With us today, Sysco Corporation, which I don't think really needs much of an introduction, as the leading U.S. food service company in the U.S. We have Kevin Hourican, CEO, and also Kenny Cheung, CFO. So, you know, with that, I think we maybe just kick things off. Kevin, I don't know if you wanna give some, you know, opening remarks.
Sure.
But I think that'd be a great place to start.
Yeah, great. Well, first, I wanna say thank you to Ed and thank you to the Wells team for the invitation to the conference. We're privileged and honored to be able to be here. Appreciate those in the room and the interest in Sysco and those that are joining on the webcast. Thank you for joining us this morning. I'll just kick off. You know, you know, Ed just, you know, covered who we are. We're the largest player from the food service distribution perspective in the globe, and we're the largest at scale internationally. We are the backbone of the food away from home industry. That's how we describe it, from restaurants, big to small, from hospitals to healthcare to hotels, sports arenas, and everything in between. If it's consumed outside of the home, we, Sysco, are the largest player in that space.
We believe this is an industry where scale meaningfully matters, and we are working aggressively at Sysco at increasing those scaled advantages from how we purchase goods, to, how we merchandise our inventory, to how we distribute to our customers, and the technology our customers use to do business with Sysco. So looking forward to our conversation this morning. Ed, back over to you.
Yeah, great. So, you know, maybe just starting on the guidance front, you know, you recently reiterated guidance for 2024, 2023, which is, you know, great, for fiscal 2024.
Right.
You don't have a long-term algo currently. You know, I think you typically would have at least a three-year outlook from a company standpoint. I think maybe just talk a little bit about, you know, the reiteration, but then also thoughts on how we should be thinking about, you know, the multi-year, and when we could maybe get some incremental color around that.
Okay, great. I'll kick off with just, you know, we are today again reiterating our guidance for the year. That's the main punchline. I'll start, and then I'll turn it over to Kenny, who'll talk about the longer, you know, term. Just... If I could, just wanna re-emphasize some of the key points of the guidance that we do have out that we're reiterating today. I'll break it down to what we call the three big boulders within our industry. First is volume. We do expect for volume growth this year in our industry to be muted, below what is the historical average. I think you're hearing that from restaurant names, big to small. That traffic, from a year-over-year perspective is, more muted, and we have built that into our guide.
We expect for inflation, that's boulder number two, which impacts our margin rates, to also be muted. Back when we provided our guidance, we actually talked about the fact that the U.S. business is currently deflationary, and it was deflationary at the end of our fiscal Q4 of last year. And what we, Sysco, are doing to manage that deflationary environment, we communicated that we expect the U.S. to be deflationary for roughly the first half of the year, with returning to muted inflation in the second half. We articulated that we, Sysco, have a bit of a buffering effect because our international business is still inflationary due to unique considerations, mostly in Europe. Europe entered the inflation cycle later than the U.S.
And also there are some government rules and regulations that, you know, create scenarios that are unique to Europe that we expect will result in inflation in international for the full year. So when you put all that together, we're communicating a sales guidance of roughly mid-single digits, roughly $80 billion on the top line, which leads to our final of the three big boulders, which is operating expenses. We made significant progress last year from the midpoint of the year to the end of the year in significantly improving our operating expense as a percent of sales and our logistics cost per piece. First half of the year, our expenses were elevated prior year in 2023, and we really did a nice job quarter-over-quarter of sequentially improving, and we anticipate that that improvement will continue into fiscal 2024.
We can see the progress that's being made in improving retention, improving productivity, and bringing our cost to serve down. When you put all that together, it results in a guide of $4.20-$4.40, which is a healthy year-over-year growth given the environmental conditions that we just talked about. I'll turn it over to Kenny to comment on the more long-term side of the equation. Kenny, over to you.
Sure. Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. Just one comment on guidance, right? So we are three months into the new fiscal year, 10 days away from closing out Q1, and we remain confident with the full year guidance. Obviously, there's still nine months left. However, in our business, we have a lot of data. We're watching things very carefully, and we will deploy actions proactively and responsibly. So that's my comment around guidance. There's confidence around it. The second point I would make is around the algo. There is an appetite for us to disclose a multi-year algorithm. Hopefully, in the springtime, for Investor Day, we plan to have one. In terms of now, for today, though, taking a step back, there are financial themes or profiles you'd expect from our business going forward if you think about multi-year.
First and foremost, grow top line, win market share. That's the first theme. Second is operating leverage. Growing GP, gross profit, faster than expenses, growing bottom line faster than your top line. Number three, expand margin, both on the rate side and the dollar side. Number four, continue generating robust free cash flow for our business. If you look at last year, the EBITDA conversion from the cash flow conversion from EBITDA to OCF was 75%, and from FCF was 55%. We continue to generate that. And then last but not least, the last theme to expect from us on a multi-year is investment grade balance sheet. Continue with Dividend Aristocrat status as well, which we've maintained for the past 54 years.
Great. So if we think about current industry trends, I think there's been you know, quite a bit of anxiety from an investor standpoint around slowing traffic at restaurants. You've obviously acknowledged, you know, below average growth in the fiscal 2024 guidance. Can you maybe talk a little bit more about what you're seeing in the marketplace today?
Sure. I understand the concerns, and I'll just add the deflation question that keeps, you know, coming up on, you know, can you, Sysco, grow profit in an environment that is deflationary? So if it's okay, I'll just kind of address both of those points. What we can say today is the following, that we're reiterating our guidance, and we're off to a good start this year. We anticipated a slowing overall volume growth environment, and the environmental conditions are consistent with what, you know, we expected. We're monitoring it very closely. As Kenny said, we have an enormous amount of data at Sysco, from the largest chain restaurant, QSR, down to hundreds of thousands of mom-and-pop restaurants, and we have global data. So we can see trends. We're monitoring it very closely.
Our commitment to our shareholders is, if the market behaves differently than what we had forecasted, we'll take the necessary actions to manage expenses to deliver our bottom line. But off to a good start, you know, reiterating, you know, our guide for the year from a volume perspective and how that impacts our P&L. On the second piece, which is deflation, I know there are concerns about whether or not we can grow profit in a deflationary environment. The two things I would communicate in that regard, as I mentioned a minute ago, we exited Q4 deflationary, and we had a very solid print in Q4. We were able to grow our bottom line faster than the top line in Q4, despite that deflationary environment for a couple of reasons.
One, we're the largest purchaser of food in this industry by far, such that when the environmental conditions are creating deflation, we will get more than our fair share of that reduction in COGS. And then we have a strategic pricing software that allows us to be extraordinarily thoughtful about the rate and the pace with which we pass those savings on to our customers. And we proved in a hyperinflation environment we can expand GP, and we proved in our Q4 that even in a deflationary environment, you know, we can expand GP. I guess the main point behind all that, though, Ed, is that it's all built into our guide for the year, and we're off to a good start.
Okay. Maybe let's dig in a little bit on that, you know, inflation, you know, deflation debate. We've heard from you and, you know, your peers that the deflationary period should be somewhat shallow and temporary.
Right.
We've talked today about, you know, this improvement in the back half. It's another issue that I think investors are concerned about, that maybe it could be longer than that, and maybe deeper. Can you just talk a little bit about, you know, your confidence in, you know, in, in that expectation for this year?
Sure. It's a great question, and I understand the concern. Let me just acknowledge that, period. We understand the concern. We acknowledge it as a legitimate question. What we can say is the following: we, Sysco, have a couple of things that help insulate or buffer individual categories, and the two main points are this: because we're international, we have a little bit of a tailwind internationally because of still persistent and significant inflation. Second point is, in the U.S., no one category, Kenny talks about this a lot, over-indexes at Sysco. We have 12 categories at Sysco, and while one is hyperinflationary and another was deflationary, we have forecasted at the category level what we expect the inflation and deflation to be. The main driver here is what I call week fifty-three.
When are we lapping the hyperinflation from a year ago, and when do we get back to a more normal environment? Within proteins, just you asked for a little color on, on categories. You know, the beef market has returned to inflationary, and that's meaningful. We sell a lot of protein at Sysco. Poultry is still a meaningful drag. Poultry is still double digits deflationary. I do not anticipate that will happen in that manner for an extended period of time. Actions will be taken by the supplier community to reduce production, which will then bring free market forces into effect, which will create an environment of what I'll call more normal inflation. Something Neil has said for years is that a good rate of inflation in this industry is roughly 2%-3%.
That's the healthy range that we all like to be in, and fiscal 2023, we were in the 15%-18% range. Now we're dealing with a bit of a correction, and we expect to normalize back through that correction. But the main punchline for investors is we can grow our bottom line profit, even in a deflationary environment. And, we can't predict the future, but, you know, we anticipate that in the second half of this year, we'll be back into a muted inflationary environment.
Yeah, just-
Anything to add?
Yeah, just to provide some color. In Q4, as Kevin mentioned, in the back half of Q4, U.S. did experience deflation, and we were able to grow EBITDA 4x faster than sales in Q4. We were able to grow GP dollar per case. We were also able to expand margins on the GP side by 28 basis points, and on the OI side, 56 basis points. That's one piece of it. As Kevin mentioned, on the commodity tables as well, we have natural hedges in place. One thing as well is we also have, in our assortment, national brands and also Sysco brands, and they have different inflation profiles within the commodity basket. I think that's important to note. The last piece I would say is that on the P&L, we have quite a few levers in place to offset inflation in which we control.
This is around strategic sourcing. This is around our centralized pricing. This is around driving private label Sysco Brand penetration. Oh, and oh, by the way, we expanded by 65 basis points last quarter. This is around just more discipline in managing the entire GP line. Oh, by the way, we also have a lot of focus on cost below that line as well, or on SG&A to protect the OI side. As Kevin and I like to talk about, it's the textbook mentality, where you have debit somewhere, look for credit elsewhere.
Just to follow up to that, you know, I think what you see from your packaged goods vendors in dry grocery is probably more important maybe than some of the commoditized stuff. What are you hearing from them related to the expectation for inflation?
Yeah, I'd prefer not to talk about any specific supplier or any category-
Yeah.
but dry grocery has been, I'll say, a healthy amount of inflation, and we have not experienced deflation in that space.
Yeah
within our book of business.
Okay. Thinking about the independent, local, you know, customer, so obviously it's an important customer for-
Mm-hmm
You know, the food service space. High-margin customer for you guys. Growth in the last quarter was a little bit lower than what it was for the company overall. I would imagine that you'd probably like to see better growth than that. Could you just maybe talk about the health of that customer, and what you're doing to drive better sales growth there?
Sure. Yeah, driving growth in local is very important and a big priority at Sysco. First, I just wanna acknowledge our national sales team, which is half our business, is doing a phenomenally good job. So we are growing national in a meaningful way. We are meaningfully taking market share. We're expanding our profit rate within national at the same time that we are taking market share, so we are thrilled with our performance in nationals, half the business. It helps leverage fixed cost, it helps increase route density, and winning in national is a priority, and it's important. Point two, our success in national in no way, shape, or form negatively impacts our ability to grow in local. I just wanna be really clear about that. They're different sales teams.
We do not have space or throughput capacity challenges at Sysco, so winning in area A does not negatively impact winning in area B. So let's talk about winning in local. It is a priority. I'll, I'll highlight a couple of areas where we are doing well with local, and then I'll communicate where we expect to make more progress in the forward-faced view. We're winning in specialty in a meaningful way, so that's produce, that's protein, and that's Italian. We've doubled our Italian market share over the last 18 months. We recently concluded an acquisition called Bix Produce, which is based in the Minneapolis, Minnesota market, to expand our FreshPoint presence, and we're really pleased with the market share growth that we are experiencing in specialty. Area two that we're pleased with is our strategic growth initiatives tied to Sysco Your Way and Perks.
We've articulated to our investor base both of those programs are driving double-digit top and bottom line growth, resonating meaningfully with our customers, and we're winning. And, and we can do better in local. We can grow profitably at a faster rate. I'll say what we're not gonna do, and then I'll say what we are gonna do. We're not gonna use price as the lever to try to win incremental business in local. We believe that that is a race to the bottom. It's not healthy for the industry, it's not healthy for Sysco. I'd encourage you to look at Sysco's flow-through from the top line to the bottom line. There's a reason why we are the industry leader on an EBIT margin basis. There's a reason. We have the highest EBIT margin, in the industry by a wide margin, and it's for a reason.
We won't use price as the primary lever. Why? It's not sticky. Someone else can just come in and lower by a penny or ten cents per case more and win it back. We're gonna lead with service, we're gonna lead with assortment, we're gonna lead with selling skills and digital capabilities. Some areas we'd like to see improvement is, visit frequency, visit quality, visit health. That's sales force visiting with customers. This is a relationships business. We gotta get our sales force consistently back in front of our customers on an ongoing and regular basis, and we can measure that, and we're putting a lot of focus on that this year. We can make some tweaks to our compensation model, which I've talked about publicly before. We like our comp model. It's working in its method of retaining our sales force and motivating them.
There are some modifications that we can make to that program, and we will be making them soon to put even more encouragement behind the sales force to go out and win business with new customers and existing customers. And the beauty of that is the more they win, the more we win, and we're sharing in that, you know, incremental gross profit savings. And the last but not least is, you know, better leveraging our digital tools and our selling skills, as it relates to putting offers in front of our customers that it can increase share of wallet. And I'll talk more about that in Investor Day. It's a pretty complicated topic. But so there's areas we can improve. We can win market share.
We are growing our local business faster than the market overall, and we know we can accelerate that rate of progress.
Great. So switching gears to the cost side, you know, there certainly has been tangible progress on the cost front, you know, in the back half of last year. Could you just talk a little bit more about the drivers of that, and then you think about, you know, the journey ahead in fiscal 2024, you know, the opportunity that you still have, in that regard?
Sure. Kenny?
Sure. So thanks, Ed. You know, I agree with you. We spent a lot of focus, and we're very proud of our progress we made last year. If you look at our, for example, our U.S. business last year, in Q1, first half of the year, we were definitely negative leverage, meaning expenses grew faster than GP as well as volume. That's been driven by the fact that we did have what I call snapback costs. These are costs tied to the great resignation, retention bonuses, state bonuses, recruiting, and the likes. We also had excess overtime tied to the tight labor market at that time. The good news is, these trends subsided over the course of the year, and towards the end of the year, they were zero. So it has normalized on a cost base.
That, coupled with supply chain logistics productivity, that we worked really hard on to drive that. And that's been driven by quite a few things. There are tools in place, there's investments in, in technology, also retention. When you have a more tenured workforce on the selector side, on the driver side, you have greater output as well. You know, a three-year veteran is more productive than a first day on the job, right? So we are seeing that dividend payout right now as we speak. So you have the snapback and access over time going away, plus supply chain productivity, which is gonna carry forward into this year. And you also have the $100 million that we talked about on the last earnings call.
So the $100 million, good news is, all of it has been executed, meaning from a phasing standpoint, it will be ratable over the four quarters. And we're not stopping. We are not stopping. We're continuing to have a robust pipeline for further productivity across our business, and the name of the game for us is driving operating leverage across the board.
So I'll just add to that. People ask, like, what-- like, what are you talking about? What could drive incremental productivity? I'll just say one in operations and then one from a tech perspective. Operations, it's retention, retention, retention. Kenny talked about it. Driving improved retention improves productivity, it improves safety, it reduces workers' comp injuries, it provides health, like, all across the P&L. We are meaningfully improving retention, and that will continue into this year. So we expect goodness to come from increased retention, driving lower cost per piece. The second is, you know, we're using digital tools more effectively to take the cost out. So while it's not a panacea, generative AI, we believe, does have applicability at Sysco's business. Think about first backend things, call center. We get a lot of phone calls from customers. "Where's my truck?
“Items out of stock, are there substitutes that make sense for my business?” Digitizing those types of interactions. Then we have a lot of interactions even with our own teams, setting up new items. And, you know, there's some real breakthroughs happening in technology, Ed, that we believe we can deploy specifically and tangibly. We're working with the best in tech on that right now, and that too, can take cost out. What we're excited about, it's faster, it's more accurate, and it can take meaningful expense out of the business.
Kenny, you mentioned, you know, multi-year, GP dollars growing faster than OpEx dollars. You have some tailwinds in fiscal 2024, you know, it seems like from an OpEx standpoint, that maybe, let's call it OpEx per case, maybe grows less than that, whatever long-term normalized rate would be. Does that opportunity extend beyond 2024, and how do you think about, you know, your ability to contain OpEx per case, in the business, over, you know, a multi-year period?
Yeah, I think there's twofolds. Onefold is just pure productivity play, where there's productivity on the... And let's be clear here, when I talk about productivity, there's the supply chain, the logistics side of the house, but there's also the corporate functions as well, which I haven't touched upon yet. I'll give you a good example. So two months ago, we opened up a shared service center in Costa Rica, and again, access to great talent for our business. At the same time, as we grow our business, it's gonna scale even more effectively. So that's one, that's one piece of it. The other piece is just the whole notion of growing your expenses slower than, call it volume, GP growth, et cetera. By definition, if you do it that way, then you will get the scale leverage down to OpEx per case.
So for us, that is something that we do watch very, very carefully, pacing that piece of it. And the good news is, we have the agility and tools and data for us to react and action upon in our business to do so. So we'll, we'll be very, very agile.
And I'll just add one last thing. It's leverage fixed cost. Obviously, that over time, you know, can bring down the total cost per piece as fixed cost gets leveraged. And we are working on a warehouse of the future, if you will, leveraging robotics in a stronger way than we do today. For those of you that have been to a Sysco facility before, many are surprised at how manual it is, mostly because of the product that we sell. We sell 50-pound bags of rice, big drums of oil. These are categories that are extremely difficult to toss on a conveyor belt, to have a shoe diverter, put it down a ship line. By the time it arrives at the truck, it's busted open. So it's pretty manual environment, both for our competitors and for us.
Over time, we need to make it less manual. I believe the delivery operation will always be manual. A human being will be the one bringing the food into the restaurant for lots of complexity reasons. But within the warehouse, investing in robotics, we have a building in Arizona that's under construction that will have a next-gen level of robotics. Too soon to tell what that impact can be, but that too, over time, can bring down our cost to serve.
I think. Sorry, just one thing to add. I think our strategy lends itself very nicely as well. Think about specialty. When we have team-based selling, you're putting an extra case on the car, so you're really scaling the car. The truck is going there anyway, so by definition, our strategy is gonna—it's gonna enable more scale as well.
Yeah.
Very important.
Just one last follow-up related to this topic. We have been hearing, I think, at the conference around, some easing of labor, you know, inflation pressure. Are you seeing that in your business as well?
I'll just start with some, you know, Sysco-specific comments. We are fully staffed across our network, and it took a lot of work to get there.
Yeah.
We're extremely pleased with our level of staffing health. We are fully staffed. We are able to grow our business profitably with no constraints on labor availability. We wind the tape for the last three years, extraordinary shortages of product for about a year, then we had extraordinary shortages of people, which was driving elevated costs. The good news is, we don't have product shortage challenges at this time. We do not have labor shortages at this time. I'll say it's a healthier labor market from a perspective of an employer population at this time, which is a good thing.
Great. So switching gears, you know, leverage is at your target level now.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, maybe just talk about what that means for you, you know, as a company. Obviously, you're going to be buying back more stock this year. How do you weigh M&A versus stock buyback when your valuation is at a level that it's lower than what it's been historically? So maybe just, you know, talk a little bit about what that, what that means for you.
Sure. So, here at Sysco. Our capital allocation strategy is consistent and balanced. We have a ton of optionality and flexibility, especially against the backdrop of the ample cash liquidity that we have. The priorities for our business are actually very straightforward. First and foremost, we will invest for growth and invest in our business. This includes technology, digital, automation, fleet, facilities, right? Also includes M&A as well. On M&A, though, I think one thing that is a rubric of ours is we don't buy businesses just to get bigger. We buy businesses to make that business bigger in our ecosystem. That's how we think about this. So that's where the lens of ROIC is critical, where it has to accrete the return on the capital deployed. That's the first priority.
The second piece is making sure we have intact our investment grade balance sheet. The leverage ratio you talked about, you know, 2.5x-2.75x , we don't have intentions to lower that. So right now, in Q4, we're at 2.5x . There is no intention to lower that further. So by definition, if you increase your EBITDA, you'll deploy more capital to either you go grow your business or just the last priority, is return excess cash back to shareholders. So, right now, if you look at the past 10 years, including 2014, we would have returned over $17 billion to shareholders, including dividends and share repurchases. This year, we are going to increase, as of right now, by 50% on share repurchases. Last year, $500 million. This year, $750 million.
That number will flex up, or you know, if the M&A activity is different than what we planned. So-
I'll just add, again, he was crystal clear, and by the way, he's an absolute pro at this work. He's an expert in this space, and I'm thrilled to have him as my partner, you know, as CFO at Sysco. We're going to return $1 billion of value to our shareholders this year through dividend. Under the Why Sysco investment thesis, we're the only one that pays a dividend in our space, so $1 billion of cash to our investors through the dividend, $750 million of stock buyback, and we have optionality beyond that. What was your question? We have optionality. Our fortress balance sheet is a privilege. We are, with line of sight, focused on some interesting M&A. We can't comment on M&A, unless there's an M&A to comment on, but, there's some fertile, interesting things.
When asked, "What does that mean, Kevin?" we're really interested in specialty, adding to our footprint, adding to our capabilities, adding to our geography. Here's what's really exciting. There's meaningful white space on our geographic map where we do not have our full specialty presence. FreshPoint, as an example, is not in the Northeast, it's not in the Pacific Northwest. One way or another, we're gonna have FreshPoint in those geographies, either through acquisition or through greenfield, and both of them are essentially an ROIC lens on how to get from here to there. We have full intentions to take our Italian business coast to coast through the Greco acquisition, and again, that can be through some select M&A. If not through M&A, we have the ability to do greenfields and fold out.
So, one of the best parts of our job is that those decisions, but buttressed by an incredibly, incredibly strong free cash flow, strong balance sheet, and we'll be very judicious and prudent. In fact, we've added ROIC as one of our compensation metrics for our executives to ensure that, that these decisions are being made in the most optimal way.
We have a little bit over five minutes to go. I don't know if there's any questions from the audience, but I just want to make sure that we ask. Okay. A follow-up to that, related to capital investment. You've talked about potential for automation. We've actually heard a lot about this from some large-scale, you know, retailers at this point. Is there potential for your capital investment to grow over time as it relates to you leaning into that? Just maybe thoughts around how you see CapEx, you know, over time.
Maybe I'll start with what the projects are, and then, Kenny, you can comment on the dollars-
Sure.
We've gone public with this. We actually have seven physical buildings in the process of being constructed at this time. Four of them in the United States, one in Canada, one in Northern Ireland, one in Sweden. Typically, what Sysco has called those are fold outs, where we're, you know, oversat—you know, a building that we are in is, is starting to hit capacity, and we have tremendous growth potential in a market we can fold out. We have done that for 54 years, and we have meaningful line of sight towards increasing our fulfillment capabilities in that regard. That's more projects than we've had in our company's history at one time, and we've done it within our capital allocation framework, so we're excited about that.
On the physical robotics side, it's too soon to tell, but again, ROIC would be applied to that. It's not a panacea. You know, I designed pick, pack, and ship internet fulfillment warehouses in prior lives, where you were trying to take many hundreds of people out of a building. Our buildings are not like that. We don't have thousands of people working in our buildings. Why we need to work on robotics, and then I'll toss to Kenny on the numbers side: we have people working at 2:00 A.M. in a minus 30-degree freezer. Who wants to do that job for the next 20 years? And they're picking up 50-pound boxes of beef and putting them on pallets, sorted by customer to do delivery. It's a really hard job.
So the why we're working on robotics is less about trying to bend the cost curve. It's more about, think 10, 15, 20 years from now, are there gonna be people that want to do that work? Back to the why Sysco, there's nobody in a better position than Sysco to make those types of investments. And the people a lot talk about the big three, us versus the other two, combined, the three of us have less than 40% market share. As an investor, you should be thinking about the 60% share that none of the three of us have and how much consolidation can take place in this industry over the next 20 years, and we believe Sysco will be at the front of that, race. Kenny, back to you for any comments on the-
Sure, sure. On CapEx, historically, CapEx has been roughly 1% of sales for our business. The way we think about capital investments is the following: just like our debt is well-laddered, we think about capital investments the same exact way. There are certain things like locations and so forth, that payback is a little bit longer, but there's also certain things where you implement an enhancement on Shop to drive conversion on the website. That's a lot quicker. So the entire time, we're balancing the return on invested capital, and at some point, you can keep it, flow it through the bottom line, or it redeploy again, right? So that's how we think about the return on capital, and it's well-laddered across the spectrum of the next one, five, 10 years as well.
Great. Well, maybe just, this will probably end up being our last question, but, you know, Kevin, there's been a lot of change at Sysco since you've arrived, with the installation of Recipe for Growth. Nothing's ever seamless, obviously.
Right.
Maybe a little bit of an update on sort of what's worked, what's been more challenging, and how... If you think, take a step back, how does Sysco look today relative to where you want it to be?
Sure. That's a great question, and I appreciate it very much. I'll start with, you know, what's working, and then there are always opportunities to be more effective, and I'll give a couple of highlights on what those are. What's working? Our digital tools and the advancements of our digital tool is absolutely working. I'll give a couple of proof points behind that. When I arrived three and a half years ago, we had roughly 35% of our customers were placing their own orders on our digital tools. That number starts with an eight now, so 80%+ of our customers' orders are coming through our digital tools. Why that's important?
It is an empirical fact that those that place their own order buy more from Sysco over time than those that picked up the phone and called the sales rep, or the sales rep was placing the order on the customer's behalf within their kitchen. The why is simple: These digital tools are incredibly effective in two ways. One, we provide them a suggested order. It's not even a laptop; it's literally their phone. They go into their phone, they open their app, boom, right there is their suggested order. I mentioned earlier, we have treasure troves of data. We know what they buy, we know what they're running low on, and we know what people like them are buying that they're not buying. We can prompt all of those things through those digital tools.
If they're consistently buying national brand, insert item here, and we can save them $1,000 a year by converting to Sysco Brand. A dialogue box will pop up in the checkout experience. "We can save you $1,000." With the click of one button, we've just converted to Sysco Brand. Kenny talked about in Q4 the success that we've had in Sysco Brand penetration. Look back over the last 18 months on the consistent upward trend of Sysco Brand penetration during an inflation period and during a deflation period. That's because of the digital tools. So it's working emphatically well. Our pricing software, as a part of our digital experience, is emphatically working. During 18%+ inflation, we expanded GP dollars per case and our gross margin percentage at the same time.
That would not have happened if we were trying to do pricing through 7,000 sales reps. And now the opposite. When prices are coming down, we need to be extremely thoughtful and strategic about passing on that value. So that's working. Specialty is working. I mentioned we've more than doubled our Italian market share over the last 18 months. We're making meaningful progress in produce, and we have line of sight towards substantial growth. And we'll talk about it in Investor Day within specialty. What's working? We have centralized important functions at Sysco, and I'm gonna talk about the what's not working side in just a second. When I arrived at the company, you may know this, Sysco was a very decentralized company.
Less than four years ago, we had 76 different operating companies who did their own buying, they did their own inventory planning, they did their own strategy build. We had more than 10 websites. We had more than 15 apps. We had 76 different people who were buying frozen french fries when there's only three global suppliers in the world. So we've centralized all of those things now. We have a central buying office, we have a central inventory planning office, we have, obviously, one digital team who's making the decisions, and we are a far more efficient company today than we were four years ago. And what has not centralized are the things that local matters. That relationship with the sales rep, local, that will never be centralized. The assortment and what they are allowed or not allowed to carry is a local decision.
Seafood is a very quintessentially local product offering. The food on the table in Florida is extraordinarily different from a seafood perspective than the Pacific Northwest. Those decisions will always be local at Sysco. So we describe it this way: We've centralized those things where it makes sense to do so, and we've kept decentralized those things where that makes sense, but we have a common strategy fueled by a common purpose and a line go-to-market approach. But that has not been easy. You can imagine if you were an op co president who was here for three decades when this change happened, you know, you've moved my cheese. So we've worked really hard on change management. We've worked really hard on getting alignment.
Last week, we had our global leaders from all over the globe in Houston, talking about what we call Ways of Working, which is the field in constant communication with what we call the GSC, which is the Global Support Center, partnering together to better serve our customers and better serve our colleagues. And then over the last three years, have we gotten it perfect? No. And then we've had quite a few exogenous shocks thrown our way during that period of time. Less product available because of supplier challenges, less people, you know, challenges. So I'd say the number one thing we're working on is managing the pace of change. There are so many wonderful things that we can do at Sysco to improve. That's great from a long-term investment thesis, but, you know, you can overwhelm people if you do too much.
So we're gonna have more rigor on what we call an air traffic control function or a great gatekeeper function for sales and for operations so that we don't overwhelm them. And I think at times, mostly Ed, due to things that were happening to our industry, we probably had a little more on the plate than we would have liked. So we're gonna be super focused on what matters most and what we call executing with excellence against those things, and that starts with delivering our budget, delivering against the guidance that we put out, and we're committed to doing that.
Can I add one point? You know, one, the other piece is international business. Our international business is actually growing very well. It's becoming a growth engine for our business, and there is an opportunity, as we think about the global model, the scale, to really include them as well, so we can share best practices, go-to-market strategies together, and operational efficiencies as well. So you know, and also functionalizing certain functions, as Kevin's mentioned. I believe international is doing great, but it's also a continued opportunity for us to build a single Sysco global operating model, and that will unlock benefits and drive efficiency for our enterprise as well as for our customers as well.
Yeah. Okay, great. That's a great point. Great. Well, we're out of time. So, again, I wanted to thank Sysco for attending the conference again this year. It's always great to see you guys here.
Great. Thank you for having us.
Thanks.
Great. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you all.
Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it. Have a great day.