All right, thank you everyone for joining. I am Lauren Silberman, the Equity Research Analyst at Deutsche Bank, covering restaurants and food distributors. I am happy to be here today to introduce Sysco. We have Kevin Hourican, CEO, and Kenny Cheung, CFO. They'll start with some brief remarks and then have time for a few questions at the end. With that, I will turn it over to Kevin and Kenny.
Okay, great. Good morning, everyone. Happy to be back at the Deutsche Bank conference. We appreciate your joining us today as we talk about Sysco and our growth objectives, where we are as a company, and the things that we are working on. Me and Kenny will be up here in just a moment, and then I'll come back one more time to do a quick wrap-up page at the end. For those that don't know us as well, we call this our one page at a glance. If I could just cover some of the quick highlights on Sysco from a performance perspective. We are the number one player in the food distribution space. We'll do approximately $81 billion in top-line revenue or turnover, as we call it here in Europe, with size and scale advantages from a procurement perspective, from a supply chain distribution perspective.
We have the largest number of distribution centers in our space of tri-temperature facilities, tri-temperature trucks, which puts us closest to the customer, which allows us to have the lowest cost to serve in the industry, which leads to the highest profit ratio from an operating margin perspective in the industry. On the right-hand side of the page, you can see our diversified customer mix. Kenny makes the point often, yes, we're primarily restaurants, two-thirds restaurants, but the third that is not is a very recession-resilient sector. Think healthcare, think education, think government business, and of course, there's a travel and entertainment and hospitality space that falls into that sector as well. That portion of our business tends to be very consistent over time. We're the number one player in almost all of those customer segments and customer types. My favorite slide about our industry is the following.
The blue line is the grocery channel, and the green line is what we call the food away from home space. We play in the food away from home space. If that's not a trend line, I don't know what a trend line would be. You can see that food away from home takes share from the grocery channel each and every year, except for the wild dislocation, which is the day that we got the text worldwide that said, "Go home, stay at home, don't leave your home." That was about the only time when we didn't take share from the grocery channel. Equally important, we're sitting here in Europe today. Europe is following this exact same pattern. This is a U.S. chart, but it's about 10 years behind, which actually means positive tailwind into the future from a growth perspective for our European business.
I'll come back to that in a moment. The result of that prior page is that Sysco grows consistently over time. In fact, we've grown 53 out of our 56 years in company history. The only three years we did not were the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, which was significant, and then obviously COVID, which I just mentioned a moment ago. We've delivered an 11% CAGR since the beginning of the company, 56 years ago. On the right of the chart, you can see where growth opportunities still lie in front of us. We have large opportunities to grow our international business. Within our domestic U.S. business, we run a large specialty business, and specialty we refer to as produce, protein, cuisine-specific businesses like Italian and Asian.
Our market share in those specialty businesses is below our total broadline average, which gives us lots of room to run in the future. Another one of my favorite charts. This is a U.S.-only chart. I'll do international, global in just a moment. It is a large total addressable market, $370 billion, to be clear and specific. We at Sysco in the number one position have 17% share. Why I like this chart the most is the pie itself gets bigger every year, and our slice of the pie has gotten bigger each and every year, both of which afford the opportunity for profitable sales growth. Equally important to note is the big three in the space that we operate within commands less than 40% share. That is pretty unique.
If you look at a big three in most industries and most sectors, the top three players would be a higher percentage of that. It is important to note this is a business where size and scale matter: purchasing scale, fulfillment scale, technology scale. We believe that, frankly, all three of the big three have the opportunity to accelerate growth over time. What makes Sysco unique from an investment perspective and from an industry player perspective is that we're the only global food service distributor in the food away from home space from our named peers' perspective. With number one market share, I think you can probably still even see the chart from the back. We have number one share in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, Costa Rica, Bahamas, and Great Britain, just to name a few.
The green bar on the chart is the market share in 2019. The blue bar on the chart is the market share in 2024. We have not yet gone public with 2025 share. You can see we have taken share in each and every country that we operate within across the globe. We have the number one position in the vast majority of the countries that we operate within across the globe by doing what we call running the Sysco play.
What we mean by that is a boots-on-the-ground street sales force, a modern technology stack that's a website, a pricing technology, a CRM that fuels the work of our sales colleagues, a modern supply chain with technology that advances our ability to fill on time, to deliver on time, and to deliver in full, and to have a robust, broad product assortment powered by private label products that we call Sysco Brand. When we do all five of those things, we have proven definitively, regardless of the country, we win, we move ourselves into that number one position, and we do so profitably. See my aforementioned point that our profit rate as a % of sales is significantly higher than who we compete against. Let's talk about where growth comes from from here as we look forward into the future.
The left-hand side of the chart we introduced in 2021, we call it our recipe for growth. It is a five-part plan to improve the center of the wheel, which is our colleague and customer experience. We firmly believe if we improve the colleague and customer experience, they reward us with more business, and therefore we profitably grow. What's interesting is the five parts of the wheel work together. That's why it's a wheel. They won't change, but what will evolve over time are the individual tactics within each of those five. So an example only: when I arrived at the company five and a half years ago within digital, our website was the main focus. Our website did not meet my expectations. We needed to make it easier to use. Search engine results, product recommendations, and the like needed to improve.
We're very pleased with the progress that we've made on our website, and we're now pivoting our work focus from a tech perspective into our CRM so we can increase the yield and effectiveness of our sales force. We'll talk more about that over time. For the remainder of my time on stage, before I turn it over to Kenny, I'm going to talk about the two things on the right, which is what we're doing to drive local growth and specifically a double-click into some additional growth vectors. I have three pages on local. One is short-term, one is medium-term, and one is long-term. We're not satisfied with our local performance. Local is our most profitable sector. I think local is mom-and-pop restaurants. We are the largest player in that space. We are the most profitable in that space.
We need to turn that business into growth mode, and we have a plan to be able to do that. Let's focus on this chart, which is the near term. It starts with key selling initiatives. We have a program called Sysco Your Way, which is in a restaurant-dense neighborhood delivering six, seven days a week with a late-in-the-evening order cut off. That program is working worldwide. We will continue our focus on expanding to new neighborhoods and penetrating further in the neighborhoods that we operate within. I mentioned the growth businesses within specialty. Two of them are listed here. Greco is our Italian platform. We are bringing that platform to more states within the U.S., and we're beginning the effort to bring that product category north of the border into Canada. The second on the page on the bottom is our Asian Foods business.
We are expanding that capability to more states within the U.S. and taking share profitably. Our supply chain is performing. That is the punchline. We are significantly improving our net promoter score to our customers. That will result in increased customer retention and increased penetration with the customers that we serve. Most importantly is the bullet next to it, which is we have significantly improved our sales force colleague retention, which has been a challenge year to date in fiscal 2025. We are back to extremely healthy from a supply chain, excuse me, sales consultant retention perspective, and that will become a tailwind as we turn into fiscal 2026.
An outcome measure from the things that I've said on the left-hand side of the chart is that we are winning more net new business in our local space than at any other point in time in the company's history, with the exception of the snapback period of COVID. We are winning new business at accelerated rates, and that will become a tailwind again as we look into 2026. This is a bit of a busy chart, but if you break it down, it's actually four different things, which I'll quickly highlight each of them. The top left is sales colleague investment. Kenny and I have made a discerned choice to add headcount onto the street from a selling perspective, and that began at approximately this time last year, and we're building our headcount slowly over time. Those colleagues add to our ability to grow our sales profitably.
The top right is capacity expansion, and I've highlighted just a few examples of net new distribution centers, which increase our capacity to grow and serve our customers. On that chart is Allentown, Pennsylvania, which is intended to help pull volume away from our Metro New York facility so Metro New York can focus on downtown Manhattan, and to pull volume out of our Philadelphia facility so that our Philadelphia facility can focus on downtown Philly. Allentown is increasing the ability to serve that population-dense northeast corridor. We're opening a new facility in Tampa, Florida. It's a fast-growing market in the U.S. Lots of people moving there. We have huge potential to profitably grow our business. The two European examples that are shown here, the Irish flag is Belfast. We have a great business in the Republic of Ireland. We underserve Northern Ireland.
We're essentially doing long-distance cross-docking through Belfast. We're opening a large modern facility this summer in Belfast to be able to profitably grow that business. The Swedish flag is on the southern tip of the country. New opportunity. We have a great facility in Stockholm. We need to better serve the southern part of Sweden, and we will do so through that building. Each of those investments focused on, again, profitably growing the business. Bottom left, specialty. We've talked about growing with produce, growing with protein. The chart shows that when our customers buy product from our broadline entity plus one specialty business, they spend three times more. If they spend on two of our specialty businesses, think fresh produce and custom-cut proteins, they actually spend six times more.
We are doing very good work to increase the number of customers buying cross-channel, which then wraps up to the bottom right, which are selling initiatives. I have already spoken about Sysco Your Way. Two other programs that we are bullish on, their positive ability to impact 2026, is our pricing agility work to increase the ability of our local field sales force to react in the spot moment to a customer need, leveraging a pricing technology that allows us to do so with profit discipline. We have a loyalty program called Sysco Perks. We are rebooting that program this summer to triple our focus on service experience for those best customers. Think how Marriott treats their best customers. Think how United Airlines, as an example, treats their best customers.
It's taking our best customers, putting them from a service perspective on a shelf at a level far above everyone else. They reward you with loyalty over time as a result. This is my last slide, and here are some longer-term growth opportunities for our business. Versus Sysco Brand, it is a powerhouse within our company. For our local business, it's more than 50% of the cases we sell to our customers are Sysco-branded private label products. We are far more profitable in Sysco Brand than we are with national brand products, growing at an 11% CAGR, and it's an $18 billion business just to itself. Our international business, we're standing here today in France. We are growing our international business top and bottom line double digits, which is a faster rate of growth than our core domestic U.S. business.
We have many, many years of compelling growth in front of us internationally. On the far right, I have already spoken about specialty, so I will not belabor. You can see the specialty banners across the bottom of the page. We have long-term M&A potential to go along with expanding that specialty reach and capability over time. With that, I am going to turn over to Kenny. He is going to come up, and I have one more chart that I will cover after Kenny is done. Kenny, over to you.
Great. Thanks, Kevin. Good morning and hello, everyone. It is great to be back, as Kevin said. You know, you just heard Kevin talk about three things. Number one, our leadership position in a growing and attractive industry, right? Number two, our strong track record for long-term success.
Number three, how our balance of initiatives are driving near-term momentum and long-term growth. During my presentation, I will add additional color and insight on how these items translate to our financial performance, mainly around the P&L, the balance sheet, cash flow, and ROIC. Take a look at this page. Let's start with the key piece. Our local case growth volume has continued to improve sequentially versus Q3. We are on track versus our recently provided guidance, which is, and let me remind you, for the full year, top line, 3% growth, adjusted EPS, at least 1% growth. With one more month to go, we are confident in our guide. As seen on this slide, we've achieved strong performance in each of the past four years. This is across both top line and bottom line.
If you take a giant step back since FY 2021, you can see that our efforts have yielded CAGRs of 12% on sales and roughly 32% CAGR on EPS. Sysco has proven to be a resilient business and are able to grow across various market conditions. The consistent performance also includes strong operating leverage, where our gross profit is growing faster than operating expenses, and our bottom line is growing faster than our top line. The attractive return profile here you can see includes the number one market share position in a growing industry. Importantly, size and scale matters, as Kevin just talked about. The size and scale renders the following: leading sales and industry, leading margins, free cash flow, ROIC. The fifth one is really important, especially now, the only IG balance sheet in the entire industry.
These leading industry metrics are a position of strength, and it helps illustrate our strong quality of earnings. I do like this chart a lot. It's one of my favorite slides. If you take a look at this slide, our superior performance relative to our average industry peers can be clearly demonstrated across both the income statement and the balance sheet. Our competitive advantages, coupled with operational rigor, really allows us to have that spread that you see on the page. Let's first talk about the income statement. If you look at the left part of the chart, you can see that gross margins last year was roughly 18.5%, and that is 1.3 times higher than the average core peer. That's really driven by our size and scale.
If you move your eyes across the board, you can see on operating margins, it's roughly 4%, and that is 1.6 times higher than the average core peer. So what's driving it? Here at Sysco, we have levers across our P&L. On the GP side, you have items like strategic sourcing, utilizing total team selling to drive higher margin specialty sales while leveraging the broadline scale and driving international growth as well, because that comes with a higher margin attachment rate. But we also remain focused on operational expense levers as well, mainly supply chain, where we actually leverage the efficiencies across the improved retention, as well as labor productivity, structural cost out, as well as optimization within our corporate expenses. These are meaningful and structural advantages that show up across the P&L. Now, let's talk about the balance sheet.
We are industry leading in terms of cash flow conversion from EBITDA. So EBITDA to OCF operating cash flow is roughly 70%, and EBITDA to free cash flow is roughly 50%. On the right side of the page, you can see that our free cash flow annually is around $2 billion. That is almost three times higher than the average core peer. Given the fact that we have robust cash generation, we have the luxury to do both, invest in our business and reward our shareholders via share repurchase and roughly 3%+ on dividend yield, which is a true differentiator in our space. More to come on that one. ROIC. Couple IG balance sheet with ROIC. That is how Kevin and I approach day-to-day activity.
ROIC is a true differentiator for us in this space, as it allows us to execute against four things: deliver today, build for tomorrow, at the same time, weather any instability or storm that passes through, and then fourth, last but not least, reward our shareholders. Our approach is disciplined yet flexible with three key focus areas. Number one, leverage our size and scale as the industry leader. This includes growth and continued efforts with structural cost out to drive org efficiencies. Number two, ROIC for Kevin and I is not just all about maximized returns. It also includes strategically reallocating capital towards higher returning assets, business activity, all while optimizing working capital. And third, executing on long-term M&A.
We have a strong track record on delivering accretive M&A with a focus on enhancing our global product portfolio, specifically in our specialty space, and growing in markets with leading share positions. To put a bow around this page, if you take a step back, our ROIC mindset and the ways of working is driving our total company to be roughly 400 basis points higher than the average consumer staple sector and roughly two times our average core peer. Looking forward, our plan is simple: drive value creation by maintaining the best in class in ROIC and growth, which is layering in incremental growth each year, which compounds over time. All of our efforts are supported by a balanced approach to capital allocation, which is consistent in discipline as we leverage our ROIC mindset to ensure capital deployed yields optimal return on various asset classes.
First, we will invest in our business for growth. We are planning for CapEx to be approximately 1% of sales annually. This consists of both growth and maintenance CapEx, which we will optimize over time. Second, we are maintaining our investment-grade balance sheet and operate within that 2.5-2.75 times net leverage ratio. Lastly, we are committed to rewarding our shareholders via share repo and dividends. Our robust cash flow generation and strong balance sheet affords us the financial tools and flexibility to make the right decision as we seek to grow our business today and over time in the long run. If you look at the page in front of you, approximately $3 billion in annual operating cash flow serves as the source, the engine that powers our long-term capital allocation capabilities, whether it's investing in our business or returning capital back to shareholders.
The durability of Sysco's balance sheet and liquidity profile are noteworthy and impressive and serve as a powerful tool for long-term value creation. This is particularly important, especially against a dynamic backdrop in which we're seeing today. Furthermore, on the page, you can see that our liquidity position right now is roughly $4 billion, which offers a meaningful headroom with a cushion of more than two times of our minimum liquidity threshold. This robust liquidity profile unlocks meaningful capabilities for Sysco from a perspective of supporting operational continuity, growth, and resiliency across a variety of operating environments. You know, this is a great chart as well. Since 2015, the past 10 years, you can see that Sysco is on track to cumulatively return close to $20 billion back to shareholders through the end of FY 2025.
Now, this is a meaningful number as to put in perspective, this is more than half of our current market cap. This remains an important piece of the Sysco investment thesis. Our commitment to this practice is evidenced by the $1.25 billion of share repo for this year, with $550 million in Q4, which is this quarter alone. From a capital return perspective, we're also committed to long-term growth of our dividend. Most recently, we increased our quarterly dividend by 6%, and we remain a proud member of the Dividend Aristocrat Club, and we're on track to deliver our 56th year of increased growth in payouts. As you think about our dividend outlook, we are supported by a 40-50% dividend payout ratio as it relates to adjusted EPS.
Given the robust nature and cash generation profile that we have in our company, I would naturally expect our dividend to grow in line and commensurate with EPS growth over time as we maintain our payout ratio. In closing, we are confident we have the right team and focus in place to execute against the last month of 2025. Again, we are confident with our guidance, and we're confident that we will continue to drive continual improvements in our financial performance. This will build on our track record the past four years, you saw earlier, of double-digit growth on both top line and bottom line. We can deliver today and build for tomorrow. Our investments are well laddered and support the long-term view of our business, which includes a TSR for our shareholders of 9-11%. This is a great time to be at Sysco.
We like our position. Thank you for your support. With that, I'll pass it back to Kevin for closing remarks.
Okay, great. Thank you, Kenny. Just one wrap-up slide, just why we believe Sysco is a very compelling investment. We kind of check boxes across the spectrum of things that are very interesting for an investor. We're the number one player in a large and growing sector. The fundamental health of food away from home is a strong sector. If you're concerned about the impact of consumer confidence and potential recession on the restaurant space, we have a large non-restaurant business. If you're looking for a flight to safety, see the comments that Kenny made about the strength of our balance sheet, the robust dividend that we pay, the opportunity to buy back our stock, invest in our business, and pay our dividend all at the same time.
To be really clear, we were the only profitable food service distributor that is a public name during the fiscal crisis that was COVID's impact on food away from home. Just repeat that point. In 2020, we were profitable as an entity, and we do not anticipate an economy looking anything like what we were dealing with back in 2020 when our business went down 65%. In fact, the last recession, I think our sales were down 1.2% in the year of the last recession. This is a resilient business. Food is essential. People say, well, going out to eat might not be. Given how time-starved consumers are, we actually view our sector as a very, very resilient sector.
Just last but not least on this chart is that strong track record of growing our dividend that Kenny just covered, industry-leading profitability, and we absolutely have the opportunity to accelerate our growth profitably as we look out over the next 1, 5, 10, 20 + years, given the growth factors that I chatted about earlier. With that, we're going to turn it over to Lauren for questions. Lauren, over to you.
Thank you, guys. I'm going to start on the local case growth side. Kenny, I believe you mentioned local case volume sequentially improving. Can you guys talk about what you've seen through April and May, how much you attribute some of the improvement to the Sysco-specific initiatives relative to what we're seeing in the broader industry?
And then just overall, talk about your confidence in being able to continue to improve that local case growth performance.
Sure. Maybe I'll start with this. I'm going to repeat what Kenny said. The overall marketplace has improved Q4 versus Q3, and Sysco's specific performance has improved from Q4 versus Q3. We're not going to quote % on that regard today. We'll do that on July 29 when we have our Q4 call. That rate of improvement both in the industry at Sysco gives us the confidence to say with confidence that we will deliver upon our earnings guidance that Kenny just walked us through. We're pleased to see the improvement in foot traffic to restaurants, and we're pleased to see the performance improvement at Sysco from a volume perspective in our most profitable sector.
As we think about both the ending of this year and, as importantly, the jump off to fiscal 2026, I just want to emphasize a few things. What has to be true in order for us to have positive case growth in local? Number one is our sales force. It is stabilizing the retention of our sales force and improving the selling effectiveness of our sales force. I just want to repeat what I said back at the podium. We have absolutely stabilized the retention of our colleagues. That problem is behind us. We are still working through the customer loss that occurred from prior colleague turnover. For those that do not live in our space, if a colleague leaves Sysco and goes to work for a competitor, they tend to bring some other customer business with them to that competitor. Twenty twenty-five was a tough year for us.
We made a compensation change. Our turnover increased, and that produced a headwind for our business. As we pivot into 2026, that headwind has the opportunity to pivot to become a tailwind. That is topic number one. We have improved the stability and retention of our colleague workforce. Topic two tied to that is the hiring that we have been doing. Our new hires are moving up the productivity curve at a healthy clip. They are delivering the rate of profitable growth that we expect and need from them. That is topic number one, Salesforce. Topic two, our specific initiatives. I mentioned several of them on the stage a few moments ago. Sysco Your Way is an absolute winner worldwide in every single geography that we have moved forward with that initiative. We will continue to expand to new neighborhoods.
I mentioned on stage we are rebooting our Perks loyalty program to make it even more focused on our top customers, our best customers. I mentioned United at the podium. United has a premier service program for their top customers, and you are absolutely treated differently if you're in that program than GenPop. That's exactly what we want our best customers to experience from Sysco: a higher rate of on time, a higher rate of fulfillment, preferred delivery service windows, at-your-call service from a sales consultant 24 by 7, et cetera, et cetera. These are things that will make a difference for our top customers. And price agility, as I mentioned, that's another core fundamental initiative for next year. So that's number two initiatives. And number three is investments.
I showed on the chart the new facilities that are coming live, the investments we're making in technology specifically to improve the CRM, which fuels the work focus of our sales force. Those investments will pay dividend. Last but not least is the longer-term growth initiatives, the expansion of our international business from a capabilities perspective. As I mentioned, in every country that we are running the Sysco play, we are moving into the number one position from a market share perspective in improving the profit rate of international. With that, Kenny, I'll toss to you for any additional comments you'd like to make.
Yeah, I'll say a few things, and you can hear and sense the confidence in Kevin and my voice in terms of local and the progress made. Here's two additional color points. One is ROIC.
I talked a lot about that in my presentation, but that is the same way we think about from an SC, Sales Consultants Deployment standpoint. Right now, because of the fact that we are very deliberate on when and where we deploy the SCs, we're actually seeing expectations on growth hitting our own expectations right now. That gives us confidence that as the SCs climb the productivity ladder, as Kevin talked about, that will further yield greater attrition from a sales standpoint. In terms of the productivity curve, you remember most of the SCs added on our books today, right now, they came in towards the back half, the end of last fiscal year, and also throughout this year as well. Many of them are actually entering the 12-18 months timeframe. Now, the SC's productivity curve isn't binary. It doesn't change overnight.
It changes over time. But the biggest jump in productivity, i.e., revenue per SC, happens in that 12-18 months frame. So a lot of them are actually entering that timeframe, and we do expect to see a lift on that. The second thing I would say is there's definitely indicators out there that we track closely to give us confidence. Retention is improving, as Kevin said. That is a big indicator. We have more net new customers than we ever did. And today's new customers are tomorrow's penetration. Last but not least, our NPS scores right now are rising every period as well. That is a good indicator, given the fact that our service levels are at top notch right now.
Great. Thanks. I'm going to shift over to international. Performance across the international segment has been consistently strong.
Just talk about the drivers of the performance, how you're thinking about the long-term potential of the business, and both top line as well as what you're seeing on the margin side.
Would you mind grabbing the remote quick?
Oh, sure.
We are very, very pleased with our international performance. I'm just going to go back to a slide while I'm talking. When I joined the company five and a half years ago, frankly, first question, second question, third question from investors are, why are you in this international business? It's a drag on the profitability of the company. Is it a distraction for management? You should consider selling it. It's your predecessor that got you into this business. You should get out. What I'm very pleased to report is now, five years later, we get that question 0% of the time.
The question we get from long-only European investors is, how big could it be? What countries might you be interested in? The why is the proof of the pudding behind us. We are growing our international business, top and bottom line, at a faster rate than our core domestic U.S. business. We have years and years and years of runway still to go where our current country international business can grow meaningfully faster, top and bottom line. The profitability improvement that has come from international is significant. Kenny shared with some investors this morning. It was a 2%. EBIT is a percent of sales business. It is double that. As we look at wrapping up the year, we are in with a strong track record of equaling our current total company profitability.
There are no structural issues in Europe that will prevent us to get to our targeted rate of profitability. The one country on this map, and I wanted to come back to it, that we were the weakest in was actually the country that we are currently in, France. What we are excited about with France specifically, if you look at the total addressable market, it is the second highest number on the page. It is a $23 billion total addressable market. This is a foodie country, high GDP per capita. There is not a clear number one. There is not a Sysco in France. The business is meaningfully distributed across a large number of distributors. There is not one large dominant broadline provider. There tends to be like a meat person and a dairy person and a dry goods person.
We have an opportunity in this country to be that player, to be the full solution. We are profitable in France, which I could not have said four or five years ago. This is a profitable country. It is well on its road to healthy. We are bullish about our capabilities here and across Europe. What excites me even more for the long term, and we are not making any form of announcement today, but you can see there are a bunch of countries that we are not in, even contiguous countries in Europe that we are not in. My main point is we have proven that every country that we go into, if and when we run the Sysco play, we can deliver the rate of profit that we deserve. We can deliver the type of growth that we expect.
We move into that number one position over time. The future is bright on international. Kenny, anything to add?
Yeah, thanks, Kevin. Just a few things. As Kevin said, our margins were roughly 2% here, operating income margins. A few years back and last quarter, we were 3.7%. We had literally six quarters of straight-up double-digit operating income growth for six straight quarters. That's point number one. Even though, yes, Canada and U.K. are our biggest markets, the good news here is that the growth is broad-based. It's every market. Every market in Q3 grew close to double-digit. That's really important for us. The third piece is, and some of you may remember, we did a couple of recent M&A deals as well in Ireland and in Great Britain around the specialty space. Those two are doing really well. Why is that?
Because we're number one in those spaces. When we go to market, we have the beauty of total team selling, leveraging our broadline scale and our depth of specialty coming together to differentiate the Sysco product and assortments. That's going really well as well. The last thing I would say is that there is no structural back-to-margins. There's nothing structural that would impede our ability to be roughly 5%-6% similar to our U.S. in terms of operating income. Great. I'll build on that a little bit. On the M&A side, and you mentioned countries that you're not in, it seems like international has now earned the right for acquisitions. Just how you're thinking about M&A, both in the U.S., what you look for in a target, balancing that with international.
Any other commentary that you want to make on just your broader capital allocation priorities and the balance there? Yeah, maybe I can start with just capital allocation. I'll dive into M&A. Capital allocation, just reminding everybody, as I said, invest in our business, maintain our IG balance sheet, and any excess cash reward our shareholders. One thing I would say is the following. Kevin and myself, we view ourselves as asset managers. Given the environment we're in right now, which is dynamic, we're being very mindful and disciplined in terms of looking at all parts of our cash flow statement, including, for example, CapEx. Every year, we used to spend about, we spend about a billion dollars or so rounding here, 1% of sales. For us, given the environment we're in, we may be pacing that appropriately as well.
It's the right thing to do as a business. Great companies do this. Right now, it doesn't mean we stop investing. We just be very, very disciplined on where and how we invest. Oh, by the way, right now, we've invested with 10 new facilities, new SEs coming in. We're also at the same token, ensuring the return on investments is happening. The third thing I would say is that on M&A, we always say this. We don't buy companies to be bigger. We make those companies successful along with Sysco. You're right, Lauren. Markets, certain markets, they have the right. They're open for business right now in terms of M&A. There are certain markets that are not right now. As Kevin talked about, France, for example, they're in the midst of a self-help transformation. It's going really well right now.
I want to see a couple more wins there before I think about M&A. Again, we're very disciplined in terms of how and when, given the fact that there's a hurdle rate that has to be evident before we do so. In terms of what we look for, usually it's either a smaller broadliner or a specialty, which we can tuck in nicely or fold in nicely to our existing portfolio. Again, the best ROIC is leveraging the assets you already have. Got us real quick examples in Europe from an M&A perspective. In Ireland, which is the most profitable international business, we have number one in broadline by far, but we didn't have the specialty assets that we have in the United States.
We bought a fresh produce company, and we will now integrate it with our broadline entities so that we can serve both the custom-cut, bespoke, unique needs of the premium produce customer as well as the broadline customer. We have proven in the U.S. how successful that will be. In Great Britain, we are number one in broadline. We did not have the custom-cut protein business, so hand-cut butchery and the like, dry aging, wet aging. We just bought a premium protein custom-cut shop. We will take that capability, and we will integrate it with our Brakes broadline business to be able to win specialty in addition to broadline. Pretty much in each and every country, we will fill out our capabilities over time. Bank is open in certain countries. France, as Kenny said, is doing a great job of its own self-help recovery.
It will earn the right for investment at the appropriate time. Longer term, again, nothing to report today. Longer term, there are countries that we are interested in. We have learned which countries are attractive. High total addressable market, high earnings per capita. Why is that important? Because you have more money to be able to spend when you go out to eat. A not clear dominant number one. If those three things are true, it is a very, very attractive marketplace for Sysco. It gives us the confidence in our longer-term growth. I will not keep bouncing the charts around, but that extraordinary free cash flow generation that Kenny referenced gives us the opportunity to make those types of investments over time.
We are pretty much out of time. Is there anything that you want to leave investors with before we end?
Yeah, from my standpoint, I mean, there's no better time to be at Sysco. That's what I leave it with. If you think about our balance sheet, think about our leverage ratio, think about just our robust liquidity profile. It's a company that has stability, and it also has a growth profile attached to it as well. It has a nice balance of that. I would also argue it's one of the more diversified portfolios that you will see as well from a product assortment standpoint, from a market standpoint as well, and from an industry standpoint too, right from healthcare to education to restaurants and the like. It's a great time to be as an investor. I'll be very concise. I promise we are extremely confident in the long-term success of our company to expand our leading marketplace position.
We're not satisfied with our local business. We have a very clear plan to improve that business. We believe fiscal 2026 is an opportunity to show the type of improvement in that business that we deserve and that our investors deserve. We're extremely committed to do that.
Kevin, Kenny, thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Lauren.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, everyone.
Thanks, all.