All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Ed Kelly with Wells Fargo, and just want to welcome you to the first meeting of the seventh annual Wells Fargo Consumer Conference, an event that continues to build, and hope you all have a great couple days out here, so kicking us off is Sysco, the leading food service company in the U.S., a sector that you know we do like, and we have Chairman and CEO Kevin Hourican as well as CFO Kenny Cheung, and I did want to thank the company for again supporting us at the event, so before we dig into fireside chat questions, I think Kevin wanted to just kick us off with a few comments, so start there and then dig into questions.
Good morning, Ed. Thank you for having us this year again, and thank you to the broader Wells team for hosting the conference. We're honored and privileged. Kenny and I will be very, very brief on our prepared remarks. Just some quick thoughts, as you know. Ed said, we're the leader in the food away from home space, largest from a market share perspective, highest from a profitability rate perspective, with what we would call some unique assets that are creating a defensible moat around world that we can start with number one, Broadline, which I just mentioned. We also have the largest and significantly growing specialty business, a large and growing improved profitability from an international perspective, and investments in technology that will pay dividends for years to come. These are competitive assets.
As I said, the food away from home industry is a good space, good business. It's a large space, continues to consistently grow, taking market share from the food at home channel year over year over year. There have only been three years in the last forty years where the food away from home business didn't grow revenue, and that was in 2008, 2009 financial crisis, the beginning of that, and then obviously, when the world was told to go home and stay home and not leave their homes in the beginning of COVID, that was rough. You take those three years out, and across the rest of the span of time, this industry has grown and consistently taken market share. Sysco is taking market share from within that growing pie, so we talk about it as a growing pie, and we are growing our slice.
This most recent year, fiscal 2024, we grew our business 1.75 times market. And if I could just talk about that very briefly and turn it over to Kenny. What we're proud of? We're proud of our national business, which is roughly 50% of Sysco's business. We call that national sales. We're doing very well in that space. We are the largest in that space. We are taking market share at an accelerating rate, and our margin profitability within national expanding. We're doing very well in specialty. We have a $9 billion specialty business. Continue to add to that portfolio, both organically and inorganically, growing that space, taking market share, and we're doing very well in international. Our international business is growing top and bottom line faster than the overall company. Where we have opportunity for improvement is in local sales.
Where our local sales business is a good business. We have the largest share and the highest profitability, but we're not satisfied with our volume growth in local, and I'm sure we're going to talk about that today. With that, turn over to Kenny for a few comments from his chair.
Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with all of you. Just one thing to add on top of what Kevin spoke about is ROIC. We are super focused on ROIC. If you take a step back, if you look at us versus the average for the consumer staples sector, we are 500 basis points higher than the average and more than twice of our average core peer. ROIC is really embedded in everything that we do, from looking at M&A to CapEx deployment, to OpEx deployment, to even headcount hires. It's everything that we do, and we're also looking at it from a portfolio optimization standpoint. Let me go a bit deeper on that one.
Kevin and I, the management team, we look at our portfolio assets that we have today and make sure that there's a proper growth and there's a proper return for the capital and resource deployed against that asset. This brings me to Mexico. So we are exiting and divesting our JV in Mexico for the following reason: One, growth potential is not there, and two, the returns are actually dilutive to the overall enterprise. Again, this is still under regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. Now, my point of bringing this up is twofold. One, this is further conviction that we believe our international business is a growth sector. We are able now to redeploy resources and capital and double down on high growth, high-performing, high-returning markets. That's point number one. And point number two is just ROIC in action, right?
ROIC in action. We will continuously look at both ends of the spectrum. What asset can we invest in? And are there assets where we can better deploy our resources elsewhere? Very important point here, so as investors, long onlys, thinking about value, growth, and income, it's a compelling opportunity, and you can rest assured that when you invest in Sysco, the rigor, the thoughtfulness around ROIC will always be the backdrop. With that said, the Q&A.
Yeah, great. Thank you. So maybe let's start with a bit of a State of the Union in Sysco. You gave a you know fairly robust presentation at your Investor Day, highlighted a lot of self-help. It's hard to judge the progress from the outside, given the initial backdrop. So can you talk a little bit about how you think underlying momentum of the business is going? You know, what's working, what needs a little bit more attention? Just, you know, thoughts on sort of, like, where you are.
Sure, yeah. Completely understand the question. There's a lot going on at Sysco. I'll save comments on the macro drop, macro backdrop for, you know, further questions. I'll focus on local sales. But, you know, before I do, we need to continue to run the play in national that's providing tremendous success at Sysco. So I just call that ride the fast horse faster. Our national business is doing incredibly well, customer retention at all-time highs. Our win rate on the RFP circuit is incredibly strong at margin profiles that are above historical standards. So we need to continue to run that play. We need to continue to run the play in specialty, because we're doing very well in specialty, and we need to continue to run the play in international, are working.
Where we need to improve is local, and we're not satisfied with our volume growth in local. To sum it down to a four-part plan, what we communicated our investor day, here are the four key focus areas, and I'm happy to go deeper on any of them. Number one is sales headcount. Why are we adding to our sales force? Our territory sizes for the average sales rep grew to a place bigger than what we would like them to be. And the punchline there is we need that rep in the customer's account on a weekly basis. So we need to decrease territory size by adding sales headcount. Number two, and I'm sure we'll come back to this one, is our compensation model for our SC.
We were higher in base pay than we would like to have had, and we weren't seeing the motivation that we needed to be driving with our sales population. I can happily talk more about that in a moment. We did remix our pay. That just went live. That went live on July 1st, and we're working through that transition as we speak. Number three, which is a driver winning formula, is something we call total team selling, which is getting our specialty business sales reps and our broad line sales reps to collaborate more at the specific customer account level to win the total basket of the purchasing ability of that restaurant. And we're really pleased with how that's going. And the fourth for us is something we call performance management.
We have a large field leadership organization, scaling them up to be able to provide selling, coaching, selling training, especially to new colleagues, to move them up their productivity curve. These four things together, that we have confidence will improve our local business. I do want to be clear that this is not a light switch activity. It's not a flip a switch, and all of a sudden, the business is going to be X% better. These are slower, longer-term actions because that's the healthy way to improve. We can improve tomorrow if we wanted to lower prices to win share. That is not the view that Kenny and I take on this business. We take a long-term view on this business to ensure that the growth that we drive is profitable growth. Kenny, anything to add?
Yeah, I'll pick up where you left off. This is a long game here. That's the name of the game. We're playing the long game, growing possibly. The other couple of things I'd say is that if you think about our company, our algo for growth, 90% is from core and 10% is from growth initiatives. And what does core mean? Kevin talked about it is the local side, right? Continue to grow our local business. Continue to grow our CMU business, our specialty business, and our international business. That's what we mean by the core business. Obviously, that's against the backdrop of supply chain efficiency, merchandising capabilities, and also SG&A prudence. So that's what we mean by core. And our balance sheet allows us to invest, obviously, for today, the core and build for tomorrow. This is where the growth initiative comes in.
This is where your Sysco Your Way comes in, Perks, personalization, the 10 buildings we're building as we speak right now, which will come in laddering over the next few years. This is very, very exciting for Sysco. And the third thing I would say is that I know you read the papers and you look out of the window, it's dynamic. So definitely dynamic in the environment. The one thing to provide comfort is we have a lot of levers in our business from a gross profit standpoint, from a supply chain standpoint, as well as from an OpEx SG&A standpoint. So just quick examples, and then we can move on. On the merchandising side, we are the biggest buyers, right? We have scale, and we have benefits to be had on the strategic sourcing side.
Sysco Brand is another piece as well and then last but not least, as we grow local, as Kevin talked about, grow our specialty, grow international, you'll have that nice uplift from a mix standpoint, given they have a margin attachment rate that's higher than the traditional overall enterprise Broadline business. That's number one. Number two, on supply chain, we are seeing retention improve quarter over quarter, month over month, year over year. In fact, last quarter, retention doubled. Really, really good because that's the gift that keeps on giving. You have pieces per labor hour, productivity and hiring costs, training costs, shrink, safety, workers' comp, auto liability. I could go on and on. There's a benefit there as well.
And then last but not least, as proven as last year, we have a nice share of a benefit on productivity implemented last year and a robust pipeline, as well, entering FY twenty-five. So those are the levers we have in the P&L to mitigate any dynamics in the marketplace.
If we could just, you know, maybe zoom in on, you know, one of the things that you mentioned, Kevin, around changes in sales force compensation. There's been a lot of questions, I think, in the market around those changes. As we've talked about, maybe there is some, you know, noise around friction there. Can you maybe just talk a little bit more about what you did, and do you believe this is a headwind, in your ability, at least in the near term, to grow?
Sure. Good question. We understand the question. Anytime you impact someone's pay, it's personal, impacts them. So let's talk about where we were, where we are, and where we're going. So pre-COVID, we were 100% commission model. COVID first hit, we pivoted to a base plus bonus model so that our colleagues had the ability to put on the table and have a livable wage to see all that, you know, as it turned. Over the last three years, we've been-
W orking on the bonus component of that pay to optimize their work focus. And he talks a lot about the things that they're being bonused on are: win new customers profitably, drive Sysco brand integration, win more CRS cases, what we internally call local case growth versus alternative customer types, because as Kenny says, the mix favorability is positive. So those are the changes we've made over the last couple of years. Why we made the change in July? Just going to be really direct about it. Our base pay was too high as a percentage of total. Motivation was not sufficiently there to get the colleague to be out of their kitchen and into the customer, something that we talk about. This is a relationships business.
We need our sales colleague in the customer account on a weekly basis, call it fighting for cases on the Sysco truck, having good conversations about how they can help that customer. I don't want to quote the internal stats, but we had too large of a percentage of our colleague population, Ed, that was making just to their base pay, and they were good with it. Well, I'm not good with that. We need them to be hungry, we need them to be out driving, we need to be out, impacting positively. So we did this because we wanted to, not because we had to. We want to impact this. It's a long-term decision. We've lowered base pay as a percentage of their total, and we put even more earnings potential in the bonus calc.
To be clear, I'm going to normalize this math just to make it more digestible. We took $1 out of their base pay, we put $1.50 bonus earnings potential. So every colleague, writ large, period, has the opportunity to make more money in this new program than the prior program. It's completely uncapped. The more they grow, the more they make. He always reinforces that. Oh, by the way, this extra $1.50 piece that we put in is financially accretive to Sysco. If they succeed, we are succeeding along with the colleague along the way. So this is the change we made. We've lowered base, increased bonus. For many of our colleagues, Ed, they're thrilled about this change. Our best sellers actually are thrilled. Like, "Yeah, I get to bet on myself. I get to drive my own performance.
I get to have the impact that I want to have, and the more I grow, the more I make." For some of our colleagues, they have a choice to make. Do they want to change their behavior and improve their performance and earn more money? Or perhaps they don't want to work at Sysco? And here's what I'm saying for our long-term investors and for me as a CEO, I intend to be here for a long time. This is a necessary change, and there will be some turnover. There will be, period. There will be turnover in Q1, perhaps into Q2. That turnover will have a short-term impact. We're going to manage through that. We've hired new colleagues, which we can talk about, that will help offset some of that, and that's why I said this isn't a light switch activity.
Comp change is going to change behavior. We all know it takes time to change someone's behavior, and it is absolutely the right thing for our financials for the long term, and I actually think it's going to help create a higher growth profile for the company for the long term, and we're going to work through the transition. We're on top of it. We're having active conversations with our colleagues. We call it Grow on the Grid. There's this performance grid that they have, and our job as leaders is to help them be successful by giving them the skills to be able to succeed, and also provide them technology tools that make it. Kenny, anything you want to add to that?
Yeah, just a couple of things. One, having the variable structure allows us to match the inflows and outflows of cash. That's period, right? If they sell, we pay. If they don't, we don't pay. That's point number one. I think the second point is that's often missed is, yes, there's three ways to grow, if you really think about it. There's three ways to grow. The first is the new sales professions with the updated competition model. They're motivated, and they take the transferred accounts, and they grow those accounts. That's point number one. The second way to grow is they grow new accounts, right? The third way to grow is the existing SC. Kevin's the existing experienced SC. He now has extra capacity as well.
Day in and day out, Kevin and I are looking at both, ensuring that the new SCs are gearing up the learning curve efficiently, because that way, they can bring in new business, and making sure that our existing SC, who doesn't need any more training, can also fill in the capacity as well. It's twofold as well, if you think about the local side. The last thing I'd say is that I know we threw out a number out there, 450-500 heads per year. Two things I'll say there. Kevin and I will be very disciplined in terms of when and where we add.
When, meaning pacing to the environment, making sure that we still drive operating leverage in our PNL for the full year, and where, in terms of, you know, territory, where do we actually add high-growth markets, and who do we add? Specialists, it's the generalists, it's the trainers, right? So we'll be very deliberate on the mix of people that we're bringing in as well.
So just, I guess, dovetailing into that, you mentioned that local case growth and improving local case growth is not a light switch. You know, you are making comp model, but at the same time, you're hiring. I think your hiring plan is maybe roughly around 20% increase in sales headcount, although that's probably gross. Net, I don't know. But how do you think about the return on hires? You know, this transition period currently, right, that you're going through, when the market will see some improvement, organic local growth?
Good question. I'll start with the why we're doing what we're doing. Kenny can talk about the financial return, what we're doing, and we'll talk a little bit more about the macro environment that we're in, which was implied as a part of the question.
So again, I like to do the where we were, where we are, where we're going, why are we doing what we're doing? Back at the beginning of COVID, our business dropped 65%. Took significant expense out of our business model during that year. I want to be clear about one thing, that we're profitable. We were the only profitable food service distributor that year. Even in a year when our business was down 65%, we were profitable that year. But the reality of what I just described is we reduced our headcount in the sales population pretty significantly back in 2020. At the same time, deployed a substantially improved customer ordering website. Fact is, we had 35%-ish of our customers placing their own orders back in 2020. It's now north of 80+%.
That single fact that I just described has decreased the amount of transactional volume that our SCs need to do and freed them up to do more selling activities, just as one discrete activity. So we haven't needed to hire back at the pace that we originally had from a colleague headcount perspective.
Good news, bad news here, though. Good news is we've meaningfully grown our business over the past four years. That's a good thing. We've taken market share. We've grown profitably each of those years. The bad news is our territory size that, as I said, has grown larger than we would like. So each rep we currently have has a too big of a territory, and they're not therefore able to get in front of our customers as often as we wanted. So the net, it's a net number.
The net 450 that we hired last year, emphasize a point, most of the hiring was at the second half of that year, is to reduce that territory size. And he just walked us through that. From the new person who joins the company, we give them five customers to get them started, called seed accounts. So think of that as five other reps each donated one customer to Kevin, the new colleague, and then Kevin is then tasked to grow his business up through new customer prospecting activity. That's where the sales growth comes from.
Add that person, they start with five accounts, they grow that book of business. Point two, Kenny made, which was then that person who gave up an account is tasked with replace that account. Go out and get a new customer into your book of business.
That's where the sales growth comes from, that's where the profit lift comes from. We are being cautious in managing people's expectations on this topic. That net 450 was in the second half of the year. It takes a while for Kevin, the new colleague, to work up the productivity curve. It's a twelve-week training program that Kevin goes through. He then has time to be out on the street, one customer at a time, building that book of business. We haven't quoted externally the length of time to get to, quote, unquote, "our productivity standard," but it's not months. It takes time. So what we've articulated is that the second half of this fiscal year is when we will begin to see the benefit from that net hiring, and then the net hiring we do this year will benefit fiscal 2026.
And Kenny mentioned this a second ago, we're gonna be very purposeful about the hiring we do this year. Given the macro backdrop, we'll be thoughtful about the speed and the type of colleague that we are hiring. Kenny, would you like to add?
Yeah, so just to clarify, I agree with Kevin. The benefit will be in the back half, coupled with, we do believe there'll be a moderate step up on foot traffic in the back half. That's what's been modeled in. The second point I would make is that, you know, this year, there will be. Right, the ones we hired last year will be pretty showing benefit in the back half of this year. However, the ones we are hiring this year will be a P&L drag, right? Because the return isn't fully matched within the current period. The good news is that we have levers, as I talked about earlier, that we still drive leverage in the P&L. Think about supply chain, not back in 2019 levels yet, in terms of productivity, right? Think about SG&A. Lots of things in the pipeline.
So you can rest assured that even though, and we're turning on the spigot right now, as I like to call it, the spigot of the water faucet, if you will, of talent coming in. Once it continues, then you don't have the drag on the year. But right now we have a class coming in. But with the levers we have, we can make sure that we can offset base pay and still drive leverage, margin expansion, as well. And the other thing I would say is that it's not a binary switch, right? Meaning it's not zero to 100%. With every passing quarter, every passing period, the SC gets more productive as well. So there is a slightly. You know, we should start seeing a bigger spread between the market versus our performance.
So we've kind of danced around the industry.
A little bit here, so maybe we can dig in. There has been anxiety around, you know, restaurant traffic. You've acknowledged that, the industry's been a little bit weaker than probably what we would all like to see. I think, one, your outlook does assume some traffic improvement, as you mentioned. Can you maybe talk about what you're seeing, you know, market currently, and then, you know, your expectation as you progress through your, year five?
Yeah, great, so I'll start with macro backdrop, what we're seeing out in the industry. Kenny will then transition into the outlook for this year and our thoughts, you know, on the full year. Said on our Q4 earnings call, that traffic in our last quarter, which was Q4, was down roughly 3% to restaurants. That was a very clear number. That comes from Black Box. That's not a Sysco number. That's a global industry number. For the quarter we're now in, it's softened a bit. It's softer than that minus 3%. We said in a conference a couple of weeks ago that July was minus 5%. We haven't quoted August, and we'll save that for our earnings call, but Q1, the quarter we're currently in, is softer than the prior quarter. It's softened a bit.
Not a major shift, but it has softened a bit. We're seeing it across all sectors. It's not just QSR sector that's being written about the most because of the lower-income consumer being the most strained right now. Yes, QSR is being impacted, but we're seeing it across the industry right now. One thing we're clear about, and our peers have said something similar, we can still grow our business in a negative foot traffic environment. The how, focus on net new customer prospecting. Serve roughly fifty percent, five zero, of the unique doors in the restaurant space across the countries that we compete in, but that fifty percent number is specifically to the U.S. We have an opportunity to grow our business by new customer prospecting. In fact, we will grow our business this year, even in that softer macro backdrop.
Things we're seeing that are newer to report, we are beginning to see restaurants then take action on price, and I think it's necessary. Food cost inflation has normalized. Yet menu prices were still going up. So we think it's a good, positive sign that restaurants are beginning to provide more value on their menu. And what we always say is we need to focus on what we can control, and we're leaning in hard on cost savings opportunities for our customers. Kenny talked about the fact that we buy more food than anyone in the industry. Take that purchasing scale, leverage that scale to provide value to our customers, point one. Point two, the Sysco Brand.
Sysco Brand is a meaningful savings opportunity for our customers, providing what we call trade management deals to our customers to give them incentive to shift. It is good for the customer, and it's meaningfully good for Sysco. Point three, and I'm only making three points then tossing to Kenny, is our specialty, specifically our protein business and our produce business. We can do even more to do what we call take knives out of the back room of the kitchen. They're prepped. So think about a vegetable medley. We can produce the exact vegetable medley that a restaurant needs for their primary dishes, vacuum seal it, provide it to them in a cost-effective way. They can take labor out of their kitchen. The same thing on specialty meat. Our specialty meat business does hand-cut, custom cut to the exact spec of the restaurant.
They can take some of that skilled labor out of the back room. We vacuum seal it, provides more shelf life to them, and we've provided value. We've also saved them some money on their labor costs as part of it. So these are the things that we're leaning into. We focus on what we can control. Yes, the market is softer right now than it had been. We anticipate that will continue, Ed. We think that will continue to at least the end of this calendar year. We'll see what the Fed does today. We'll see what the election brings. When we get past the Fed lowering, we'll get past the election. We are projecting a bit of improvement in the second half of the year, Ed, and if it doesn't materialize, we have actions that we can take to manage our P&L.
With that, I'll toss Kenny for additional comments.
Yeah, you covered it well, Kevin. Just two things from my end. The bumper sticker is we have full confidence in our 2025 guide, full confidence in that guidance we provided on the earnings call. The second piece is, during tough times, you can count on us to be very disciplined. During tough times, from a pricing standpoint, go-to-market standpoint, we will not grow for the sake of growing. Very, very important that I say that. Just around pricing, making sure we look at the spread on margins, these are very, very important for us as well, and these are must-wins as we get our guidance prepared.
As it pertains to that, you know, the top distributors all are looking to grow case volumes, hiring sales force. Are you seeing any increase in competitive activity given that the backdrop, you know, softer? Just thoughts around what that backdrop is like today.
Sure. I'll start and toss to Kenny. And again, let's break our business down into its components. 50% of our business is national sales, that we continue to win meaningfully in sales. Our customer retention rates are at all-time highs, and our close rate or win rate on that book of business continues to exceed our own internal expectations. Every one of those contracts are competitively bid. There are folks bidding on that business, and our win rate there is accelerating. And the why is our supply chain capabilities are national and increasingly important international scale, because many of these concepts we're serving have international business. For them, Sysco is a one-stop shop, you know, like you have an easy button for them to be able to partner with across the globe. On the local side, it's an efficient economy.
Every case is not under contract. It's priced for that item for that week. We're seeing a competitive environment. Ourselves and our competitors are looking to win new business, and it's a competitive environment. I would say it's rational, but competitive environment. And Kenny just said it, and I'll reemphasize it. We're not going to lead with price as the mechanism to get new customers, for several reasons. One, it's not good for the health of the P&L for the long term. Two, we just reset the market if we do that. So what we do is we are very disciplined. We have a pricing software that helps us do this.
We get to what's called a reference price for every item, for every customer, understanding their zip code, their cuisine that they are in, what items are known value for them, and what items are more inelastic for them, and we price our book. So it's aggressive, but we are managing it. Kenny, anything to add?
Yeah, just one double click on what you said. Around half our business is national, half is local. Now, within the national customers, one-third is actually what we call resilient segments. So these are your health cares and education and the likes, right? So one-third. So we have that portfolio of ours that we are very proud of, that we are growing, and we're growing very profitably. That's point one. Number two, as Kevin said, in terms of pricing, yes, you know, when volume is tougher, but however, we are seeing rational pricing for the most part. The other thing I would say is that here at Sysco, we think about pricing as an output, not an input. And let me explain what that means. So right on price. Absolutely, right, right on price.
This is very important and offer the maximum value to our customer as well. Because if you think about it, price is a reflection of value, right? That's what value is, value. So as Kevin talked about specialty, which is a competitive moat to our business, really hard to replicate. Being able to help our customers during this time to take labor out of the kitchen and help reduce wage inflation for them, right? Being able to find ways to help with their shrink and spoilage, etc. So, that's what we think about when we think about pricing. It's not an input, it's an output based on the value that we provide to our customers.
Just so switching gears to international, which obviously talk a bit about the international opportunity, what your goals are there, M&A and supporting M&A going forward within that?
Kenny will start.
Sure, I can start. A few things here. International is a growth segment for us, period. Period. So I thought that was Mexico, right?
Mexico, last year, was approximately 3% of our top line for international. Again, margins dilutive from an enterprise standpoint, right? That's point number one. So again, it's a growth vector for us. Number two, the Sysco playbook that we started in the US, it's replicating very nicely to international. Meaning, Sysco Your Way, perks, strategic sourcing, and we're seeing that in the P&L. Last year, I'll give you a few numbers: 7, 12, 24. Top line grew 7%, GP grew 12%, and OI grew 24%. So we're definitely seeing that leverage and that scale, kind of that one Sysco model that Greg Bertrand, our COO, leads.
The third thing I would say is that there are no structural impediments or structural reasons, maybe that's the way of saying it, why the international market cannot be the same margins as the US. It'll take some time. It'll take some time. I admit it'll take some time, but there's nothing structurally on why we cannot be there as well, and we're every single quarter, we're growing double digit. In fact, last year, every market, and every market last year, international grew double-digit OI. Every market, wasn't just Canada or GB. Every market grew double digit. And if you dip your toe into a few various markets, Canada, our largest market, double-digit growth, right sizing the portfolio, healthy growth in the bottom line, right? We actually exited on top of customers. GB, indexing previously to national.
They still are, but we're making a lot of grounds on growing local, for example. France is a little different, self-help there in France, right? In the past few years, they were more in the red, and because of new leadership that we put in place there, Rémy's doing a fantastic job. We actually are in the green now. So we can give you a flavor of the market. Now, to answer your M&A question, yes, the answer is yes. We will deploy capital to international, but let me clarify a couple of things here. We, from a strategic standpoint and just from the way we think about M&A, we're not kingdom builders. We understand the value of assets, we don't want to overpay as well, and not every market's created equal too.
Meaning, for example, in GB and in Canada, number one, market share, number one in the space, right? Solid foundation.
Okay, that feels like a pretty good. Again, not telegraphing anything. It feels like a good place to think through M&A, especially specialty. Broadline, there's a compounding effect, if you will, but a place like France, we've got to continue to focus on the foundation to then bolt on M&A on top of it. So again, we'll be very, very deliberate on when and how we do M&A.
Kenny gave a super thorough answer. I would just say technology as well is something that globally is improving dramatically. What we're essentially doing is deploying great tech tools in the US and then fast follow to Canada, fast follow to Europe. That's helping us sell more profitably. Customers are responding very favorably to the modern ordering web tool, and then we have a CRM that we deploy that helps them effectively, so I'll just plus that up. And then just to reemphasize Kenny's point: so yeah, the bank would be open now for M&A in select countries where we have a leading position and we feel really good about the business, focused mostly on bolt-on capabilities that help us, what we call Run the Sysco Play, which is number one Broadline, adding produce, adding protein, adding equipment and supplies, et cetera, dot, dot, dot.
When we fill out that room, we can sell around the room, win greater market share with that customer, and we have proven we covered this at Investor Day. When they buy from Broadline, plus one of our specialty businesses, that customer spends three times more per year. If they buy from two of our specialty businesses, they buy six times more per year. And the why is those specialty companies that they also sell Broadline products. So when we get a specialty player out of the account, we actually see a lift in specialty. We also see a lift in Broadline. So we're gonna run that play internationally. Get back to you.
Great. Well, with that, we're up against time. So again, just wanted to, you know, thank you for participating, and again, hope you all have a great conference.
Thank you, all.
Everyone, thank you.
Appreciate it.