, either for George or for Scott, you know, if I think about non-nicotine growth, you know, is it possible to grow that part of the business double-digit? If you do, when you think about either coming from existing locations or new ones, right, the 40,000 locations, what drives the bulk of that? I understand it's chunky, but is it equally sized, or is one much bigger than the other?
I think I'll take the first part of that with the-
Okay.
With the EBITDA margin growth. We've always grown our EBITDA margins outside of M&A.
Yeah.
The only steps backwards in EBITDA margin were really good steps for us, buying Eby and buying Core-Mark. We had gone from just under 1.8%- 2.8% excluding those two acquisitions. We're confident that we can continue to do that. I'm gonna have Scott comment on our growth. I will tell you that, in convenience, today, we're well north of double-digit when it comes to food growth. Unlike our independent business and food service, it can tend to come more in chunks. We're real confident, but I want Scott to make some comments around that.
All right. I think, like George said, obviously recently, we've had significant growth driven by inflation, but we've also done a great job with gaining independent stores as well as just growing overall share inside our existing stores. I think historically, you know, double digit's ambitious, but I wouldn't wanna say much more than that because that would probably be. Jim would probably get me in trouble for thinking about his forward-looking stuff. I would say it's pretty balanced from a store count versus same store sales growth standpoint. I mean, we typically do have a little inflation in there, but pretty balanced between the two.
Kelly? I'll go to Kelly first, and then I'll come back to Chuck.
Thank you. Kelly Bania from BMO. I guess when we think about that margin expansion, which segments should we think about contributing to that the most? Or is that coming from all three? Or just, you know, how do we think about mapping that out over the next couple years? I had one follow-up.
Okay. I think it will come from all our businesses. I think where, if you take Vistar, where we have very high, at least we consider to be very high EBITDA margins, we do have portions of our business that have very high case cost averages, so that's probably a more difficult area to raise those if we see a lot of growth in those high case costs. When you're talking case costs over $100, and you're running 4.5%-5% EBITDA margin, it's not, you know, necessarily the most feasible. I think across our business, we've seen some real great recent improvement in our food service and our mix continues to get better within that business. You know, we expect to see some good improvement there. You know, convenience, it's entirely what Scott said. It's continuing to grow that food business at a really good rate.
Okay. Just to follow up on convenience. Just what is considered in your three-year plan in this guidance, given noise on regulatory changes in tobacco and nicotine, and that is 40% of the gross profit, I think, there?
Yeah. No, I think I'll take that to Scott. He's certainly more knowledgeable than I am. Maybe Liz might wanna make a comment because she's spent a lot of time at Altria and has a good understanding for the decline and the history of that and what they kind of consider to be the future of that.
In the three-year, Kelly, I think that we looked at, you know, cigarette decline kind of returning back to a more historical rate. Just consistent steady growth in, you know, both our for sales.
Liz, would you make just a quick comment on the.
Sure. Like George said, I came from Altria. I have ran strategy and business development there. There is a long runway in tobacco. I think there's the price elasticity they obviously understand quite well, and they're managing their pricing when and how they're taking pricing accordingly. I think from a regulatory perspective, they also believe they have a long path ahead before there's any substantial impact. There's a lot of switching behavior, obviously, in the tobacco industry. I think that's where to the extent there is any impact, it's just a matter of switching between forms or brands or types.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I got the okay.
Hi, it's John Glass, Morgan Stanley. First, Jim and George, can you just give us a reminder and a history lesson of how this industry's has performed during recessions, right? You weren't public, but you were around, obviously, as companies, so one of your largest competitors, Sysco, was; their case growth was negative, and maybe that was a Sysco specific issue. Can you talk about the three channels you're in and how they responded maybe in the last recession and what you think is different this time, if anything?
This one could be different. The previous ones have been very much alike. Okay? What we see, I think we're almost a precursor to it. We see it early, as discretionary income, which we're, you know, large parts of our business are dependent upon. We see that softness. Typically before anybody announces that there's a recession, everybody seems to want to announce that now, and there isn't one yet. We see it early. People change their habits.
People may decide, you know, I'm gonna go another year before I get that new car, or I'm, you know, I'm not gonna do the addition I was gonna do, or the remodel or, depending on people's income level, they may say, "Well, you know, I'm only gonna do one vacation this year," or maybe, "I'm not gonna do the European one, I'm gonna stay domestic," or maybe, "I'm gonna do a staycation." You know, which is actually, you know, great for particularly our theater business. We seem to come back pretty good. As a company ourselves, during that great recession, we never went through a period where we weren't growing. That pattern I see. I mean, I've been at this for 44 years. I've seen the pattern many times, and it's just about always the same.
I think since we all learned what the word COVID was, I don't think anything's been normal, right? We'll see. I think there's a great deal of resiliency and convenience. You know, it isn't as dependent on discretionary income. This is, you know, I think that people in the workplace, as long as employment's good, like I said, theater is an inexpensive form of discretionary expenditure. That tends to do better when the more expensive ones aren't an option for people. I think we'll hold up well. Of course, we do a lot of dollar store business, and dollar stores, you know, during the Great Recession did extremely well.
Thank you. Two questions as well. The first one, I want to say it's Jeffrey Bernstein from Barclays for the webcast. You mentioned that your industry is somewhat of a precursor of a recession. You gave three-year guidance. I'm just wondering, since you did reiterate the guidance for fiscal 2022, that pretty much ends now, I guess. You know, are you seeing anything, changing trends from a consumer standpoint that would lead you to believe that recession would be likely? If you're gonna see it first, I'm just wondering maybe what your assumption is for the first of the three years along this path.
Yeah, I'm somewhat hesitant to comment on that, but I'm gonna give you a good reason why, okay? It's a very volatile period of time. We had given guidance around our fiscal third quarter, calendar first quarter, and as we were getting to the end of January, I tend not to panic, but I was pretty close to panic mode. It was really, really soft. You know, is it Omicron? Is it the economy? I mean, what's going on here? You know, we stayed bunkered down and concentrated on our business. Then, you know, February was good and March was just incredible. Our competitor, our biggest competitor, also had a good quarter, and I think probably unexpected early on in the quarter.
We have had some times where we've seen it softer, but it's I think a lot of that's got to do with the stimulus money. I guess this is the best answer, because you never wanna misread. If I go back pre-COVID and I look at the seasonal uptick of our business, because our fiscal fourth quarter is always our best quarter, what we've experienced this year is real similar to what we've experienced in the past. The anomaly was last year, the ramp up was much bigger. I think we thought a lot of that was things calming down a little bit with COVID, you know, after Omicron, maybe some pent-up demand and because that period of time was so slow. It may be just money gushing into the marketplace as well. I'm not sure.
That's the best answer I can give you. Then the second thing I'll add to it is it's volatile week to week. I mentioned this to a couple people earlier, but I'm used to it. You're running 10% case built in independent. You know, you have a 12% week, and you're a little bit giddy, and, "Man, this is great." You have an 8% week, and it's, "Oh my gosh," you know. "What happened?" Right? Pretty narrow range. It's 15% growth, 3% growth, 18% growth, 1% growth. I mean, that's how it is. If you all look at Black Box, you look at NAD, you see, I mean, you know, our independent business is different than that, but not hugely different than that, but very volatile.
Just longer term, as you think about having gone through COVID and thinking over the next couple of years, it would seem like the challenges we hear from our biggest players, such as yourself, there have been some serious challenges. I would only imagine how difficult the challenges have been for everybody above or below the big three or so. I'm just wondering, do you see significant market share opportunities over the next couple of years where it could be outsized because there's just so much, whether you're further penetrating existing or adding new accounts, that these smaller players have to be struggling a lot more than any of the big players might have been?
Well, you know, we didn't have much in the way of bankruptcy, which was good. We're an interesting business industry where when business goes down, we're pretty capital intense from an inventory and a receivable standpoint. So a lot of cash comes in the door when your sales drop a good bit. I would leave it with this. I wouldn't wanna be a small distributor in this industry today. I think it would be very difficult. We were small at one time. Matter of fact, we have a board member here, Bill Dawson. Where's Bill at? He's over there. He's been with us since 2002. He was a young guy then. A lot younger than me, and he still is.
You know, we went through some times when the economy wasn't great back then when we were small, and that was difficult. We were acquisitive, so it was difficult. Matter of fact, I remember Bill and I at, he'll remember this, we were at the Chicago Airport in one of those meeting rooms with GE Capital, just, you know, just spilling our guts, trying to raise $100 million. You know, I think back to that, and it's like unbelievable. I wouldn't wanna be small. I just think there's just consolidation that's gonna continue to happen. We wanna be a part of that consolidation as an acquisitor.
Thank you. Thanks. Good morning. Two questions. You've talked about acquisition, and it seems to me, but I'm really not sure, that now in the Core-Mark business, that could be the most fragmented of the segments that you're in. If so, it also seems like maybe no one else on the broadline side is really getting in that business for the obvious reasons of tobacco. The question is that the case? Is convenience f or acquisitions?
Well, once again, we're serious about the convenience business, and Scott is a very experienced person in M&A and has a lot of contacts within the industry. If the right things were available, we would certainly look hard. Our main thrust though is food service. I mean, we're a food service company. We're gonna be a big food service company within convenience. It may take us a while, but we're gonna be big. That's probably not a great answer, but I would say that we're not out trying to buy convenience distributors today. If the opportunity were there, you know, we would certainly look hard at that to do. We're trying not to be confusing because, okay, we're pretty serious about paying down debt right now too.
Yeah.
You know? We're gonna be a company that doesn't miss opportunities, but that's not our thrust.
That's fair. Thank you. Then a second question for Jim, when you talked about the three scenarios of how you can bridge the gap to the guidance, I would wonder how that relates to debt repayment, right? So, you could go in and do it now, but if things soften, you'd rather be fortress with cash on the balance sheet. If you paid down debt and things go sideways, there could be awesome acquisitions that you have to relever, you know, to opportunistically take advantage of. So, what are the pros and cons of when and how you do debt repayment under those scenarios?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. I think it starts with the fact that we're confident that we can generate cash, and then we'll methodically use cash over each quarter to systematically pay down debt. We're blessed because we have a very large ABL, and we have plenty of availability on that ABL, and that drives the largest portion of the liquidity, and we have a low cost of capital. When I say pay down debt, I don't mean we're gonna aggressively go make payments in advance to pay down debt. I mean, we're gonna methodically, and that's probably a great term for our organization, methodically, appropriately pay down debt over time.
Yeah. You know, I'll make a comment to that too. Everybody in this room knows we're in a heavy-duty inflationary period. We're running with more inventory than we would normally run with. I think that when the odds are that when you buy something again, it's gonna cost you more, you buy more when you have the opportunity to get it. Also, particularly in our core market, in our Vistar business, we're having trouble getting the product. Our inbound show rates are really bad. I'm gonna keep coming back to, we're real serious about paying down debt, but not at the expense of doing the things that are the right thing to do for the business.
Thanks. This is Jake Bartlett from Truist Securities. You know, I had a question about the profitability in terms of gross profits per case. Obviously those have, you know, are historically elevated, even in the food service business separately from Core-Mark. The question is how confident you are that that will remain high. It's historically high. You know, your outlook, I believe for 2025 kind of does imply that you build on the gains that you've had. What is the risk that whether it's pricing competition or just other, you know, factors will kind of normalize that gross profits per case?
Well, you know, I think most of our industry is running at much higher gross profit per case. I think that happens when your expenses are much higher per case, and you kinda have to do that. There's been a repricing in the national account type business. If you look at our growth, we have a food service national accounts, we have not grown this year at all. We will next year. We have not grown at all. Our focus was making sure that we had the right gross profit per case for the level of profitability that we need.
I think when you get to the independent part of it, I think, you know, companies are pretty well managed in our industry, and you have to get your people and say, "This is for our cost of running, and this is what we need." Now, can they hold on to that? I don't think we have a crystal ball that tells us yes, but I think we're confident. I would actually wanna throw that to Craig to make a comment on it as well, because he's been the real leader in getting our gross profit per case up.
Thank you. Well, I think it really cuts across all of our businesses, and each of us have had grown-up conversations with our customers over the last year and a half, two years, to talk about what's the reason we're here together, why are we doing business together, and to talk plainly about some of the challenges that are there, and we've been really blessed. You know, we have a sales compensation structure in our food service business that you know rewards people for building businesses and relationships with their customers and to be a bigger part of the pie at each of those independent customers. We've been really lucky. We've been supportive.
We've worked hard to serve our customers well through that period and continue to get feedback that, you know, when we share platforms, if you will, with others that, you know, we just had a recent dinner where, you know, you hate to look at it this way, but we're the least of the issues. You know, I feel confident that, you know, our teams will continue to do the same sort of things to add value and to work hard to hold that gross profit per case. Because as George mentioned, we do have some increased expenses.
One of the things that will not go away. Simple math. We take what the inflation rate was for the period of time, and if you put that inflation rate on our average case sell price, our case sell price is still more than that because of the change in mix. We have just really done well in center of the plate and high case cost items is where we put out the highest level of growth. That isn't gonna go away. That part of it, we're very confident in. Eric spoke to our top of the line beef program. We are just seeing such sales growth. You know, the average sale price is so high, so the gross profit per case is great.
Thank you. Peter Saleh from BTIG. Just two questions. Could you just give us an update on the labor? How much of the-
Okay. I'm gonna take the second part because I think Jim would be better to speak to the first part and maybe get some help from Craig, too. As far as our growth has really been more around increased penetration of existing business than it was in the past. There's reasons for that. I think it's our sales force just gets more experience, and they're able to do that, and it is from a profitability standpoint for themselves. It's better to go get more business out of an existing customer than a new customer. Our service capabilities weren't what they should be in many markets. We really did not want new customers. But our service has come back. Still not what we want it to be, but it's come back.
We understand that today, a lot of our growth is gonna come from new customers. It's been the penetration, but I'm telling you, it's gonna be new business. With the labor, I'm gonna turn that over to Jim, and Jim will get some help from Craig.
Yeah. Thanks, George. Craig, I'll set you up a little bit, and I'll talk about what I call the cascading effect of the steady improvement in labor and where that improvement will come from that we're counting on, and we're already starting to see it. I think Craig can talk a little bit about where we are in that progress. We've talked with you many times about the fact that we're at the peak end from the standpoint of not only do we have challenges in the States and some inefficiencies in the supply chain for many different reasons. We have a lot of overtime being paid, and we also have a lot of contractor temp workers in the supply chain.
Every quarter, we started disclosing the premium we're paying for contract workers over and above normal runway. Every quarter, we talked about how that's starting to improve. The way it would cascade is we'd see the contract worker premium start to fade away, and then we'd be left with some pretty high overtime, and then we'd see overtime start to dissipate. Then as that dissipates, you'd start to see improvements in the warehouse as far as accuracy as well as drivers. I want to share that answer with Craig.
I think you just gave me the answer. I think there's opportunities. This summer is much better than last summer. There's a difference between the two. Last summer, there was a lot of money floating around. So applicant flow has improved. Coming from that then will be, you know, better applicants, more applicants. We've got an opportunity to, you know, work on retention and top grading and making sure our training is right. It's not just drivers, it's also warehouse. We have many markets that are, you know, full employment, if you will. We're seeing overtime come down. We have some pockets here and there. I think most of our competitors do as well. Pockets that are a little more difficult. It's not even across the country, but I can tell you we're in a better position. I feel good about where we are, certainly this summer than last summer.
Since you brought in the conversation, I have a question. Distribution network that comes with it and eventual legalization of cannabis, nationwide. How are you guys thinking about that? You know, just frame it up for us a little bit if you don't mind.
Well, I'm not sure we're thinking about it too much.
Okay.
It seems like something that's if it's a long way off. You know, of course, people have different opinions with it. What communication we have received is that likely we would benefit from that tremendously because the tobacco guys would probably win out. They're gonna be a lot more efficient. There is talk that there may be some states where it's to the alcohol is controlled, that it could go through that form of distribution. Once again, I'm gonna put our two and a half year-old here on the spot because she's dealt a good bit with this. If you have some comments you'd like to make, Liz.
Oh, I don't have the microphone.
Right there.
I don't know. Brent and I were talking about this earlier. I think our answer is that we're just going to follow the law and see what happens with the federal framework. We do think that, like George said, that there will be benefits to us regardless of which direction this ends up taking.
Thank you. Brian Harbour, Deutsche Bank. You showed a 60% performance from the efficient mix in some of the slides. I think it's an all-time high. Can you just speak to the ability to continue to push that mix higher over the next three-year plan period? Is there a natural ceiling on that mix that we should think about? Or maybe conversely, we're better at this than ever as an organization, maybe environment's conducive to changes.
It's a very good question. Started out by saying, you know, we're not opposed in any way to selling national brands. We're gonna give the customer what the customer wants. Now, we wanna influence them by having, you know, a better product and a better price value. One of the reasons that we had a clip up with Reinhart down initially and then up. A lot of it is just our training, and we'll pat ourselves on the back. I think we do a really good job. We also have been able to get significantly bigger. There are product areas where we didn't have enough volume, particularly back at that time, where we were really heavily over-indexed in pizza and Italian and to a degree, Hispanic.
We just didn't have enough volume where someone was interested in packing a product for us because we typically don't use their existing product with our brand put on it. We come up with what we want for a specification. That's part of it. We didn't expect to get to 50% this quick. We always expected to get to 50%, but we didn't anticipate that kind of jump. Part of it is just better availability. Then we do have companies, not those that are 60%. There's definitely upside. I think that the road from a 50% to a 60% is a lot longer road than 40%- 50%, but I think it's something that we can aspire to.
Have a good one.
Lauren Silberman from Credit Suisse. Two questions. One, what is your embedding for case growth in your sales expectations? I'm just thinking about independents historically had the 6%-10% growth target. Is that still in play? My second question is just independent restaurants have been dealing with a lot of profitability challenges. Can you just give us an update on your view on the state of the independent restaurant, the health there?
Yeah. I don't know that we're ready to give guidance around that yet because it's so volatile. You know, we've been at a really high rate. We think that to some degree, that's probably artificially high. Although we saw a drop-off in our independent case growth for pizza, and that was concerning until, you know, we saw the performance in that same quarter of Domino's and Papa John's on the pizza side. I think there was just pizza fatigue. Sure enough, when we got the type of share numbers we get, we actually grew our share faster with lower growth. We have a confidence level similar to what we had before.
I think that we just need some time to spend with Steve and Erich and Craig and kind of figure out where we're gonna go with that. We're continuing to add people, and of course, that helps. We also have the other part of it. This, I'm probably getting a little confusing, but I mean, our people are averaging almost three times the volume that they did in 2012, and we were pretty consistent. We grew our cases twice as fast as we grew our sales force, and that really dropped off. We felt like, you know, we really needed to step up the hiring. Once COVID settled down, it's better than ever. We have a lot to figure out. Confusing answer, I know, but we don't wanna give bad guidance. We're not quite ready there yet.
I'd like to append to the answer, add a little bit to it. In our three-year outlook and the modeling we've done, we worked from the ground up. We spent a lot of time in the details. We have all the metrics that we need to make sure we can be confident in the outlook that we provide and the guidance we provided. We're just not gonna share it today in that detail. I want you to know we've done the work. One comment I would share, which I think is fair and reasonable, is on the slide I showed about independent case growth. You saw the last two years were very high double-digit growth numbers. I talked about how those were exceptional years because we're going against a recovery history, as probably Craig would call it.
If you thought of those as exceptional years, I would look at us going forward as reasonable growth.
Yeah. I'll make a couple more comments. You know, we surpassed 2019 case numbers a year ago. Okay. Over a year ago. Once again, we're confident. You know, if you look at all the things we gave guidance on, we did this three-year, which is out of character for us at an Investor Day. I think we need to do that. It's not like we wanna bring these back one at a time. I think it's just nothing but confusing. We wanna get back into our regular cadence, you know, around guidance, and we're looking for that period of time where things are somewhat normalized, and we can do that. We are confident in the three-year number that we gave.
I'm gonna go to Josh, then I'll come back to Mark.
Great. Thank you. Josh, along with Stephens. Curious if you could talk about the capital expenditures that you have planned. You have been very disciplined, like you showed in your slides there, Jim, in terms of running in that range. It's ticked down over the last couple of years to the lower end of that range. Thinking about what's needed to support those targets you have over the coming years, anything you could talk about prioritization or maybe ability to move within that range and how it might show up as those dollars are deployed.
Sure. Thanks for the question. Just a few reasons on why it's ticked down. It hasn't slipped due to lack of intent or commitment. One is we've added tobacco into the mix, and the CapEx investment rating in a tobacco-driven sales business is not the same, right? That weighs down the number. The other one is, today, as you know, in any construction environment, it's a little difficult to build. It takes longer to get things done, and you can have the greatest intent of getting something finished, but a lot of people weigh into it, and it's not always in your control. I can assure you that we are investing back in the business appropriately.
We certainly have the wherewithal, and we appreciate the fact that we have the money we need to invest in our business, and we'll continue to do that to make sure that we drive growth and we make our capacity big enough and the supply chain big enough to support the growth that we wanna deliver.
Thank you.
The other one is Mark.
Mark Carden on UBS. How are you guys thinking about inflation in your three-year outlook? How are you anticipating the split between food away from home and food at home to play out, particularly given that you're now pretty big players in both channels?
Yeah. I'll take the first one, and could you repeat the second question again real quick?
Just in terms of what you're thinking about the split between food away from home and food at home, and how that goes into your guidance, and just given you're a pretty big player now in both channels. How do you see that playing out?
Great. Good question. On the first one on inflation, we all know we're all seeing really high inflation. Not seen that before. I'm really pleased with how the organization is managing that inflation and doing the best we can to take care of our customers. At the same time, make sure we take care of our shareholders. We're handling that. We don't, in our three-year outlook, expect that rate of inflation to continue forever, of course. We expect it to begin to abate and back to a normal level of inflation, which I think would match with the three macroeconomic environments that we talked about at the high end of the range, mid, and the low point of the range.
Yeah. I'm gonna preface this with this is my opinion. I read on it all the time. Obviously, we saw things swing heavily back towards food prepared at home. I think we learned as COVID settled down, that people love to get out, and they love to get out to eat. Some of it's discretionary, and some of it, you know, people just, that's what they're gonna do. That's, they don't, you know, wanna prepare food. I just feel like the food prepared outside the home is gonna get a bigger and bigger percentage. I think that there's a lot of people that didn't use takeout very often, didn't use delivery at all, and have gone back to getting into restaurants, but not entirely. I think we're gonna have a net gain from that.
I just think we're in a great industry, and that's what people wanna do. They wanna get out, and they wanna interact. I should make one other comment. It's not really material, but we are doing more and more retail grocery business. We have no intentions of being a retail grocery distributor. A lot of it is within our Braveheart product. Matter of fact, nine of our 10 largest Braveheart customers are retail grocers. Individual locations. They're retail grocers. We have other products that fit along with that. I think that's gonna be a growing part of our business. I think that's similar for the reasons that people will go out is the product's special and they'll pay the money, and it's expensive, and it's a treat, and I think that's why it's doing well.
As a follow-up, just with some of your recent enhancements in e-commerce, is there any change in thought process in how you're positioning that to customers? Is some of it largely reactive in nature, or would you expect to maybe advertise it a little bit more aggressively?
Where we're effective from an e-commerce standpoint is not so much us going directly to the consumer. It's us going to the consumer for somebody else, maybe a manufacturer, maybe a customer. That's where we've been more effective. Particularly in Patrick Hatcher's world, when we meet with suppliers, it's not just about them as a supplier to us. It's what can we do as an e-commerce supplier for you. That's gonna be a good part of our future. It's slow, like a lot of things, but we've had some where they've just shut down their own operations, turned it all over to us. We have some where it's a mix. We're doing some of it. They're doing some of it themselves.
Some has actually come from another e-commerce provider just because of our ability to handle chocolate, particularly at the right temperature. We like the business as ourselves, as somebody operating an e-commerce site. You know, we do some business, but trust me, it's not material enough to even have a conversation about.
I'm actually gonna take a couple from the virtual portal, so I think that's good. The first comes from Ian Gerken. Do your three-year sales and adjusted EBITDA targets include M&A?
They include a small amount of M&A, but nothing significant. We spaced a small amount pro rata across each year.
I'll take one more. Why do you feel positive about adding more chain restaurant business going forward? What are the contribution margin expectations versus historical rates?
Craig, let me turn that to you.
I don't know if I heard the question correctly, but we feel confident because of our funnel. The conversations we're having, right? Sort of the state of where those relationships are elsewhere. I feel good about how we're looking at the returns on those pieces of business. We have a great finance team that helps us work through the analytics on any particular account and where we can, you know, meet the customer's expectation in terms of price and our expectation in terms of return. You know, I think that we'll have, you know, good returns on that accretive to our overall EBITDA. But, you know, we're selective right now. We're selective. It's gotta be the right relationship, the right culture, the right piece of business.
Had we had more business last year, which we certainly had opportunities, but it just would've been more people we disappointed. It was a very, very difficult year. What we didn't wanna do was tap the brake on our independent growth by having, you know, severe service issues.
Hi, I'm Jake Bartlett. My question was on fill rates, and where you stand now for both the food service as well as Core-Mark. I believe in the tour, we kind of heard Core-Mark being, you know, 80% fill rates, kind of that zone. How much of a cushion do you think that provides as staffing improves, as the supply chain starts to ease? You know, how much, I guess, as you think about your outlook, is that kind of muting whatever could happen on the demand side?
Yeah. I'm gonna give you, unfortunately, a pretty long answer because it's very different, our different businesses. When you get to our food service business, we're getting at least knocking on the door of old inbound service level from our suppliers. It's really improved greatly, and we're in the mid-90s%. We expect to go higher. If you think about our food service business, a lot of it is product that's prepared from the state in which they get it. In other words, there's one ingredient. So packaging is the only issue beyond not having that ingredient, be it pork or beef or, you know, seafood item. Cheese, we've done exceptional. We haven't really had any issues with that. So, you know, that's a big part of our business, and that continues to do real well.
We feel like we're pretty close to a normal state there. But when you get to Vistar and you get to convenience, which are actually very similar supplier base, some of these items will have, you know, 10 ingredients, 15 ingredients, so it's 10 or 15 times the likelihood of not being able to produce that product. High 70s, low 80s is about as good as we've been able to get so far. Now, there's another difference in that. You know, you have a menu, you can substitute maybe an item, but that's very difficult. If it changes your recipe, it changes your end product. Usually, when one supplier is short, the other supplier is short, so you just can't get it at all.
When it comes to a convenience store, you know, a vending machine, a theater, a micro market, if they don't have one product, they can put another product somewhat similar in that slot. Be it a different snack or be it a different candy. So, do we have, you know, 15%-20% upside because when supply gets back? No, definitely not. The other thing too is that we have items that the customer continues to order on every order. They want that item. Many of the manufacturers have consolidated. So if they had, you know, 20 Pop-Tarts flavors, maybe they've got 8 now, right? If you think about the candy guys, big time with this.
If you think about your line, and particularly, you know, with when grocery stores were going crazy, everything you could produce, you sold. Everything. Why would you shut the line down to change a flavor, right? How many of those items are gonna come back? We don't know, but they continue to get ordered. We don't have the understanding of our outbound fill rate like we should. Very long answer, but that's the reality. Yes.
Hey, thanks for doing this, guys. The market and the room are relatively distracted by perceptions on macro. You guys have laid out a lot here today, and I'd hate for that to get lost. If we just step back, you've laid out kind of a mid-single, call it six top line CAGR over the next three- years.
You've laid out a margin profile that kind of seems to step up 20 basis points a year. Obviously, that's not GDP. When you step back, if we just kind of framed it, not to put it in any specific period, but if we framed it as outgrowth, if we framed it as company-specific margin pieces. Could you just talk through in an environment of X, we think that we have the pieces of the puzzle to outgrow by Y, and similarly, the margin framework here is XYZ is mix, XYZ is private label, things that are kind of more tangible and less about simply leverage. I think those would be very helpful. Thanks.
I like your question because obviously, you can see from today we have a lot of different levers. The biggest thing that contributes to our EBITDA margin, I mean, mix is important and growth is important. It's just getting labor back to similar to what it was before and the kind of progress we've made in other areas would show up more. That's probably the single biggest thing. I'm gonna turn it to Jim because I think he's got the best feel for kinda how this came together, you know, kind of bottoms up.
Yeah. There's a couple things I'll tell you we won't do, and then there's some things I'll tell you that we're doing. One of the things you can count us not to do, at least in the near term, is put down a marker on a big operating expense reduction initiative. We're gonna do our work, but we just may not share that part. That'll be up to us, and we're gonna deliver the results we need. The three-year outlook and the margin improvement you're seeing was built on so many different things that are all gonna go the right way, and they're already going the right way, as we talked about through our track record today. Continued momentum across every single division, not only in growth but in profit margin improvement.
Everyone in the organization is committed to it and knows what they need to do to improve profit margin. Then the building blocks that come naturally to us are focusing on the most important customers and making sure that we stay on top of our customers, as well as driving private brands growth and then the operational efficiencies. That answer is gonna fall short of the very well thought out detailed question you asked, but our results won't.
That's good.
Thanks again for laying out a very comprehensive presentation today. Just can you talk a little bit about the fact that, like, obviously, you guys are gonna generate a ton of free cash flow, and, you know, if you guys hit your numbers, you're gonna be very underlevered relative to history. Absent M&A, can you just talk about, one, you know, how you're thinking about minimum leverage and potential excess returns to shareholders from a cash flow perspective?
Yeah. Our target range for leverage and where we like to operate in the absence of significant M&A is 2.5x-3.5 x, and we've talked about that many years, and we haven't wavered on that. George and I are very comfortable with that number. We're in a spot coming out of two large acquisitions where we're above that. We're saying that we're gonna work on delevering. As far as other things beyond that, as far as return to shareholders, we are not in a spot to talk about that today because that would be subsequent to the focus on delevering. I think that answers your question.
Yeah.
Told you it would be a negative. Good job.
Thanks.
Just a quick one. In the guidance left, for synergy, has anything changed there? Can you just remind me of what's left on the synergies you've already talked about?
I think I'll go ahead and take that. You know, we've done a really good job with Reinhart, as I mentioned, and we've got a good ways to go. Now, the good ways that we have to go will come at a cost. You know, we have places where we have a legacy Reinhart distribution center and a legacy Performance Foodservice distribution center that are fairly close together. We've kinda developed two issues as we go along with that. One is that neither one of the buildings can handle the business because we've grown so much. The second one is you don't wanna dislocate employees in a labor environment like this. You don't want to build a new facility and then not be able to man it properly.
I think with Reinhart, they've performed so exceptionally well, and I don't want this to sound wrong, but I don't really care about more synergies as well as they're performing. That overcomes everything. There will be a day where we'll get more and more similar from an inventory standpoint. There'll be a day where we can handle the geography part of it. I don't see it being in the real near future. I think with Core-Mark, we're doing a great job, and I think we'll continue to do a good job. I don't know, Scott, if you wanna comment beyond that. I think that our biggest synergies to come, and it takes a while, with Core-Mark are top-line synergies, which no one really likes to get too enthused about.
That was the number one synergy with Reinhart, was just sheer growth. I think we can do that with Core-Mark, outside of tobacco.
Okay. I think with that, we will conclude our formal Q&A session. Thank you so much.
I'm gonna do some real quick introductions if during the lunch hour you wanna talk to some of our other people. First of all, we've got Patrick Hagerty here. A lot of what you heard with Vistar was created by him. He was the driving force of making that the company that it is. We also have three new executive VPs that are here, and that's Erika Davis who runs our HR area. Put your hand up, Erika. Okay. We got Brent King, our General Counsel. Don Bulmer, who runs our IT. He just loves getting questions. I'm kidding you. And Jeff Williamson. And Jeff is in charge of operations, so basically warehouse delivery, facility expansions, new facilities. I should mention, my assistant is here, Jill, because she has the hardest job of everybody, so I gotta mention her. All right.
Great. Well, thank you all for joining. First of all, thank Core-Mark for hosting us at these fantastic facilities. Really appreciate it. Thank everybody who
I talked about Jill. I should introduce. Where's Matt Flanigan? Over there . Matt is also on our board, and he's the chair of our audit committee, and does a fantastic job for us.
Thank you. I just wanna thank everyone that helped with the production of today. Thank all of you who traveled down to Dallas, to meet with us. We really appreciate it. We're gonna break now for lunch, and that will conclude our day. Go enjoy some of the food that our chefs have prepared for you. Thank you again.