All righty, if we could all find our seats, we'll kick off our next presentation. It is my pleasure to welcome back US Foods to CAGNY. US Foods is a $20 billion+ market cap company that generated more than $39 billion in sales and increased their adjusted EPS over 26% in fiscal 2025. US Foods maintains a unique position in the industry as the only pure-play, U.S.-focused, broadline food service distributor with national scale. The company's differentiated go-to-market strategy focuses on the three fastest-growing and most profitable consumer types in the industry, customer types in the industry: independent restaurants, healthcare, and hospitality. Company is an industry leader in both digital and food innovation, providing its customers the right tools, resources, and products on time and in full.
Please join me in welcoming US Foods Chief Executive Officer, Dave Flitman. Dave, over to you.
Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to be at CAGNY for the second consecutive year. I'm Dave Flitman, as Andrew said, and I'll spend the next few minutes talking you through our great story. You can read the disclaimer page on your own. We're excited to be here. Just as we get started, one quick change to the agenda. Our Chief Financial Officer, Dirk Locascio, was scheduled to present with me today. He had a family emergency associated with the health of one of his parents, so Dirk is exactly where he needs to be with his family today. So I'll cover the slides that he was prepared to cover with you this afternoon. The first part of the presentation, I've got five clear key messages for you.
First of all, we are focused on growing the most profitable and fastest-growing segments in all of food service distribution in the United States. That is independent restaurants, healthcare, and hospitality. Secondly, we have large national scale, and we're an industry leader in what remains a highly fragmented industry today. Third, we are driving with the most consistency in the industry, top and bottom line growth, and doing the best job of leveraging that top-line growth to bottom-line profitability. As a result of that, we have a robust and growing free cash flow base that we are deploying to the business first, secondly, to tuck-in acquisitions, and third, and we'll talk about this, returning capital to shareholders. Importantly, we are executing well and delivering industry-leading EPS growth that we've delivered for the past several years, and we expect that to continue for a long time to come.
So first, let's talk about our simple four-pillar strategy, and here it is on one page: culture, service, growth, and profit. We built this early in my tenure three years ago to align our team and determine exactly what we needed to do to execute well. I won't read the elements of it to you, but we'll refer to it throughout the presentation. Equally important to our strategy is how we execute, and I love these five cultural beliefs. They're the hallmark of how we deliver our results, which is just as important as the results themselves. Let me bring this all to life for you and run a quick video.
All right, well, I get excited and also hungry every time I see that video. So we have taken the roots of this great company, which many of you don't know, we can trace back nearly 170 years to Reid, Murdoch selling provisions to dreamers chasing the California Gold Rush in the 1850s. From that, through the course of many decades, we've built this company into the great company you see represented here. In the bottom left, we have 76 distribution centers across the U.S., and importantly, we cover all of the major MSAs. We also have 22 Stock Yards operations, which are meat cutting and seafood operations spread across the country. We've got 30,000 associates. As Andrew said, we delivered just under $40 billion in revenue last year, and we are servicing 250,000 customers every day. In the bottom right, you can see the breakdown of revenue and importantly, the industry structure.
So even given the scale that we've got in the company, we only own about 10% of the market share in food service distribution. I underscore that point because we have a long runway of growth ahead of us. In the center part of that, the center wheel, it's important that we are serving the fastest growing and most profitable segments of the industry. If you combine the restaurant space, that represents about 56% of our revenue, and importantly, healthcare and hospitality are about 27%. So those three targeted segments that I spoke about represent about 83% of all of our revenue. Scale matters in food service distribution. Importantly, two key elements really matter if you need the scale to serve your customers well. That is center of the plate, so think about proteins and seafood and also fresh produce.
Those two product categories represent over 40% of the revenue of the company. So we've got great scale to serve our customers well. In addition to what we do ourselves to drive the growth in the company, we are benefiting from the trend that you see here, which I've shown for the last decade. But importantly, this trend in food away from home, growing faster than food at home, has persisted since 1970, with all but a handful of years. That is a very nice tailwind to expand growth in an industry that continues to take share. That translates to what you see on the left-hand portion of this slide. So since 2019, food service distribution in the U.S. has grown from $306 billion to $377 billion last year, about 23% growth.
It's important to understand those three targeted customer types that we are focused on represent about 75% of the growth that we've seen in the industry over the last six years. So we are fishing where the fish are and expect to drive growth for a long time to come. I talked about scale and the importance of scale in this industry, and what you see on the bar charts on the right-hand portion of the slide from 2019 to 2025, in the green portion of that, that's the combination of our share and our two large public peers. And as you can see, we've gained 600 basis points of share to the detriment of the rest of the industry.
You can also see on this slide, just how fragmented the industry remains, and so I expect that share growth to continue for the big three for a long time to come. So let's zoom out and talk a little bit about our key differentiators. There's eight on the page. I won't drain the slide for you. You can read them, but there's a few that I wanted to point out. Andrew mentioned in his introduction, the one I feel the best about is we're the only pure-play U.S.-focused food service distributor with national scale. That matters. Focus matters, simplicity of our business model matters, and it helps us tremendously with execution. Secondly, we are focused on the three most profitable and fastest-growing customer types in the industry.
We've got an industry-leading digital ecosystem, and we've been the industry leader in digital for well more than a decade now. I'm gonna talk about that at length, but it's a great differentiator for us. It drives customer loyalty, and it also makes it very easy to do business with US Foods compared to the broader base of our competition. I spoke of, of our four-pillar strategy earlier. Underlining that, we have a very proven operational play, playbook that we're executing to deliver that top and bottom line growth. We're leveraging that to industry-leading adjusted EPS growth, and we will be an earnings compounder, not just through the length of this long-range plan, but for many years to come.
Okay, let's look at those three targeted customer types. Why are we focused on them, and why are we doing so well? First of all, we have deep expertise in each one of these areas. We've been at this for a very, very long time. Not only do we have human resources, but we've got great digital capability that we've deployed. If you think about independent restaurants, we've been growing for 19 consecutive quarters and taking market share in that space. Underpinning that is our digital MOXē platform, which we introduced about 3.5 years ago now, and there's two things that MOXē does. First of all, it helps our salespeople be more productive, 'cause it helps our customers serve themselves efficiently and effectively, and importantly, because of that, it takes friction out of the relationship with the customer. We become much easier to do business with. Secondly is healthcare. We are the industry leader in healthcare and have been for a long time.
We have a lot of healthcare professionals on staff, including nutritionalists and people that have been in the industry for a very long time. Analogous to MOXē, we have a platform called Vitals, which helps optimize patient feeding costs, helps the operator, healthcare operators, track not only their costs, but also the nutritionals for the patients. We built that in-house. No one else has anything like it, and it is a real differentiator as we go to market. Then we've been accelerating our focus in hospitality, took share every quarter in 2025, and we leverage that differentiation with large-scale GPO relationships to help us access that customer base and drive significant growth. On the right-hand side, you see the relative contribution margin of each one of those segments, those first two, independent restaurants and healthcare.
I put on here specifically chain restaurants, so you can see the relative profitability of what we're focused on compared to what's out there in the restaurant space. This is our data, but this margin profile also mirrors the industry. As we think about our customer value proposition, we talk often, we do a lot of customer surveys, and our customers tell us what's important to them, and they've told us three things: They want the product availability at scale and high quality that we bring. They want more tools and capability to make it easy to do business with us and serve themselves. And importantly, they want great service, including more frequent deliveries. So what I'd like to do in each one of these areas is just give you an example as we walk through these next several slides.
First of all, I love our exclusive brand portfolio. We've been at that for a long time. We have a tiered good, better, and best, as you see in the middle portion of this slide. Importantly, we've got 22 exclusive brands representing more than 10,000 products, and we develop those through a process we call Scoop. So twice a year, we've got culinary experts that scour the globe, literally scour the globe for the next trends in culinary needs in all areas of product capability. We bring those products to life twice per year, and we're constantly innovating. Importantly, we design these products with quality first, but secondly, these products cost less for our customers than buying a manufacturer's brand. As a result of that, they're also more profitable for the company. So it's a win-win. Our salespeople are comped more to sell our exclusive brands.
Our customers win because these are great products that they can buy at a lower cost, and the company makes more money. That's why you see our exclusive brand portfolio now represents about 35% of the company's revenue. And importantly, in areas like independent restaurants, we've penetrated our exclusive brands at a much higher rate. In fact, we just covered last week that we were 54% penetrated with independent restaurants, a record level for us in the fourth quarter of last year. Secondly, is MOXē. I mentioned earlier, we've been the industry leader in digital for a very long time, more than a decade. In the fall of 2022, we launched MOXē. It was the first one-stop shop for digital e-commerce in the industry. We were the first to market. We continue to plow money and effort and resource into it to maintain that industry leadership.
As you can see on this slide, our customers love it. 86% satisfaction rate. We are now nearly 90% penetrated with our customers all over the company, all over the country. And importantly, in the bottom part of this slide, there are two reasons why we drive our digital e-commerce. First, it helps our salespeople be more productive, and you can see there's a 30% reduction in the work that the sellers have to do. Why is that important? Because our sales force can then go find the next customer, more importantly, continue to build those customer relationships and find out how to further penetrate those customers. In the middle part there, you see that it results in more sales. That's why we do it. It helps our customers.
Our CIDO, who's fantastic, by the way, and thinks about the business first, he's got this saying, and he says, "The machine never gets tired of asking for the order." And I think that's at the heart of why you see that we grow faster where we penetrate our customers with digital commerce. And finally, and I love our Pronto platform. We introduced Pronto in 2018 to find new customers. It's a different service model than the company has. Let me just explain that to you. It combines the scale and the assortment that we have in our broadline business with a very flexible service model. These are smaller, more frequent deliveries with later cut-off times.
The important part of that is there's a portion of the market that we hadn't historically been able to compete with, and that's specialty suppliers who were into customers three, four, or five times a week with very small orders, and very late cut-off times. And where they found their success was in fresh product. So think about that center of the plate and protein offering. We have those great products. We just didn't have the service offering and a way to get that to market with the capability that some of the specialty suppliers have. Well, we figured it out in the form of Pronto. And what I'm disclosing here today, we talked about achieving $1 billion in revenue in Pronto last year, but we haven't shown the ramp-up previous.
So you can see in the last three years, we have tripled the revenue of Pronto, and we believe it's gonna be a long-time growth driver for the company for many years to come. So let me just tie a bow around what we delivered in 2025. You can see that listed in each one of our four pillars of our strategy. I'm not gonna drain the slide, but a couple I wanted to highlight. In the area of culture, we improved our safety performance by 16% last year, and that's following a 20% improvement in 2024. Keeping our people safe, our 30,000 associates, is paramount to everything that we do. In the area of service, we talked about MOXē. What we didn't talk about is the digital, AI that we are embedding within MOXē.
We talked last week on our earnings call about one capability, where MOXē can now take any sort of text document or even a handwritten note and immediately translate that in the system into a customer order. This is great capability that saves our customers and our sellers a lot of time. In the area of growth, we've talked about gaining share in the three targeted customer types. Over on the right-hand side of this slide, where we talk about the importance of produce in the center of the plate proteins, we grew those last year with independent restaurants, 150 basis points faster than the market grew, and over the last two years, we've grown at 400 basis points faster. So we're getting great traction in those important product categories.
And finally, we achieved record-adjusted EBITDA last year of $1.93 billion, and also, while we did that, we expanded our EBITDA margins by 30 basis points. We've done that by driving consistent productivity on operating expenses and importantly, continued to expand our gross profit through our self-help initiatives. The last year was not a flash in the pan. So these are our results for the last three years, and you can see we have compounded revenue growth at a 5% CAGR. And through that self-help work that I just spoke about, we have delivered a 14% adjusted EBITDA CAGR over that same period. And through our growing cash flow and the way we've deployed that to share repurchases, we have leveraged that to a 23% adjusted EPS CAGR, and we expect all of those trends will continue going forward.
So 2025 was a very strong start to our three-year long range plan, and what you see on the left-hand side, in the left-hand column, is our algorithm that we committed to in June of 2024 for the 2025-2027 timeline. And you can see on the right-hand side what our results delivered last year: a 4.1% top-line growth, 11% adjusted EBITDA margin growth, 30 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion. And importantly, we led the industry last year in adjusted diluted EPS growth of 26%, and we expect that to continue. We also generated $1.4 billion of operating cash flow, repurchased $930 million of stock, and made two tuck-in acquisitions for about $130 million last year. We also reduced our net leverage down to 2.7x from 2.8x in 2024, and we now have the best leverage profile of anyone in the industry.
Okay, I'm going to switch over and talk about our financials in a little bit more detail, and this is the portion that Dirk would have covered had he been here. Four key messages here. We are driving superior financial performance with our differentiated strategy, and importantly, we've been focused for the last three years on operational rigor and consistent execution. We've got great alignment of our team around our strategy, and we are executing very, very well. We're growing market share, as we've discussed, and we're accelerating productivity and combining that with gross margin expansion to deliver that consistent double-digit earnings growth.
We've got a robust and growing operating cash flow that we are deploying first to the business, secondly, to tuck-in acquisitions when they're appropriate and when they're available, and third, and importantly, returning capital to shareholders, and we'll talk about that. And we believe we are on track to deliver this long-range plan and can continue to deliver that algorithm well beyond 2027. Last week, we reported both fourth quarter and full year 2025 results, and as you can see, very much consistent in the fourth quarter with what we delivered for the full year. So in the fourth quarter, our sales were up 3.3%, 11.1% adjusted EBITDA growth, EBITDA margin expanded 35 basis points, and just under 24% adjusted diluted EPS growth.
On the right-hand side, you can see very consistent numbers for the full year, and again, leveraging that 30 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion and EBITDA growth of 11% to industry-leading adjusted EPS growth of over 26%. Importantly, we have disclosed and are consistently driving earnings per case. That's how we think about the business, not just in dollar terms, but relative to how many cases that we sell. In the fourth quarter, we adjust, we grew our adjusted EBITDA per case by $0.22 and $0.21 for the entire year last year. And as you look from 2019, importantly, we've grown $0.63 of adjusted EBITDA per case or 40% over the last six years.
We've leveraged that earnings growth to generate strong cash flow of almost $1.4 billion in 2025, and you can see on the right-hand side of the slide here how we deployed that. We invest first in the business, so we put a record level of cash CapEx back into the business, $410 million. I mentioned the two tuck-ins that we did, $130 million, and importantly, repurchased $934 million of shares. We have been very consistently repurchasing shares, and over the last three years, we've repurchased $2.2 billion and returned that capital to our shareholders. M&A is an important element of our growth strategy, but it's aimed at tuck-ins.
So think about smaller opportunities within existing markets that help us do one of two things: either take miles out of our distribution network and become more effective and efficient, or importantly, add capacity and help us improve our local market density. You can see our investment criteria here, which I won't read to you, but we are a seasoned acquirer. Culture is very important to us, strong management teams are very important to us, and the mix of business within these targets, importantly, aimed at independent restaurants, are also very important to us. We have a robust pipeline of more than 100 targets, representing $15 billion. The important thing to note is we leverage our cash flow and either deploy that to tuck-in M&A or to share repurchases, depending upon the opportunity. It's really hard to predict when the right target will be ready to sell.
Some of these take years of relationship building. But when they happen, we've got the cash flow to pull them into US Foods. Last week, we also gave guidance for 2026, and I'll hit a couple highlights here. 4%-6% sales growth. Importantly, that is underpinned by 2.5%-4.5% case growth in total for the company. Underneath that, we committed to 4%-7% independent restaurant case growth this year. We're leveraging that top-line sales growth to, again, double-digit EBITDA growth of 9%-13% and 18%-24% adjusted diluted EPS growth. It's important to note, we do have a 53rd week in 2026, and that adds about 1% to both our case growth and our EBITDA growth ranges that you see here.
We have delivered profitable growth quite consistently across multiple years. You can see for the last three years, that sales growth has been 5% CAGR, as I mentioned earlier, 14% adjusted EBITDA CAGR, and industry-leading 23% adjusted diluted EPS growth. All of that helped deliver more than 1,000 basis points of return on invested capital. We've got great earnings power. We are leveraging through our self-help initiatives, that top line growth to bottom line growth, and we expect this model will continue well into the future. Let's move away from earnings a little bit and talk about cash flow. I've spoken about the robust cash flow that we are generating.
In our 2025-2027 long-range plan, we committed to generating $4 billion+ of deployable capital, and we intend to spend about a third of that, 30% or so, reinvesting back into the business, about 20% towards tuck-in M&A. So think about, about $250 million towards tuck-in M&A every year. And then importantly, we committed to about $2 billion of capital returns to shareholders through share repurchases. And I already highlighted that we delivered $934 million of that in the first year, last year. Here's a slide that compares our performance, which is industry-leading, both in terms of top line growth and EBITDA margin expansion to our two large peers. So our two large peers that are public are compared to us on the, on the gray bars here.
So you can see our adjusted EPS growth compared to theirs. Importantly, our adjusted EBITDA growth. Importantly, we lead the industry in margin expansion over the past several years. We delivered 30 basis points last year compared to our two large peers at 4%--4 basis points. And importantly, we have grown our adjusted EBITDA margin by 110 basis points over the last three years to 4.9%. And you can see the combination of our two large peers last year. Now, all of that has resulted in us trading at a slight premium to our two large peers on a PE basis, on a forward-looking PE basis. I expect that will continue. When you think about many of the consumer staples companies, they trade at a much higher PE multiple. So as we continue to deliver and execute and leverage to that adjusted EPS growth that I covered, I expect that multiple will continue to expand over time.
We can move into some Q&A now, and I, I'll leave you with this slide. This is the algorithm we committed to over the three-year period of time in our 2024 Investor Day. 5% top-line sales CAGR, 10% adjusted EBITDA CAGR, at least 20 basis points per year of annual EBITDA margin expansion, and at least 20% adjusted diluted EPS growth. And in all cases, we've been exceeding those commitments in the first year.
All right, so let's open it up for Q&A.
Kelly?
Thank you. Thanks for the presentation, Dave. Was wondering if you could talk about the sales force, growth plans, which I don't think you touched on, and if at all, your AI tools change how you think about investing in the headcount there in coming years, or you really look at that as kind of more of an efficiency dynamic, which I think you talked about?
Yeah. Is mine or is this on? Can you hear me?
Yeah.
I appreciate the question, Kelly. So we believe the right level of headcount additions every year is in that mid-single digits, so think about 4%-6%. And over the last three years, that was 6%, then 5%, and almost 7% last year with some internal transfers. So I think that's the right way to think about it for the future for us. It's important that we grow organically with our sales force. The digital tools and the AI capability, that will help be a force multiplier for our sales force. That's the way I think about it. That's the way the organization thinks about it, helping them be more efficient and effective in what they do.
And that is why I believe we have some of the most productive sellers in the industry.
Jeff?
Thank you. Jeff Bernstein from Barclays. What I think a lot of people find most interesting about the segment is the tremendous tailwind you have from a market share opportunity perspective. So I think you said 38% in 2025, and that was 32% in 2019. So six years, 600 basis points makes it easy.
For the big three, Jeff.
The big three.
Yeah. Combined.
Just curious, the opportunity you see there, because that's not a very large share relative to other industries, where the big three might have a lot more than that. So one, what do you anticipate for the next 5 or 10 years? And two, like, are you surprised that the independents hold up as well as they do? Because it would seem like based on the tools you have, you have tremendous opportunities that some of the smaller players, for better or for worse, unfortunately, don't have.
Yeah, and I think the scale affords us the capability to buy well, importantly, invest in things like digital that some of the smaller players can't do. I think the smaller players compete mostly on two things. One is relationship, because they're there and they've known those customers in those markets for quite some time. And the other one is service. And that's why I'm so passionate about improving our service capability and not giving our customers a reason to look for someone else as a supplier. It's really, really important. No one has stood out consistently on service in this industry for a very, very long time, and that's why we're doing so much good, and we've reached all-time service levels in the company, but there's a lot more for us to do.
To your first part of your question around share, I expect more of the same. I think the scaled players, both through a combination of organic growth and M&A, will continue to take share in this industry as, as we roll it up, and importantly, outpace growth with the breadth and strength of our sales forces.
Karen?
Hi, Karen Holthouse from Citigroup. Yeah, I can appreciate you've talked a lot about AI tools on, you know, operations, efficiency, routing. How can they ultimately play into the service aspect of things? And are there, you know, tools out there, whether it's cameras watching palettes being, you know, put together, trucks being loaded, things that can help make sure you're getting, you know, the right things on the right truck every time? Thanks.
Yeah, appreciate the question, Karen. There's a lot of things that we can do around service. I'll give you one example. We're deploying robots within our operations right now to count our inventory. The deployment of those, they can count the inventory 100% accurately within 24 hours within each distribution center. You don't have the manual errors that get created by humans doing that. That's just one example. AI tools, similar to things that we've embedded in MOXē, for instance, where's my truck? So the customer can actually track their delivery individually. And what we've proven through the advent of AI and how we've embedded it in the tool, the tool is actually about 35% more accurate in telling the customer when the delivery will be there than our drivers are telling them when they're gonna show up.
So there's a lot of things that we can do. As you're aware, we are deploying advanced technology in our new Aurora operation around automation. I think there's two benefits that will come from that. One is productivity, obviously, but importantly, a much better service experience for our customers. So if you think about the manual nature of the selection of product that happens in our distribution centers, to the extent we can automate that, it eliminates errors, and the customer will see a much more consistent product and offering coming to their operations every day. So there's a lot-- There's really no end to how we're using AI and ways we can embed it for the good of our customers and our service levels.
Ann?
Thank you. Ann Gurkin with Davenport . I have two questions. One, very impressive slide saying the adjusted EBITDA per case growth up 40%. I think it was since 2019, up 10% over the past year. What is your level of confidence continuing that momentum beyond 2027, and what would be the key drivers behind expectations there? And then within the independent segment, you are bumping up on 54% sales from private label. Are you going to issue a new target, or is there any kind of timeline or strategy we should think about driving further private label penetration within the independent segment? Thank you.
Yeah. So, let me take those in reverse order. We're excited about our exclusive brands. We talked about the penetration. I think that the reason I'm so confident that there's no near-term ceiling is, and, and we talked about this a little bit last week on Ernie's call, about 25% of our independent customers are 75% or higher penetrator with our exclusive brands. So at 54% on average, it tells me we have a long runway of opportunity and growth there. And to your point around EBITDA per case, we are very much an execution and a self-help story, and we talked, earnings call after earnings call in all the public forums about all the self-help that we have and a long runway of that, both, in EBITDA margin expansion as well as operating expense productivity.
I expect that will transcend well beyond 2027, and you can expect this earnings profile to continue for a long time to come.
[audio distortion] Okay.
Can you hear me? Forgot to mention my name, Kelly Bania. I have one more for you. Was wondering if you could talk about private label. You mentioned your good, better, best portfolio. What's working in private label and what's not? You had one competitor mention they're a little under-penetrated in value and gonna be investing in kind of the value component of private label. So I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about how you feel positioned, what's working? Are all three cohorts working, and also the innovation front?
Yeah, they really are, and I think the hallmark of our success has been the long-standing approach that we've had for our private label, and we hadn't backed off on that for a very, very long time. This innovation team that I spoke about from the stage a few minutes ago has been in place for a very long time. These are culinary experts, very good at what they do, in driving innovation, very engaged with the customer base. As I said, they scour the globe for culinary trends, and they're doing that constantly and bringing new innovative thoughts to our sales team and to our customers. And so all three components of that good, better, and best are working well. We've had no challenges or issues. We're excited about it.
The only little blip we've had along the journey was during COVID, and that was just a purely a matter of supply when we couldn't get, you know, the products from the manufacturers. But other than that, we've got the sales force confidence exactly where it needs to be to lean into those brands.
Jeff?
Thank you. CAGNY is all about the consumer, and, you guys service the consumer through the restaurant industry, and I think the food away from home chart demonstrates the opportunity you have there to continue to grow. But can you share any thoughts just broadly on the consumer? You know, from a sales perspective, seems like that's the area where the industry has had a tougher time more recently. Now, clearly, you've still demonstrated you can beat your EBITDA and your EPS targets, even if sales are more challenging. But your perspective on the consumer and the outlook over the next twelve months relative to maybe the last twelve months, how you feel about that?
Yeah, I think pretty well documented. No new news here. I mean, the consumer's been under a lot of pressure for a long time. That showed up in reduced foot traffic in our industry for really the last 2.5 years, Jeff. And to your point, we've been executing well and significantly taking share and driving growth. I expect that that will continue. I think the consumer is still pressured. We were pretty encouraged in the third quarter in terms of what we saw, going into the government shutdown in terms of trends and momentum. Importantly, coming out of the fourth quarter, in the first several weeks of January, we had a very good and very strong momentum, and we're quite encouraged until Fern and a couple storms hit.
But the other important data point I would give you is coming out of that, now that we've got the weather behind us, we've seen a significant rebound right back to those trends that we saw in early January, including last week and so far to date this week. So we feel really good about that. Hopefully, that points to the improving health of the consumer. But I, I think it also speaks, Jeff, to the resilience of this industry. So you think about the consumer, even when they're under pressure, it doesn't cost as much money to go out to eat and enjoy a meal and relax a little bit, especially when you're under stress and tension, as it does to go on vacation or remodel your kitchen or buy a new car.
I think those things get under a lot of pressure, but people wanna go out and relax a little bit. And, the other data point I would give you is back during the Great Recession, our case volumes were flat and sort of a pandemic-like event. That's about as rough as things will get, and our EBITDA was only down mid-single digits, and I think that also underscores the resilience of the industry we're serving here.
Okay. No further questions in here. Please, join me in thanking US Foods for being here, and join us in the breakout. Thanks again.