Thank you. Welcome everyone, first presentation of the Morgan Stanley Global Consumer and Retail Conference. Thank you very much for joining us. We're gonna jump into it here with Sysco, Kevin Hourican, CEO, Kenny Cheung, CFO. They're actually gonna present for a little while, and then we'll finish with some Q&A. I will turn it over to them, and thank you guys for being with us.
Absolutely. Great. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Brian. We appreciate the opportunity to be here this morning with you all to talk a little bit about the Sysco story, Sysco name. Given that we don't have slides behind us, if you wouldn't mind, in front of you is a slide deck that I'll refer to as I talk through our presentation this morning and turn it over to Kenny here in a little bit. I'll spend a little about 10 minutes, Kenny will spend 10 minutes, and then we'll gladly open it up for Q&A, which will be, you know, moderated by Brian. So again, honored and delighted to be here. We at Sysco are the backbone of the food away-from-home industry.
For our fiscal 2024, if you look on the first slide, we've guided our top-line revenue to be approximately $80 billion from an EPS perspective of a range of $4.20-$4.40, which would be 5%-10% from a range perspective, and we remain on track to be able to deliver against those commitments, you know, for the full year. If I go to the next slide, this slide talks about we, Sysco, who we are, and it deserves some explaining, given the breadth and the depth and the diversity of who we are. We've been working very hard at Sysco at extending our capabilities, broadening our reach, and building on our set of capabilities.
Today, we are already the leader in the space that we compete within, and we have an opportunity to expand that lead through our good work. Let's just talk about some of the numbers. This last year, fiscal 2023, we delivered $76.3 billion in top line as the largest global food service distributor, delivering dry, refrigerated, and frozen products. As you can see, about 60% of our business revenue is in the restaurant space. Oftentimes, people think of us as just restaurants. It's the largest portion of our business, but every facet of food away from home is who we serve and where we compete. That's hospitals, that's education facilities, that's government properties, sporting venues, entertainment, and everything in between.
We have 725,000 global customers, and a very important point is the bottom left of the chart, which is we have the largest distribution footprint in the world for the business that we do. We have over 330 distribution centers, and to be clear, these are tri-temperature facilities. In fact, that's a misnomer, because in just the refrigerated section, we have seven different temperature zones. That is a fulfillment capability that is hard to replicate, that's expensive to replicate and provides a competitive moat. Why does having the most distribution centers in the world in the space that we compete within matter?
It matters because it affords us the opportunity to have the broadest inventory assortment, and more importantly, the ability to deliver on time and in full to the customer, and we're the closest to the customer, so therefore, our supply chain cost as a % of sales has the opportunity to be the lowest. We have 72,000 colleagues around the world, and importantly, the largest sales force in the industry that we compete with them with over 7,500 sales reps around the world. If I go to the next slide, we have the privilege of working within a very large total addressable market. $350 billion is the food away from home market, and as you can see on the chart, it's grown every year, essentially for the last 50 years, with the exception of three.
two tied to COVID and one tied to the financial crisis back in 2008 and 2009. One of my favorite charts shows the market share of the food away from home channel versus the market share of the grocery channel, and it is a clear secular trend that every year, consumers spend more money outside of the home than they do inside of the home. That is a large tailwind for this space. Second point, despite our being the largest, we use this word, only 17% market share. As importantly or more importantly, if you combine the big three, oftentimes, people talk about us versus one other company or two other companies. Combine the big three together, we represent 36% share of the market.
If you look at other industries, and if you look at other markets, and you look at the top three, that's actually an unusually low percentage, and we view that as meaningful upside for the long term for Sysco and frankly, others that are large as well. In this industry, scale matters, fulfillment scale, technology scale, delivery infrastructure scale, and the opportunity to have the broadest inventory assortment in the market. We have an extremely large opportunity to win market share profitably over the coming years. The next slide shows our company's growth. We have been a steady, consistent growth company for the 54 years of our existence. Kenny has some additional slides that he'll cover in a minute to talk about things like dividend and our ability to continue to grow our dividend.
But let's just talk for a minute about the 50+ years of growth at Sysco and why we are bullish and meaningfully optimistic about our future and our ability to continue to grow. First, it starts with the capabilities that we have built as a company. We have many growth vectors in front of us, and I'll just highlight a couple examples today. First example would be in what we call specialty. So what is specialty? Specialty is the produce industry, the fine protein space, the Italian space, the Asian space, and recently, Edward Don is an acquisition that we just completed, over $1.3 billion in annual sales for serving in the equipment and supplies space.
So our objective at Sysco is simple: we want to be able to provide to restaurants and restaurant-like entities, what they need to profitably grow their business and serve their needs end to end. We have a meaningful opportunity to continue to expand in specialty because our market share in those specialty categories is meaningfully below our market share in what we call broadline.... And so broadline are things like dry goods and frozen goods. We are dominant players in the dry goods and frozen goods space, and we have an opportunity to meaningfully expand our presence in fine proteins, fresh produce, Asian, Italian, and now equipment and supplies. It's a meaningful growth opportunity from an assortment perspective. That's fueled, as I said earlier, by the largest sales force in the industry.
We have 7,500 sales reps, and one of our key strategic initiatives is something we call Total Team Selling, which is better bridging our sales teams. We have a generalist who owns a sales account, and we have a specialist in produce, a specialist in Italian, a specialist in equipment and supplies. And that sales generalist being able to pull into that account, that expert, that expert in fine protein, who can talk head-to-head with the chef in the restaurant to penetrate that account, to win more business, and to profitably grow Sysco's business. We've cracked the code on Total Team Selling, and we are leveraging it meaningfully. Another growth vector for Sysco is international. International was a headwind for Sysco during the depths of COVID, due to the restrictions that were placed on our customers in those countries. That's completely flipped.
Now that the restrictions of COVID are free and clear, international has become a tailwind for Sysco, and our growth rates in international will exceed the growth rates in our more mature countries, and we have tremendous opportunity to continue to profitably grow in international. We have the opportunity to continue to grow in M&A. Most recently, we closed last week on the Don deal, as I mentioned, in equipment and supplies. It's a sector that we were not sufficiently serving, and that's a big sector. Don was one of the top players in that space. One little factoid tied to that deal that excites us, and then I'll turn it over to Kenny. We have over 100,000 Sysco restaurant customers who are readily and frequently using equipment and supplies, who are not buying that product from either Sysco or from Edward Don.
With the acquisition and the ability to bring that Edward Don assortment to our Sysco customers, we have a meaningful opportunity to penetrate that category with the assortment that we now have access to, the pricing power that Edward Don commands because of their large size, their fulfillment infrastructure, and their ability to deliver to the customer in a timely manner, and we can introduce those capabilities to over 100,000 customers who are not currently buying that product, and every one of those customers uses that product every day. It's a big opportunity for Sysco. Our confidence is high and our ability to provide profitable growth to our investors over time, due to the capabilities that I just described.
So my last page is the next one, and it talks just a little bit about, you know, Sysco versus, you know, who we compete with in our space through the lens of financial, high-level metrics, and then I'll turn it over to Kenny. First is industry-leading margins, and I want to be clear what we're talking about here, not just product margins, more importantly, operating income margins or EBIT margins. Our EBIT margin as a percent of sales is by far best in class in our space, and it will remain that way because we have scale, and we can continue to leverage that scale over time. Purchasing scale, logistics infrastructure scale, technology scale, as I mentioned. We're the only food service distributor with an investment grade credit rating.
The next one over is our ability to continue to do robust share repurchases and to continue to increase our dividend over time. We are a Dividend Aristocrat. We've grown our dividend for 54 consecutive years, and we are committed to continuing to do that. And on the far right, we're the only, and we were the first to have a bold ESG target, for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, and we have linked it to our executive compensation to hold us accountable for doing the right thing for our investors, doing the right thing for our climate, and doing the right thing for our business.
So if you look holistically across this universe of capabilities, strong, profitable growth trajectory for the company, delivering strong returns to our investors over time through dividend share buyback and the fortress backbone balance sheet that we have the privilege of operating within, that affords us that credit rating that we deserve. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Kenny, who's going to talk in more detail about our final financial metrics. Kenny, come on up.
All right. Thank you, Kevin, and good morning, everyone. It is great to be here with all of you today. Before I start, I'd like to take this time to thank our customers, our colleagues around the world, our shareholders, and our partners for their continuous support in Sysco. So you just heard Kevin talk about a few things. Number one, reiterating in confidence in our full-year guidance. That's number one. Number two, our growth strategy. It's working, and it's yielding dividends, providing accretive value for our enterprise. Number three, and this is an important one, we are the market leader. We are the market leader in a growing industry, and that renders a profile that has an attachment rate of market-leading margins. Really important as well.
As you think about Sysco, we have the fundamental building blocks, the ingredients, if you will, pun intended, to grow, to win, to continue to win in this space. There are five ingredients, in my view. First, strong, robust balance sheet, investment g rade. Number two, ample free cash flow. Last year, over $2 billion. Number three, number one market leading position. Number four, world-class talent with scale. Scale matters in this industry. And last but not least, our brand. Iconic, well-established Sysco Brand.... So if you go on to the next page, this is page nine, I'm gonna talk a bit more about what does being the market leader actually mean from a financial standpoint? So if you look at page nine, there's three charts on this page. Being the market leader give us superior performance relative to our peers. What does that mean?
Superior performance on the income statement side, as well as the balance sheet side. Let's start with income statement first. If you look at the left chart on the page, from a gross profit standpoint, Sysco last year generated 18% roughly on margins. That is 1.3 times higher than average core peers. If you move your way down on the P&L, in terms of EBITDA margin, we generated 5% margin. That's roughly 1.5 times higher than average core peers. Now, on the income statement, it's all about driving margin expansion, both on rate and dollars. On the balance sheet side, we are also industry leading in terms of cash conversion and quality of earnings. Our EBITDA conversion to operating cash flow is roughly 75%, so we are very effective at managing working capital.
Our EBITDA down to operating cash to free cash flow is roughly 55%. So if you marry the operating leverage, the margin expansion on the income statement with quality of earnings, you get to the right side of the page, which is robust free cash flow of over $2 billion. That is almost three times higher than average core peers. Given the fact that we have a robust generation machine of generating cash, we have the luxury to do both: invest in our core business and also reward our shareholders. Which leads us nicely to the next page, on page 10. This is our capital structure and allocation framework. First and foremost, we will invest in growth. We will invest in the business. This includes leasehold improvements, building, fleet, technology, digital tools, and the likes.
This also includes prudent M&A deals that have to cross a certain hurdle for our business. Last but not least, this includes our growth strategy that Kevin talked about as well, which is also providing dividends for our business. Any excess cash afterwards will be rendered back to shareholders in terms of dividends and share repurchase. Now, this is against a backdrop of two things: continued IG credit rating, and two, operating within our net corporate leverage threshold of 2.5-2.75 times. In Q1, we were at 2.6 times, which means we have headroom on that metric. As I mentioned on the last earnings call, depending on M&A levels for the remainder of the year, the share repurchase could flex up. All right?
The next couple pages, I'll talk about capital returns to the shareholder, as well as how we view M&A. Let's direct our attention to page 11. Sysco has a strong track record of capital returns to shareholder. Let's take each chart one at a time. On the left-hand side, you heard Kevin say this, we are honored, and we are proud to be part of the Dividend Aristocrat status. We've been increasing dividends for the past 54 years. Did you know that Sysco is only one of four consumer staples companies that has actually increased dividend the past 25 years plus, and, and accelerated dividend payment of at least 35% in the past 5 years? It's a very elite group, and we are proud to be part of it, and we plan to maintain that status going forward.
In the past five years, cumulatively, Sysco has paid out roughly $4.5 billion of dividends to shareholder. If you go to the second chart, we are consistently in the market on share repurchase. In the past five years, Sysco has cumulatively brought back roughly $3 billion of share repurchase. So if you add them together, the 4.5, rounding to five, and 2.9, rounding to three, roughly $8 billion or so of returning and rewarding our shareholders. I think an interesting stat to look at is that if you compare that number, $8 billion, over our current market cap, that's roughly 21%, or said differently, we are deploying over 20% of our market cap or enterprise value excess back to shareholder. If you compare that against average core peers, that's roughly 1%.
We value our shareholders, and that is the reason why we continue to be part of the Dividend Aristocrat status through dividends, share repurchase, and also investing in our business to drive greater good for the enterprise value. As I mentioned, share repurchase could flex up and down based on M&A. On the next page, on page 12, here's how we view M&A. Overall, the strategy is to focus on high margin, high-margin specialty acquisitions. I'm gonna make a very big point here. We do not buy companies just to be bigger. I'll say it again. We do not buy companies just to be bigger. The reason why we acquire a company is we want to increase Sysco customer value proposition through services, through products, through expanded geography, through more assortment, right? That's one. The second piece is-...
When we think about an acquisition, we apply a ton of financial rigor in terms of ROIC, in terms of IRR, to ensure it is multiples accretive for our business. That's point number two. Number three, given the fact that we have so much scale, and I'll say it again, scale matters in this industry. We have scale and experience. We focus on integration end-to-end, from the back end, from procurement, all the way up to the commercial side of the house, right? We've done this before. We're good at it, and therefore, that is the reasons why we buy a company. Let me give you an example. Greco, which is a leading Italian distributor in the U.S. We bought this company in 2021.
When we bought them, it was roughly, if you can see the middle part of the chart, sorry, the blue, the blue part, it's $800 million. As of last year, $1.3 billion, up 65%. So what happened there? Well, as I mentioned, synergies occurred, right? We expanded geographies as well. And then because of the Sysco scale, the Sysco, call it the broad line scale that we have, we were able to take the best of both worlds. The expertise, if you will, from the, from the specialty business, Greco, as well as our scale and relationship from the sales consultants in the broad line business. This is what we call, as Kevin mentioned, total team selling, cross-selling, and we were able to have one plus one equals three.
Speaking of one + 21 = three, as Kevin mentioned, we are extremely excited for our Don family to join us, and we closed last week. Again, this is also multiples accretive for our business. I'm gonna end on the last page, which is the investment thesis. Look, there's quite a few words on this page, but I'll say a few words here. First, as Kevin noted, we are the market leader, but we only have 17% share, which means there's tremendous upside on both top line and bottom line. As you look at many of these points on the page, I like to summarize this with three words, represents Sysco. We are disciplined, we are balanced, and we are purposeful, right? So let me explain what that means. We are disciplined.
As you can see on the page, we're gonna grow, but we will grow profitably. We're in the long game here, growing profitably, doing the right things each and every day. And that is the reason why ROIC was reintroduced as a management incentive KPI metric this year. So again, ROIC, operating leverage, growing profitably while generating healthy, robust cash flow and high quality of earning. Disciplined. Second, balance, consistency. Think about our capital allocation strategy. We are extremely balanced. We are extremely consistent, rewarding our shareholders, and at the same time, because of our strong balance sheet, we can actually invest in the business as well. But that's not just capital allocation that we're balanced. We are investing in U.S., also international, as Kevin talked about. We are growing our national business, and we're growing our local business, right?
We are investing for growth in different pockets of our business. Again, very balanced and thoughtful approach. Last but not least, purposeful. As you think about our mission statement, right? Connecting the world to share food and care for one another. We care about our colleagues, we care about our suppliers, our customers. They each have their goals, and we are partnering with them to realize their goals together. Second, we are on the leading edge of ESG and sustainability in our industry. And last but not least, I like this last word, leveraging our values to create values. That's what purposeful is all about. So, in closing, I'll say this: We are optimistic not only to deliver a great year in FY 2024, but to continuously improve our financial performance over time. This is a great time to be at Sysco.
Our future is extremely bright. Thank you.
Great. Thank you, guys. So we'll take just 15 minutes or so and do a little bit of Q&A. The first question I have, slightly annoying because it's sort of a macro question. I know you don't have a crystal ball here, right? But I think the question is: It's fair to say you've seen kind of case growth normalization. If you were to see some pressure on that as we go into subsequent quarters, how do you kind of respond to that? What do you do to mitigate some of that if it were to materialize?
Great. Okay, thanks, Brian. Appreciate the question. Let me just start just how we thought about... You know, we're, we're a company that has a fiscal year from July 1 through, you know, June 30th. So the best thing for us to do is to stay within that set of parameters in answering your question. You know, we've modeled for this year, I'll call it muted volume growth, and that's essentially how the industry has been behaving. So below normal volume growth, we describe that as very low single digits volume growth for the industry at large. And one of the bigger changes year over year from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2024 for us, was much more muted product inflation rates.
In fact, we said the first half of our fiscal year, which is essentially this calendar year, would be deflationary, tipping to and pivoting to very low levels of inflation for the first half of calendar 2024. And, Brian, that's essentially how the market has been behaving. In fact, the deflation headwind, if we call it that, has softened a bit, and that's ahead of schedule. It's about a quarter ahead of schedule. We've returned to, let's call it, just flattish, you know, from an inflation rate perspective. So that's how we see the market behaving, very low levels of market, a volume growth much lower than normal inflation growth. But here's one of the key points: We have 17% market share. We have a meaningful opportunity to profitably take market share.
We can grow faster than the market, we can drive growth in specialty categories that have a higher margin, and when you put those two things together, that's what can result in, you know, the $80 billion of top line that we talked about, and 5%-10% EPS market growth. So the market's been behaving pretty much as we had modeled. The second half of your question is, you know, what can we do and what would we do, if in fact, the market didn't behave? We have the opportunity to manage expenses very prudently and thoughtfully. Kenny, I'll toss to you if you'd like to answer what we would do if that or market condition presented.
Brian, thanks for the question. We have a lot of leverage in our business, so think about the gross profit line in our business. We have, strategic sourcing, where we partner with suppliers and optimize the cost of goods sold to ensure the nice flow-through from sales to gross profit. We are optimizing our Sysco Brand products, which is a higher mix as well. We have Sysco Your Way, Sysco Perks. These are all higher mix projects and initiatives that we can do to, again, mitigate some of the softness on the sales side. On the SG&A and the OpEx side of the house, we've started $100 million of cost out on day one, so the benefit is ratable over the year. In terms of supply chain productivity, we are seeing really good month-over-month, year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter momentum on productivity.
As you remember, last year this time, we had snapback costs and excess over time. Right now, that's behind us, and really, really focused on driving, you know, piece per labor hour and throughput , with, with, with energy and, and productivity throughout our, our, our channels. So overall, I would say we have a lot, a lot of levers. The last thing I would say as a proof point is, think about Q1. As Kevin described, right, there's some muted growth in terms of volume. Q1 with the inflationary, yes, we were able to grow GP, gross profit faster than expenses. EBITDA, 12% growth, faster than sales as well. So even despite deflation as well as a muted volume growth, Sysco was able to find a way to drive operating leverage in our P&L.
Mm-hmm. And obviously, you're still driving productivity and such. Is there a little bit less flexibility within the labor cost side today, right? I think, you know, you've hired a lot of people. You've really worked hard on training these people as we've come out of COVID. Does that present some challenges in the sense that there's a little bit less flexibility there, or you still feel good about that?
I think we're building strong discipline muscle, Brian, on how we manage that. You know, if I think about when I joined the company four years ago, 99% full-time fixed was our staffing model. You know, the business is reasonably consistent. That's actually a really good thing. Food service, food away from home is a reasonably consistent week-over-week business, so that affords you the opportunity to be more full-time. That's a good thing. For those of you that don't manage large workforces, part-time labor has much higher rates of turnover and lower levels of productivity. So in general, being high full-time is a good thing. The challenge with that would be, is if volume were to flex up and down, what do you do about that?
During COVID, we got quite good at managing labor to match volume, and we've built structure, discipline, systems, and process to better match labor to volume. If the volume were to come out, we are capable of pulling labor cost out of the system. We're fully staffed, as Brian, you just alluded to a moment ago. We're fully staffed across the globe. That was not able to be said, you know, a year ago. It is so much better from our ability to ship on time and in full to our customers to be in that status of labor. We're prepared to take the actions that are necessary to flex down our expenses. As Kenny said, the labor cost is one very important point, but there's many other levers. There's $100 million of structural cost out.
There's things that we can do with back office to leverage technology, emerging technologies, to automate things that have been done manually in back office. And in fact, Kenny recently stood up a center in Costa Rica to be able to move a lot of that work to that country. Very educated, language is not a barrier. From a time zone perspective, it's perfect, and we'll do more and more of that work over time.
Mm-hmm. Okay, makes sense. Maybe just quickly on some of your customer segments in thinking about kind of the most recent quarter. You actually had quite strong, you know, national chain account performance in the most recent quarter. What was, you know, driving that? Any, you know, specific cuisine segment, any more color you can tell us about on the national side?
Yeah, sure. Happy to... We're really pleased and proud of our success in national sales, and it's actually been going for about 2.5-three years now. We're meaningfully outgrowing the marketplace in that sector. I wanna be really clear about one thing: Winning in national is not mutually exclusive with winning in local, and I'm sure your follow-up questions are gonna be about local. Why are we winning in national? I wanna be very clear about point two. We are not using rate or margin as a mechanism to win national sales. In fact, the wins that we have posted, which are north of $2.5+ billion of net new wins over the last couple of years, have been at higher margin profiles than have been historical in that sector.
We're winning in healthcare, we're winning in education, and we're winning with national restaurant chains. And the why is a couple things. Number one, we've improved our technology in that space. We've made it easier for those large companies to connect their ERP to our ERP and make it seamless for things like managing substitutions, and we provided them with dedicated account service to make it just meaningfully easier to do business with Sysco. For many of those companies, they have international presence. Since we're the only international food service distributor, it's a plug-and-play solution for them in Canada and Mexico, overseas, and we are the company that they can work with seamlessly across those channels. So it's about technology, it's about broad infrastructure, and making it easier to do business with, and really pleased with the performance in national.
Well, let's talk about local then, too. You know, what, you've, I think you've changed some of the compensation structure, you've changed some of the metrics and such. So what's, you know, what's kind of-
... most relevant to driving share with the local segment going forward?
Yeah, thank you for the question, Brian. Appreciate it. Just local, over the last three years, we've grown faster than the industry for each of the last three years. Oftentimes, we're compared to one or two competitors. Let's look at industry first. So our local performance versus the industry, we've grown faster than the industry for three consecutive years. For the most recent quarter, we were flat in local, which was actually higher than the overall market, 'cause the market itself was actually slightly down. And we also said in our most recent earnings call, we can improve in local. And you, Brian, mentioned a second ago, a few of the examples that I'd like to enumerate right now, if I could, 'cause we can do better in local. Starts first with compensation.
We have the largest sales force in the industry, 7,500+ sales reps. We're pleased with our comp model, but there were some things that we needed to tweak to give them even more motivation to profitably grow their business. There was a cap in the prior model. We've removed the cap, and we've created more aligned incentives with our colleagues, that if they sell Sysco Brand, like Kenny talked about, they earn more. If they win a new account profitably, they get a kicker tied to winning that new account. It's good for us, too. Everything they do to succeed in that regard is good for us. We rolled that out in October, and it takes time for that change to percolate in business performance.
So that would not have been evident in Q1, and I communicated on our call, would be visible in the second half of this fiscal year. Number two is the size of our sales force. Our territory sizes have grown, as our business has grown, and we have not been, over the last few years, adding a lot of sales headcount because we've improved our technology meaningfully, making it easier for the customer to do some of the work themselves. four years ago, 35% of our customers placed an order online. That number is now north of 80%. So you don't need as many sales reps as you did when they were all manually keying those orders themselves.
But while that was going on, our businesses kept growing and growing and growing, and I'd say almost accidentally, the territory sizes, because of growth, have gotten bigger than we would like them to be. So this year, we're adding a substantial number of net new sales reps that'll bring that territory size down, which allows them to be in front of our customers more often. So that's number two, quantity of sales force. Number three is something we call performance management, which is visit frequency and visit quality for the sales reps. This is a relationships business. I want to be crystal clear about that. Our sales reps are ex-chefs, they're ex-culinary professionals, and they are at their best when they are in the kitchen, in front of the chef, having robust dialogue about their business to help them, the restaurant, be more successful.
So we've got to have boots on the street, be out in front of the customer, and we're gonna do a better job in the forward-facing years of managing visit frequency, visit quality, visit performance, and coaching our team, you know, to improve. So that's, you know, topic, number three, tied to our sales force. And then number four, is what we call total team selling. I mentioned it when I was at the podium. We can do an even better job of leveraging our produce business. To be clear, we, Sysco, have the largest fresh produce business in America. It's a $6 billion business. We have the largest specialty meat business in America. It's a bespoke, hand-cut meat, you know, production house. In Italian, as Kenny mentioned, the Greco, and soon, leveraging Edward Don's capabilities.
Leveraging that sales rep who owns the account and bringing in those specialists is Total Team Selling. We have cracked the code on that. There was a compensation barrier, frankly, that was getting in the way of that collaboration, which we have solved, and resolved. And then last but not least, is there are select geographies that have huge potential for additional growth, and we have some supply chain capacity enhancements coming soon that will help us grow more in those high-growth areas. So Kenny said the words, we are bullish and optimistic about Sysco's ability to continue to profitably grow faster than the market. We're already the leader, and we're confident in our ability to take share.
I think on local, one thing to call out, Kevin mentioned mostly on the US side. We're seeing growth international for local customers. We are replicating our success—Recipe for Growth success. Sysco Your Way, for example, these are the local neighborhoods that we enter to drive against penetration of local customer. Canada was up 6%, in Q1, and Europe was up 45% in Q1 as well. So we're seeing dividends from our investments and capital deployed there. </transcript
Mm-hmm. Okay. Maybe just on the cost side, you know, you, you've done a lot over the last couple of years. What's still kind of the bigger opportunity on the productivity side? Any sort of cost rationalization? You alluded to some of it, I think. You also, I think, implemented just a Global Chief Operating Officer. What does that kinda do differently for you?
Sure. Why don't I start with the answer to that question? I'll talk about the global COO job, and then I'll toss to Kenny for comments on the cost side. Yeah, so we're really pleased with the org structure change that we announced back in August. Greg Bertrand, 30+-year veteran of the company, has been running our U.S. business for decades, reports directly to me. I asked him to take a broader role for local sales and operations globally. And the simple point here is to leverage best practices, accelerate the rate of change in international. Last week, we were in Mexico, we were in Costa Rica. He's over in Europe this week. In every country that we go to, the opportunity to run the Sysco play in these countries is enormous. So compensation systems, selling tools, meaning the technology.
We have a very robust CRM in the United States, and bringing that CRM over the pond to Ireland, to GB, to France, to Sweden. Greg's ability to accelerate the forward progress on running the Sysco play is... significant. And in the countries where we are fully running the Sysco play, we are the most profitable, we have the highest market share, and we are delivering the strongest growth. So that's the simple answer, is help us accelerate running the Sysco play in every country that we compete within. To be clear, we'll have an assortment that matches that trade area, local relevant assortment, but the tech, technology, the capabilities, the supply chain will be, common and holistic across the globe. Kenny, talk to you for comments on expense.
Sure. On the cost side, there is more opportunities to be had. While we are seeing year-over-year progression on supply chain productivity, we're still not at 2019 levels yet, so there's still room to go. I think one of the questions we were asked before is, what inning are we in, in terms of supply chain productivity? I think we said fourth or fifth inning. So we're still got ways to go on that piece of it. Keep in mind, we're still driving operating leverage today, despite that element. On the SG&A side, as Kevin mentioned, that's a never-ending game, right? We're continually looking at cost out on that piece. You know, Kevin mentioned a good example of Costa Rica. Last quarter, we rolled out a service center for finance and accounting in Canada.
We continue to explore ways to ensure that we're more efficient through digital, through automation, through robotics, and the like. Again, more opportunities to be had.
Okay, makes sense. I have a couple of lightning round questions here. You'll hear these at every presentation today, so we'll throw them your way, too. Thinking about demand backdrop for the year ahead versus recent trends, would you think-- do you think it would accelerate, hold, decelerate?
I think, you know, consistent with the guide that we put out, the marketplace, we anticipate will have lower rates of volume growth versus historical averages, but consistent with what the current marketplace is producing. So flattish to current levels of volume, but again, Sysco's ability to take market share, we have 17% share. We have the ability to profitably grow our business, and then therefore, we can deliver a mid-single-digit sales and, you know, the 5%-10% earnings per share growth. We see that operating environment continuing with one change. We do expect the market to return to a rate of inflation.
Mm-hmm.
You know, typically in this industry, there'd be 2%-3% product inflation per annum. You know, we expect to be able to return back to that more normal rate of inflation over the next calendar year. Kenny, any additional comment?
I agree.
Then margin side, over the year ahead, up, down, neutral?
Yeah, on the margin side, it'll be up. And the reason why, there's two reasons why. One is the fact that we will continue to drive operating leverage down to operating income in net earnings, which we've done. And second is the ROIC lens, right? Deploying capital, having nice return at the same time are the levers I talked about.
Mm-hmm.
Sysco Your Way, Sysco Brand penetration, strategic sourcing, the like. So yes, up on net earnings.
Right. Last one, we some of us sort of know the answer to this, but capital allocation, you know, prioritized between CapEx, buybacks, dividends, debt paydown, any of those changed in relative importance recently?
ROIC, the lens in which we prioritize our capital allocation priorities. As I mentioned, the first priority is invest in our core business. With that said, though, depending on the level of M&A, share repurchase could be higher.
Okay. I think that's all I've gotten. We're out of time, so thank you, guys. We appreciate you being here.
Thanks for having us.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, everyone.