Hello, and welcome to the OTCQX Best 50 Virtual Investor Conference. I'm Michael Kaiser, Head of Client Success Management at OTC Markets. On behalf of OTC, I'm pleased to have you join us. Today's presenters represent some of the top-performing companies on the OTCQX Best Market in 2025 based on share performance and volume. Our next presentation is a fireside chat with Ahold Delhaize. If you wish to ask a question, please submit it via the Q&A box on your screen. You can also view the company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking "Book a Meeting." Today, I'm excited to welcome Gabriella Potter, Director, Investor Relations at Ahold Delhaize, which trades in Amsterdam under the symbol AD and on the OTCQX under the symbols ADRNY and AHODF. Welcome, Gabriella. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Wonderful. Let's jump into it then. It would be great to start with a short history of Ahold, highlighting some of your key brands and how you've grown to where you are today. Sure. Ahold Delhaize was created 10 years ago. It was a merger of two different companies, one being a Dutch company called Ahold, and then the other a Belgian company called Delhaize. With that, it really brought together a portfolio of brands across the U.S. and Europe. Today, we have 17 different brands that operate in nine different countries. We have over 9,000 stores that serves over 70 million customers each week. If we look at our portfolio, our biggest region is really the U.S. We have 60% of our operations in the U.S., and we have five brands which hopefully some of our listeners today are familiar with. Our biggest brands are Food Lion and Stop & Shop, but we also have Giant Food, The GIANT Company, and Hannaford. In Europe, we operate in the Benelux region, as well as Central and Southeastern Europe. Our biggest brands are Albert Heijn in the Netherlands and Delhaize in Belgium. While most of our brands operate a traditional grocery store format, we do also have one unique brand in the Netherlands called bol, which does an online platform kind of similar to Amazon, in that regards. Maybe the last thing is, you know, we do always look for areas where we can continue to strengthen our position in the market. Our most recent addition was Profi, which we added last year. Great. That's quite a spectrum of geographies and amount of stores. You speak of your size and scale the company acts focused on acting small and being community-focused. Why is that mindset important to your success? Yeah. I think one of our strengths as a company is we have 17 different brands, and some of our brands have existed for quite a long time, over 150 years at our oldest brands, and we really have roots as your local operator. That gives you a very strong connection to your customer base, to your local communities. You really understand what's happening, what's important to them, and how you can address how you operate to meet those needs. But at the same time, we have size and scale as a multinational player. We're able to do things a bit more efficiently and effectively, which allows us to have a stable operational performance. It also gives us the opportunity to scale where we see successful ideas and concepts. One example that I would call out is if you take our brand in the Netherlands, where we have a very strong own brand assortment. We introduced a concept a few years ago called Price Favorites, which is really focused on those everyday low prices, the key items that you're going to put into your basket and making sure we were pricing them competitively with the market and making it very clear to the customer anytime they shopped in our store that they could find those products. We saw a lot of success and a strong response from the customer to this concept, and we've since scaled it to all of our European brands. That's really, I think, a nice way that we have the local connection, but when we see something successful, we can quickly roll that out to our other brands in an effective and an efficient way. That makes a lot of sense. It's almost like a test case that you can expand. Yes, exactly. Where things are working, tailor-fit to each geography. This is a great segue into talking about strategy overall. In late 2024, you announced your Growing Together strategy. It's your vision for the path through 2024. We've got a few questions about Growing Together, but— Sure. It'd be helpful to start with the key components of that strategy. Yeah. As you mentioned, in 2024, we introduced Growing Together, and really the focus of that is that we want to grow our brands and strengthen our position in the markets where we operate in. We've identified four key components that will help us drive that growth. First and foremost is investing in our winning customer value proposition. This is really about using our healthy and affordable products to strengthen our position with the customers. We wanna make sure that we're driving our own brand portfolio. We want to make sure that we are investing in our loyalty programs and our personalized offers, but also enhancing that omnichannel experience and how customers experience shopping when they're at our stores. The second component of our Growing Together strategy is densifying and growing in the markets where we operate. This is about capitalizing on opportunities to continue to do remodels, accelerate new store openings, especially in the U.S., but also capitalize on opportunities where we can add additional assets. For example, recently, we closed on the Delhaize transaction in Belgium, which adds 300 stores in more of the convenience format. Continuing to fill in where we can in the market, that's the next part of the Growing Together strategy. The third part of it is innovating for growth. Here we want to really make sure we're stepping up innovation, and capitalizing on opportunities for the customer where we can grow. Where we see opportunities specifically is more around AI, how we use that for the customer experience, but also for efficiencies on the back end, as well as our customer data. With 70 million customers coming through our stores each week, so we have a lot of insights of how people are doing their shopping, what's important to them, what types of trends are happening, and we have a lot of ways to really use that to improve the experience but also improve personalized offers. Here we're really aiming to grow our complementary income streams to EUR 3 billion by 2028, and we say we see retail media as an important driver in that concept. The last item, which is very important, is leveraging and lowering our cost base. Here we're really using our scale to continue to find and unlock additional efficiencies. This gives us the space to continue to make those investments back into our business. Whether that's into the CVP or into new stores or our sustainability initiatives, that's very important for us. We have our Save for Our Customers programs, and we've set the goal of EUR 5 billion in savings from 2025 through 2028. It's very important for us to continue to stay focused on identifying efficiencies so that we have the space to make those investments. That's an all-encompassing strategy, and I would be remiss. I know we're only just a year in. Yes. I should ask for a progress report on these areas and how that's shaping your views and thoughts on the trajectory towards 2028. Sure. Yeah, as you said, we're one year in, and we're very firmly on track with our ambitions. Obviously, there's a lot of different things that we want to achieve, so maybe I'll highlight three different areas of it, first and foremost being our own brand strategy. Here, as part of our Growing Together strategy, we said that we wanted to grow our own brand penetration to 45% at the group level. That's coming from nearly 40% as of today, and it's a bit different within the regions. So in the U.S., we have about 33% penetration, and in Europe, it's closer to 50%. So we do see that there is a lot of opportunity for additional growth coming from the U.S. region, but also some additional growth from Central and Southeastern Europe. Own brand itself is very important, especially within the Customer Value Proposition, because it's something that's within our own control where we can offer an affordable product that is also high quality. That's really where we've seen a lot of evolution, especially since COVID, where maybe the perception on own b rands, especially in the U.S., has been more, okay, it's low price, but it's not necessarily gonna be the same quality as that national brand alternative. That is not the case, and that's not the relationship that we want to build with our customers. It's very much about focusing and reconfirming the quality around those own brand items. It's also about expanding the assortment and the offerings to make sure that they have the ability to still have the choice of what products they want. As customers are very much focused on value, as it is still a tough consumer environment, they have the ability to manage their wallet with those affordable products. It's also something that you can only get within our stores, so it's very important for keeping the customer traffic in your locations and really something that you can differentiate yourself on. That's an important part, and we've seen a lot of progress during 2025. We grew our penetration by almost 1 percentage point. It is something that we don't see necessarily that will always keep the same pace because it does take time to really build that position, but we're quite happy with the progress that we've made and something that we will continue on to want to step up on in the coming years. Another element that I want to draw attention to is our online business, which we think is very important. It's something that we see customers continuing to respond to and continuing to look for from a convenience perspective. Here we made a change in our operating model in the U.S. within the past couple of years. We really shifted our focus from last mile to leveraging our asset base, and really meeting customers' demands for same-day delivery. We closed some of our fulfillment centers, in replacement using our stores for the click-and-collect model, as well as our partnerships with Instacart and DoorDash. We see that over 90% of our orders are for that same-day delivery option, so we're able to meet those needs for the really short term with our partnerships and with the convenience during the day with the click-and-collect. We've seen strong growth there of 18% in the U.S. over the last year. We expect that to continue, and it's something that we wanna continue to invest in. We're quite proud that during 2025, we also achieved profitability on a fully allocated basis in this area at the global level. Part of that is the change in the operating model, but also additional scale and continued investments in automation and expanded capacity. It's something that we have a lot of optimism that will continue to drive growth in the future. We also see that there's a lot of opportunities here as retail media continues to grow in the U.S. and in Europe. One thing to maybe just call out that's slightly different is Europe does have a slightly different operating model than the U.S., especially in the Netherlands, which is our most advanced for online. They're more culturally adjusted to the next- day delivery model. They still use, say, fulfillment centers that do the next day. But they're also very advanced at 11% penetration in the Netherlands, and also strong growth, but just a slightly different outlook on the model versus what we see in the U.S. as the leading design in the U.S. Then maybe the last item to touch on is the densify and grow. As I mentioned earlier, we're really proud that we added Profi to our portfolio earlier in 2025. This added over 1,700 stores in Romania and almost EUR 2.8 billion in sales. It really doubled our position in the market and was a great complement to our existing brand, Mega Image, and moved us into the number two position in that market. We see that there's still a lot of growth opportunities there, and we look forward to continue to integrate and learn from both brands as we move forward there. The last thing is Stop & Shop, our brand in the U.S., is an area that we've also called out in our Growing Together strategy that we really want to focus on repositioning it and revitalizing it in the markets where it operates in. We really started that work already in 2024 with price investments and continued that into 2025. Almost 70% of our stores now have targeted price investments made in it. We've also done a lot of work around the overall assortment, simplifying it, the people experience when you're shopping in the stores, that there is good interaction, a consistent experience, friendliness, and then combining that with the remodel program. We've seen a good response from customers with the work that we've done. We've seen that volumes have started to improve. We see that the traffic has improved and that our primary customer base has increased, and we've seen an improvement in that Net Promoter Score, which gives us a good indication that we're doing the right work. We do know that there's still more work to be done in the coming years, but it's something that we're very proud of that's continuing to make improvements over 2025. That's incredible. It's a challenge sometimes to move that needle on Net Promoter Score. That's a good validation for the early days and the progress y ou've made in the strategy. As we think about the next two and a half, almost three years to the end of 2028, what are the biggest hurdles that stand in your way and, you know, how will the company address those? Yeah. I think if you look at the markets where we operate, that's been the case, you know, for the past year, two years. It continues to be the case. There's still a lot of uncertainty. Obviously, we have the conflict in Iran that recently happened. There's always something new, and that creates more stress on the consumer. And it makes it harder when a consumer is already pressured to manage their budget, that will continue to, I think, be something that our brands will need to be very close on in the coming years. It really highlights the importance of the customer value proposition and the work that we are doing and need to do there to continue to provide value to the customers. Some things that we have already highlighted that we were going to do is make $1 billion in price investments in the U.S. over the four-year period. We already did that in 2025 at all of our brands, and we will continue to do that through the coming three years as well. I think as the global environment continues to stay uncertain and there's less consumer confidence in certain ways, that it's gonna be really important that you're building that trust with your customer to provide the value that they need and that they can at least trust, like, "Okay, well, I know how I will manage my grocery basket." I think that's something that we continue to do and will focus on in the coming years as well. Yeah, it's a really important kind of view, and I think that it ties into maybe a follow-up question. Sure. You know, in the U.S., there's been high inflation over the past several years. It's impacted everything from consumer goods to groceries and then the staples that we buy each and every day. Have you seen a shift in consumer behavior, you know, drawing more towards the grocery stores, maybe, less eating out in different geographies? Is there any sort of correlation or thought or opportunity to continue to provide and build that loyalty through having high-value products at affordable prices as your goal? Yeah. I think if we look at the trends, the consumer in the U.S. and in Europe has been very value-focused for a while. It's not necessarily that we see that that's new or different. We do see that customers are more and more open to own brand products. We've seen own brand sales outpace from both volumes and dollars. I think that indicates that the customer is looking for quality and value at an affordable price, and that they will shift their shopping habits to find that. It's maybe less focused on, okay, it's I need this national brand product or something of that nature. I think that will continue to be the case in the coming years, especially as things remain the way they are. I think another thing is, you know, SNAP benefits is very important for a low-income consumer. When there's uncertainty there and perhaps funding won't continue, that also puts a lot of pressure on them. We do see more cautious shopping, and we do see a lot of focus on promotions, and we also see that people will shop at more than one location because they are looking for that value. I think that does continue to be important and relevant for our customers. Great. Shifting a little bit back to the strategy. We know that the world changes and plans begin in 2024, and you're adapting along the way. Have there been any new opportunities for Ahold since you've announced the strategy, and how do you look to capitalize on them? Yeah. When we introduced our strategy, you know, AI and technology was already an important component of it and something that we wanted to continue to invest in. I think AI, even since then, has increased as an area of focus and something that can be beneficial both from the customer-facing perspective, but also how we operate and do things more effectively. If we look at it from a customer side and kind of going back to the using our store or our brands as a concept and scaling, what our Albert Heijn brand has done is they've introduced an AI, say, shopping agent called Steijn that can really help you with the whole shopping journey. Identifying what you should have for dinner, helping you build your shopping basket, and we've seen that there's been increased engagements from our customers in the Netherlands. This app, especially what we find interesting, is around the end of the day when you'd be thinking about your dinner plans, more people are engaging with that app. It's something that we see that will continue to be a growing area of engagement with customers is AI functionalities and AI features. Those are things we continue to test out in our loyalty apps, and making sure that we can scale those when we see success. We also see that there's still opportunities on the back end to continue to see additional efficiencies and savings. What we came out with last year is an AI app across all of our European brands that help the in-store associates. With nearly 390,000 associates, obviously that is a very important part of our business. Where we can do things to help them and make their days easier, that really is important from the overall productivity and how you manage your labor force, but also retain your labor force. I do think going forward there still will be more opportunities, and I would say we're still figuring out where we want that to go. I don't think we know where AI is going to end up at, but it's important for us to explore it. It's also important to us to make sure that we have the foundations right, 'cause it's really all about data, and we do have a lot of data, and we have a lot of customer insights. It's making sure that we have the systems and solutions we can quickly scale those across the brands. That's kind of our focus currently is make sure we're testing things out, make sure we have the foundations, and then as we advance, continue to advance with the AI advancements. I think that's a big opportunity. Great. That seems to be a common theme across industries. What I'll say is it's interesting to see how the applications of AI are so prevalent but different and unique in each situation. I'm gonna ask one more question. Sure. We've got a few from the audience that we'll turn to right after this, and see where that takes us with time. I wanted to ask you. The company in some form or fashion, has been around for 150 years. Growing Together is about the next 150 years, and a component of that would be sustainability. How do you think about sustainability in your business and the supply chain, and the consumers you serve? Yeah. I think if you look at our Growing Together strategy, what underlines all of it is the strategic priority about healthy communities and planets. At the end of the day, we are very reliant on our supply chains. We're reliant on nature and climate to make sure that we have the food sources available for customers. If we do wanna be here in 150 years, we need to be thinking about our long-term strategy around that and how we build a sustainable supply chain model there. We think there's a lot that we can do within our own operations around, say, CO2 emissions and food waste and plastic use, but also engaging with our partners because it is a very complex systems. There's thousands of suppliers. We have, you know, sometimes 40,000 different SKUs at our stores, so it's not easy to take all of those different items and consider the implications of that product. But we think it's very important to be taking the steps and making the investments into sustainability so that we can be here operating in 150 years, and providing still those products to our customers in an affordable way. We very much embed that as the base layer of everything we do, of what's the sustainability considerations we should be doing around this, how are we also promoting healthy products, which we think is important to the communities and planet as well. That's kind of also our long driving growth ambitions as well. We wanna grow, but we wanna do that in a smart and healthy, sustainable way. Great. All right. We have some audience questions that I'm gonna turn to 'cause there's several here that I think are really interesting. There's two. I'm gonna combine them the best I can. They're about distribution centers, new distribution centers in the U.S. One in Burlington. Yes. It's quoted as the largest distribution in the U.S. in North Carolina. Yes. The questions are: How do these new distributions fit within Growing Together supply chain modernization and increasing efficiency across your East Coast brands? Yeah, a great question. We made the communication in the latter half of last year that we are going to start the construction of a new distribution center. This will primarily support our Food Lion brand. For those who don't know, Food Lion is based in the Southeast, so in the Carolinas. We see a lot of growth opportunity for this brand, and we want to continue remodels as well as open new stores. We really do need to make these investments in the distribution center to meet up with the capacity needs, both now and also for future growth. It will take a few years before this is fully built. It's really going to support our long-term growth. It's really about making sure we're positioned for that. As we do this, we also are making sure that we include all of the most relevant technology and innovation we can because we do need to make sure we're doing things effectively and efficiently. We have a lot that we can really leverage from the Netherlands where we have some nice automated facilities. There's certain technology that we will make sure we're incorporating here. It's really important for us that we keep up with the capacity needs, but also making those investments in efficiency, which isn't cheap. It obviously is a big investment, but it's something that we think is very important for our long-term growth and potential. Great. I'm going to combine two more. They're both on capital allocation. Okay. One is about, you know, integrating Profi,o ptimizing portfolio. I think the broader question is about future M&A. How do you think about future bolt-on M&A? I'm gonna parlay this question with one about your share buyback program. Okay. I think that's capital allocation as a whole. How do you think about the EUR 1 billion share buyback program in context of opportunistic M&A, bolt-on in new regions, et cetera. Sure. I hope I combined those both, but I think it's. Yeah, no. Topically similar. I understand. I'll start maybe with the second half and then go into it. We have a EUR 1 billion share buyback program that's been approved for 2026, so that's already underway. We've also communicated our intention that we will continue that buyback program through the Growing Together period, so through 2028 at EUR 1 billion per year. It is subject to annual approval where we do an assessment to make sure that's the best way to do our capital allocations, and that there's not another opportunity that would be more beneficial for our shareholders, but we have every intention. We also have a lot of space in our balance sheet that we can continue to do M&A transactions similar to what we saw with Profi. With Profi, it had no impact to our dividends or share buyback program. We had enough space that we could take out additional debt, and that still made then the most sense for us. We do feel confident that we have the space and ability that when something is identified that makes sense for our portfolio, that we can pursue that. We do have a view that we wanna be number one and number two in the markets where we operate, which is why the Profi transaction was so important to us because in Romania we were actually a much lower market share position, so that brought us to the number two position, which is where we'd want to be. We will always keep our eyes open for what types of M&A transactions make sense. It's really gonna be a lot of different factors that need to be considered before we would agree to something, and when it makes sense that we can do a fill-in or a bolt-on, so for instance with the Delhaize food transactions, then those are opportunities that we would want to pursue. Great. I'm gonna turn our attention to e-commerce, and I'll just read this one verbatim. The company has e-commerce profitability and continue to invest in omnichannel. Where are you seeing the strongest returns from those digital investments? I think we've seen very strong growth in the U.S. I think the investments that we've done. For instance, in the U.S. we've rolled out our internal platform that we developed, it's called PRISM. Now all five of our U.S. brands are on that platform. It's both the front end facing app as well as the back end productivity behind it. I think that is a good area that we've done the investments because as we identify new features, those are things we can roll out to all five brands at once. As we make improvements in productivity features, we can also roll that out to all of our brands at once. It also gives us opportunities for retail media. With all of our brands on the same platform, we now have access to all of our customers on the East Coast in one group. That is a very compelling data insight for someone who might wanna do a retail media campaign with our brands. I think those investments were very important as well as just the investments in our partnerships because we do see a lot of growth with Instacart and DoorDash, and that people are looking to those channels as well for online, that those are something that have been important for us and that we also value for our online proposition. Great. I'm gonna squeeze in one more question. I'm gonna take us to the max, if that's okay. Of course. You know, this is a U.S. investor conference. Based on the questions, it sounds like a lot of the attendees today are not only customers, but shareholders. Can you just reiterate the importance of your U.S. presence both operationally and with respect to investor engagement? Yeah. I mean, obviously as you can see, the U.S. is a big and central part of our business, and we really wouldn't be who we are today without our U.S. brands. You can probably imagine today is more U.S.-focused 'cause investors, but even in our meetings in Europe, the U.S. is generally a big area of focus. Everyone's very interested about what's the outlook there, how will things progress, what's the customer environment. It's very important for us both for our brands, but in general to know what's going on. We have a lot of important connections. It's very important to us as well for our U.S. side of things. Incredible. I will end it there 'cause we are at time. Gabriella, thank you so much for joining me today. Learned a lot. Appreciate your insights. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Wonderful.