All right, thank you, everybody. Hi, I'm Lauren Silberman. I'm the equity research analyst here at Deutsche Bank, covering restaurants and food distributors. Today, I'm thrilled to be here with US Foods. With us today, we have CEO Dave Flitman and CFO Dirk Locascio. Dave, Dirk, thank you very much for being here. Thank you, Lauren. Thanks for having us. I'm going to start with a high-level question. Dave, you joined US Foods about two and a half years ago. Dirk, you've been here about 15 years. A lot has happened over the past few years in what has been a very challenging backdrop. What's been most surprising to you over the last few years? What do you see as some of the biggest changes in the organization, both Dave and Dirk? Yeah, sure. Thanks again for having us, Lauren. As you said, I've been here two and a half years. You know, what I inherited was a very customer-focused organization that was largely focused on the right things. If I brought a couple of things to the company here, I think one of them has been simplification. If anything, it felt like we were trying to do too much, which led, in my view, to ineffective execution. We simplified the agenda. I think we've been ruthless about prioritization. You know, what are the key needle-moving activities to help strengthen the organization, but importantly, help strengthen our focus on the customer? We've done a number of things around that. You know, I'm sure we'll talk about it. We've had opportunities across all portions of the P&L. I think, not the surprise, but the thing that I feel best about is I inherited an organization that was extremely focused on the customer. In my experience, in this industry and others, if you have that, it's really something to highlight. It's a thing of beauty. If you don't have that, it's very, very difficult to create it culturally in an organization. I'm blessed to have inherited an organization that was largely focused on the customer and their success. I think I'd add to that is really just seeing, as Dave pointed out, the narrowing of focus. Doing fewer things and focus on doing them better. That really then ties into the focus on execution and performance culture. You've seen that show up in our financial results, but also just as much, I think one thing I get probably more excited than anything is just our safety results. That is one when you think about a culture and a healthy culture and that performance coming to life where the goal is to send more of our associates home safely every night. We've roughly halved our incident rate over the last few years. That's just one example of that. That performance culture continues and is only going to continue to make US Foods stronger and a better environment for our associates, our customers, our investors. Great. I'll start with moving to the consumer. Your business has been very resilient through cycles. Can you just talk about what you're seeing in the consumer environment, how you're assessing the state of the consumer, any signs of green shoots, and how that kind of all flows through? Yeah, I'd start with just a little context around the industry. The industry is extremely resilient. I think that's been proven over many macro cycles. Point back to the Great Recession and just speaking on behalf of the company. You know, our volumes were down mid-single digits and our EBITDA was flat during the Great Recession. I think that speaks to the strength of the industry, but more importantly, the resilience of our business model. To your point, you know, the consumer has been under pressure in the U.S. for a long time now. It started with COVID, just inflationary pressures that have continued. I think the best evidence of that is eight consecutive quarters of declining foot traffic in the restaurant space. To your point, the consumer is resilient. I think, you know, it will rebound. More recently, we've seen some incremental improvement from the first quarter from really March, where foot traffic was down a couple of points. April rebounded slightly to down 1.5%. And most recent data we just got from Black Box says May was down 1%. So while we're seeing sequential improvement, I think it's important to point out that we're not back to where we need to be yet, but it is encouraging to see just the 60-day trend. Great. Last year, you set out some long-term targets. As a reminder, 5% sales growth, 10% EBITDA, about 20% EPS growth. As we talked about, industry traffic has been pressured over the last several quarters. What's your confidence in achieving the guide, both this year, the next couple of years, if industry traffic remains pressured? Yeah, great question. Our confidence is high. It remains high. We say this a lot, you know, regardless of the macro we're going to execute. I think it speaks to underlying how much self-help that we've demonstrated and that we continue to have. You know, we say we're in the early to mid-index of this self-help and improvement story. I think the best evidence of that is the most recent quarter, where not only the foot traffic being a challenge, actually down as much as it's been in the last two years, you overlay a bunch of weather things that happened in the first quarter, and we essentially delivered our new algorithm. You know, we continue to take market share in our target customer types. When things rebound, it's going to be a nice tailwind for us. We basically delivered a new algorithm every quarter of last year, including the first quarter of this year. That really is what informs our confidence in the future. Can you talk about some of those self-help initiatives? Like, what visibility do you have into the portfolio of opportunities? Yeah, we've got great visibility. That, again, informs our confidence. I'll kind of tag team this with Dirk. You know, it starts with the top line. We've taken market share with independent restaurants, which, by the way, is the most profitable segment of the food service industry for 16 consecutive quarters, 18 consecutive quarters in healthcare. That momentum just continues to build. As I said earlier, you know, in a down foot traffic environment like we've experienced, our ability to control the controllables. It starts with can't control the macro. What we can control is our ability to take competitive market share. Our team is focused on that, has been for a long time, and is doing a great job. We have a lot of gross profit help. It starts with our cost of goods work. Dirk's got a very long-term perspective on that, but we've committed to $260 million over the next three years. It was informed by, you know, several cycles of doing this work historically in the company. Then we've got a lot of fixed cost productivity work. 3%-5% is our target, which will largely offset inflation in normal times. Dirk's on point for a lot of that work. I will flip it over to him. Sure. Maybe just to start with, though, I think back to your question you asked, Dave, just I'll respond also on the confidence. What gives us that confidence is the fact that we have these self-help initiatives all through the P&L. It is not a, what do we do to make this quarter? What do we do to make the next quarter? Versus we've got them laid out over the next several years. As we know, as things, we have quite a bit of visibility. It is managed in that way as something initiative A may be delivering. As that is reaching maturity, then there are other things that are ramping up. We have a lot of visibility where the team manages it to be able to understand what's happening and coming forward. As Dave mentioned, gross profit, you know, the three good examples, cost of goods that he mentioned, into the $260 million over the three years. We have a lot of confidence in that coming off of the $230 million last time. This will be roughly the fourth time we have done it in my 15 years there. It is one where Dave Poe and team, my peer who leads and really architects a lot of that, some of it is you repeat, some of that is you continue to evolve. This is really a lot of it is partnering with our vendors to bring dual growth to both us and the vendors. We have a lot of confidence in that, our continued private label penetration, and the mix from growing faster with independent healthcare and hospitality. Those are three big contributors there that will, you know, the things that we're doing will continue to gain benefits. On the productivity, it really spans across supply chain, admin, and indirect, which is non-people spend, like sanitation, maintenance, things like that, and aggregating and going after that spend, which we haven't really done previously. That is a more than $1 billion pool of spend that we're targeting, $60 million of savings. We got $30 million last year. Again, a lot of confidence in achieving that. Really, if I go to supply chain as just a couple of examples in there, the routing work that we've been doing is a great one that not only does it drive productivity, but it's a better experience for the customer, for our associates, and, you know, some other sort of things across each of those. That portfolio and the way we manage it gives us a lot of confidence and a lot of visibility as to what's coming. No shortage of opportunities. No shortage of opportunities. Exactly right. Starting with just on the market share piece of what you've talked about, it's an important indicator of the successful execution of the strategy and kind of the control of controllables. What's driving the market share gains? Why do you think customers are coming to you and what differentiates you? Yeah, we've got a lot of differentiators. Let me just talk about our focus in the restaurant space. Just from a process standpoint, you know, our team for several years now has been using the Circana, formerly NPD, data to help target market share gain opportunities at the local market level. That is very granular information. It gives us reinforcement on where we're taking share, but more importantly, where the opportunities are at the local market level. Our team has embraced that. Our sales organization is focused on it, making sure we've got the right assortment to support whatever subsegment of the customer where we've got those opportunities. I like to say we've got a little machine working on that now for four or five years that's really gaining traction and focus. You wrap that around our go-to-market strategy. We go to market with a strong sales force that continues to grow. We couple that with some resources for them, including product specialists, culinary specialists, chefs, and importantly, restaurant operations consultants that we've built an organization around. A lot of those folks have previously been restaurant operators. They really understand the back office challenges, what needs to happen in the kitchen from a productivity standpoint, how to maximize menu productivity, all that sort of stuff. Importantly for us, it helps us get multiple relationships into a customer and not just dependent upon one. You know, you couple that with our e-commerce platform, our Moxie platform, which we're very excited about. Launched that almost three years ago. It'll be three years this fall. We've been the industry leader in e-commerce for a very long time. Moxie really brought that all together in a one-stop, easy-to-use application. No matter what the customer needs to do to interact with US Foods, they can do it in that application, from ordering product to actually seeing visibility into our inventory and whether the product is in stock, filling out credit applications, paying their bills, tracking their deliveries, all very easily. The important part of that is the more entangled the customer gets into our ecosystem, the greater opportunities we have to market to them, you know, particularly our brands through that digital tool. The more challenging it becomes for them to leave, the more comfortable that they get utilizing that tool. The second benefit, and probably equally as importantly, that self-help for the customer frees up our sales force to go market the next great products to that customer, importantly go find the next customer and not get tied up in the day-to-day, you know, mundane activities that are very, very important for the customer, but do not drive the most productivity for our sales force. We have got a lot of that. Flipping over to healthcare and hospitality, similar focus in terms of how we target share. Importantly, we have got an analogous technology in healthcare. It is called Vitals. It is unique to the industry. We have built that ourselves over multiple years, continuing to make it better. It gives healthcare providers insights into their patient feeding costs, importantly nutritionals. If you think about a large-scaled healthcare provider, it's a one-stop shop for them to look at optimizing their entire network. We couple that with a long history of having really good healthcare professionals on our staff, including dietitians and nutritionists that help support that growth. Importantly, in both healthcare and hospitality, we've got long-standing relationships with some of the larger GPOs in the industry. We found through the years ways to make that a very win-win partnership. It's worked for us. Many of these relationships are multi-decade. They're long-standing. We've figured out the best way to work together. Last thing I'll say to that is we've locked up all of those relationships at least until 2030. We've got really good momentum, strong focus, strong team wrapped in a technology portfolio that really enables our success. Great. There's been a lot of discussion on the sales force and growing the sales force, you and your peers. Like, what's the right level to grow your sales force? Why not grow it even faster? How does that ultimately translate to case growth? Yeah. For us, we've been quite public that, you know, low to mid-single digits. Think about 4%-6%. It's just the right sweet spot for us. Our competitors may have different views of that. In 2023, we grew our sales force headcount by 6%. Last year, we grew it by an additional 5%. We're right in that sweet spot. For us, you know, we do a very good job of onboarding sales talent. We put them through a lengthy, rigorous training process that really never ends after the formal process is over. It's just how quickly you can absorb that sales talent and make them effective. You know, the way we are thoughtful about that, the work that we put into training those folks, you can overwhelm the system and become very ineffective and just be adding people without the capability that you need. We've just found that mid-single digit kind of our sweet spot. Great. I think you've talked about that the productivity of your sales force may be a little bit higher. What drives that? Is it your technology and the tools that you offer the sales force? I think it's a lot of what I talked about earlier. It's how we go to market. It's the team-based selling approach where we support our sellers. They have support around them to do a lot of those activities. Importantly, the technology is a big help to our sales force and their productivity. Great. We get asked sometimes, you know, do you view the technology that's replacing the human? As opposed to, you know, we look at it as the seller and the technology are partners. To Dave's point, the technology can make it easier and more effective for the customer to do what they want, get better information. Yet then the seller's interactions with the customers are far more effective. Great. You guys are the industry leader in the healthcare segment. What differentiates you? I know you mentioned the Vitals platform, but what makes it a little bit more difficult to enter the space, if anything? You have to have deep expertise for healthcare. That is why you couple that technology capability that I spoke about, which is a real differentiator for us. No one has anything like it. I think it would be very difficult to duplicate with the length and experience that we have, the deep healthcare staff on board. You know, 18 consecutive quarters of share gains kind of points to just how good our team is and how we go to market and the ability to capture that share. I do think the GPO relationships we have in healthcare are a big differentiator for us. They bring market access scaled in a way that would be more challenging for a smaller competitor to go after, right? Those all, I think, benefit us and really drive that portfolio of differentiation we have in healthcare. Great. You guys target really independent healthcare, hospitality, three very attractive segments. Just talk a little bit about the profitability of the independent healthcare, hospitality, and perhaps how that compares to [chain]. Yeah, I'll let Dirk answer that. I do want to say that we're the only distributor that focuses on those three and has done it for a long time. Importantly, over time, they're the fastest growing and most profitable segments of all food service. We're unique in our model. I think it causes us to be more resilient. We've been at it for a long time. Dirk, you want to talk about the profitability? Sure. Independence, most profitable, followed by healthcare and hospitality, and then typically chain and other are below those. It really is, in addition to that, the other attractive part is just our differentiation strategy shows up more on the independent, healthcare, and hospitality. It's harder to do that with chain. Chain, you know, you won't hear us talk about the chain is, it's not that it's bad. It's not that we don't want to serve it. It's really about optimizing in the right chains and the right locations for us. We have a number of very good chain customer partners that we work with and happy to do that. Just that independent healthcare and hospitality, just the share gains and the focus, that's why you'll see us growing faster than the market share where chains will be much more in line with what broader industry traffic does. Great. Private label, you've talked about opportunity to increase that private label penetration. What are you doing to expand it? Is it growing assortment, awareness, incentives? Talk about that strategy. Yeah, we're very excited about private label. And let me just tell you a quick story on that. I think the industry was pressured in private label in general coming out of COVID as things shut down. And as manufacturers recovered, they were much more concerned about getting that capability and supply back up on their brands versus private label. It really caused the whole industry to lose momentum. Importantly, you know, anytime you lose that momentum, you lose a little bit of confidence in the sales force. You roll the clock forward over the last 18 months, supply has been plentiful again. We've regained that confidence in the sales force. That's why you see us driving that momentum. Importantly for us, you know, we've got 22 private label brands that we've developed through a number of years. It's underpinned by a strong innovation process that we call Scoop. Twice a year, we launch in the spring and the fall, we launch a new portfolio of products. We've got culinary experts that have been scouring the globe for trends. They bring the best around the world into what could be the next emerging trend in the United States. That is really what informs the ingredients and the products that we bring to market through Scoop. It's been quite successful. I think we highlighted on the last earnings call that we reached $1 billion in Scoop sales since we launched it about 12 years ago. So exciting and momentum. I think, you know, the all-time record high quarterly performance of 35% penetration for the company and importantly, 53% penetration for independents just underscores that we do have that momentum back again. Last thing I would say is our private label products are, first of all, they're great quality. It's important for the customer. They're tiered in good, better, and best. Depending upon what the customer's looking for, we can direct them to the right part of our portfolio. You think about all the pressure that the customer has had, consumer has had recently, it really lends itself to our private label focus because not only are they great products, they're cheaper for our customers and they're twice as profitable for the company. We also incent our sellers to sell them. We pay them a higher percentage of gross profit because of the profitability of those products. It really is a win-win-win for the customer, for the company, and for our sales force. The penetration's obviously higher at the independent side of it. How is that strategy? Can Can you leverage in the hospitality, healthcare segment as well? Yeah. Hospitality penetration and healthcare both are a little bit higher than the overall company number. Private label is conducive to all three of those customer types, more so than, say, chain. Another reason why with independent healthcare and hospitality that makes it attractive is typically once you're serving those customer types out of a distribution center, the customers are buying those same products. The velocity of churn with those inventory items is much faster versus bringing in a lot of proprietary items that you're serving just those customers for. That is part of what contributes to the profitability of those customer types. Great. Let's talk a little bit about the competitive environment. Are you seeing any changes in the competitive environment, both with respect to your peers, any promotional intensity, as well as the competitive environment as it relates to sales force and talent? Yeah. So you know what I like to describe for the industry is, you know, given the fragmented nature of it in that our two large competitors and ourselves have less than 40% of market share, it remains a very highly fragmented market. That leads to a number of things, not the least of which is the competitive nature of the landscape. It's always competitive. You know, you have to be on your game in terms of service. You have to be on your game in terms of, you know, cost of goods. You're making sure that you're competitive where you need to be. That ebbs and flows, you know. Our two large competitors have a different fiscal calendar than we do. As it gets closer to their year-end, there may be some promotional things. It ebbs and flows. I do not see anything going on that is abnormal in terms of market competitiveness. It is always competitive. Secondly, relative to sales force, you know, we get this question a lot. I just like to point out that as we continue to grow our sales force, actually competitive sellers is the minority of who we hire. You know, we have a lot of success where we target competitive hires. Importantly, the majority comes hopefully with industry experience, but it comes from different areas. You know, a lot of times there are folks with deep culinary experience like chefs who make great sellers and want a different lifestyle. You know, it is a grind being a chef in a restaurant. They make great sellers. They are quick to pick up the product line. They really understand it broadly, food in general. They get up the learning curve quickly. A lot of times we have operators. You know, sometimes they come in as consultants, as I mentioned, oftentimes sales reps who really understand the operations and pressures of the restaurant. Obviously, we have to teach them the food side of it and the product portfolio. We find folks in the industry that come from manufacturers who understand broadly how the industry works, but never have sold. You know, they a little bit understand the industry, not as much the selling process. So we've got success from all over the place. In terms of competitive reps, you know, that ebbs and flows. We have not had trouble adding talent in any way, shape, or form. How does the productivity curve differ if you bring in experience versus those more adjacent in sector? Let's start with competitive reps. Typically they come in with a 12-month non-compete. You can't have them call on their old customer base, obviously. We put them into a new geography. Oftentimes because of their experience, they're able to grow that and do quite well. When their non-compete comes off, you know, they typically have the option, do you want to go back to your old territory or do you want to stay where you are? It's split really. Some just love what they're doing. Even in that situation, they can help us with those legacy customer relationships that they had. If you look at the other cohorts that I mentioned, just dependent upon their experience and culinary background, it can take them 18-24 months to get up to speed. Their productivity ramp is a little bit longer. We find over the course of time, they're able to get up to the same as, you know, someone who's got that deep selling experience in the industry. It just takes a while longer to get up that curve. Great. I'm going to go to M&A. You've done a handful of deals over the past couple of years. What are you seeing in the marketplace today and what do you look for in a potential target? Let me take the second part of that and I'll let Dirk talk about the other portion of it. We've been quite consistent in our M&A strategy and it really is tuck-ins. What we mean by tuck-ins, they're smaller scale local competitors. I love our footprint. You know, we're in 70 of the biggest, fastest growing markets in the country. There isn't a geography where I'd point to and say, hey, we've got a geographic big void here. What we do have the opportunity to do is what you've seen us do over the last couple of years, which is target a local competitor that helps us with local market density. That immediately does a couple of things. First of all, it gives us scale in that market where we may have been serving it from a greater distance away. Immediately we have the uplift of taking miles out of our distribution network, getting synergy and cost benefit from that. Secondly, you know, procurement synergies of a smaller operator to our buying scale tend to be immediate. What we target is, you know, well-run, typically family-owned businesses that have a large mix of independent restaurants. That is what you have seen us do over our last four acquisitions. Dirk, you want to take the second part of that? Yeah. I mean, really it's, we've seen market, I'd say pretty stable on there. Its valuation has been reasonable. It continues to be, people want to be paid fairly for their business, but it's not been a disconnect. It's one where our M&A team, we continue to work our pipeline and you just, you don't know exactly when that phone call is going to come of it's their time. I mean, some of these we've had relationships with for more than a decade. It just, it's the right time when it's maybe a family, a generational change, they're ready to exit the business, et cetera. Also, often a lot of these operators are connected to one another. They know one another. You know, when we buy a business, our reputation and sort of treating those associates in that business very well is important. In each, what it does though, to Dave's point is by targeting the types of businesses that he alluded to, it really allows us to increase that local density and be closer to the customer. Oftentimes it allows us to add capacity for less than if we were building it ourselves. Both examples of the one we bought in Upstate New York and then what we bought outside of Nashville, Tennessee, each of those, as you said, allowed us to be much closer to the customer, increased local density, but also both those buildings could be expanded. One is done, one is in the process. It allows us to add capacity as well to be closer to that customer. Let's continue building on the capital allocation side. You want to talk about your capital allocation priorities, balancing investing in the business versus share repurchases and even M&A. Sure. Our four priorities are, first of all, investing in the business for maintenance and growth, maintaining our leverage in our two to three times target range, which we're well within, as well as tuck-in M&A and then returning capital to shareholders via share repurchases. Job one for us is make sure we're investing in the business, which we have done. We've stepped up our CapEx spend over the last few years. We have good things to invest in. We're going to continue to do that. Sometimes we'll get the question, in order to buy shares, are you starving the business? Absolutely not. We're investing at record levels for US Foods. You go really to the share repurchases and the tuck-in M&A and back to the point of we don't know exactly when tuck-in M&A is going to come to fruition. That is why we like that combo. You can toggle back and forth between them. Just given where our share price is versus where we would expect it to be a few years out, even compared to where one of our peers traded in the pre-COVID time, we believe again, it is still undervalued over time. Therefore we like that we have that option. That becomes accretive from an EPS perspective. We are growing our earnings through top-line growth, resulting in what our middle of the P&L initiatives to drive very strong adjusted EBITDA growth and then leveraging that to the 20%+ EPS growth. Putting that all together for a very strong return. Great. On the investing in the business piece, you guys are opening up a new semi-automated facility, I think in a few months. Can you just talk about how you see automation playing a role in this industry? Obviously, this is the first one, but how you're thinking down the road? Yeah, we're excited about automation, as you mentioned. This is our first step into that. I think importantly, the technology has been around for a long time, maybe not as much in food service, more in retail. It is proven technology. The important part for us and why we chose, you know, this opportunity to invest in the new facility now is that the cost of that technology has gotten more appropriate for our industry now. It has improved over the last decade or so, and it just made sense for us to do that. We're excited about it in a few ways. First of all, it will help with productivity. I think that's obvious, right? That's why we would initially do that. The other important part of it, I think, is it's going to yield a better customer experience. If you think about the manual nature of the business that we have here in terms of how product gets selected and loaded and delivered to the customers, automating the upfront portion of that is going to result in more accuracy, a better experience ultimately for our customers in terms of how the product gets there. Also, in the intermediate step, it'll be easier for our drivers because oftentimes they'll show up to a customer, there'll be a case that's missing perhaps, or maybe it's on three pallets deep on the truck and they have to go find that. Obviously, taking the human error element out of it will make it a much more consistent, you know, experience overall. We're excited about it in a number of ways. Obviously, our first step here will hopefully start that up this summer. We'll learn a lot. We'll learn a lot about the technology, its capability. Importantly, I think we'll learn how to apply it some to our existing facilities, what parts of it could apply, which parts can't. We are very excited about this journey. We're just starting. Do you see potential to retrofit the organization with some of this automation over time, or is it more about the new facilities that you open in the future will have elements of this? Yeah, I think there's an opportunity to do some retrofitting, not at the type of scale you could. If you think about it, just the ceiling height, you know, to do full automation has to be much higher. Difficult to do that. You know, where we could apply it is in some expansions. You know, we could design the expansion portion for that semi-automation. As I said earlier, I think there are a few elements of it that could be retrofitted into existing facilities beyond that. We'll see. During COVID, there's obviously elevated turnover and you guys are working through getting back to productivity levels, service levels. Just talk about where you are in that journey today. Yeah, it's been a journey since COVID, really, really a challenge for the whole industry. For us, we've done a few things I think that have helped ourselves. One of the things we talked about shortly after I joined the organization was flexible scheduling. It's played out very, very well for us. It's more about offering our physical workforce a better work-life balance, fully staffing the operation, but giving them some flexibility in terms of when they work and when they don't, three or four-day shifts and balancing that across so you make sure you've got the right coverage. That really has been a key enabler, I think, to getting us back to basically pre-COVID levels of both turnover and productivity. We're fully there for the drivers. We're almost there for the warehouse. Importantly, we've gotten to the point now where it's no longer an issue. We've been staffed for a long time, but it really has helped productivity and also safety, you know, getting that turnover down. We are excited about where we are and I think we'll continue to make it better. You know, during these discussions and even with earnings calls and that, we talked so much about the P&L and the initiatives and the financial results. On last year's call, Dave talked about a few, just also just to your point, customer service statistics, as our customer fill rates, our operations sort of quality measure, those were all sort of back at the best levels they've been at, you know, five, six years. Those are areas where the service measure, then I talked earlier about safety, those are all things that we're working just as hard at continuing to improve and improve the experience for our customers, our associates, as we are for the P&L results. Pretty pleased with the progress. Great. Let's talk about Pronto. It's a program that enables customers to basically get deliveries on non-routine days, I believe, times. Can you talk about Pronto and then sort of the evolution of Pronto, how you're thinking about that opportunity from here? Yeah, I'll start. Dirk can chime in here. We're very excited about Pronto. I think the thing to point out is we've been at this for a very long time. We've been talking about it more recently, but the Pronto journey started more than five years ago. It was focused on proving out a model going after exclusively new customers, right? We had not taken it to our existing customer base until we understood whether that model would work for us. We have taken that Pronto, we call it Pronto Legacy, into 40 markets. It is aimed for urban, you know, hard-to-reach, difficult areas. These are smaller box trucks with multi-temperature zones in them. I think it unlocks our TAM a bit. We have great products. We can compete with anyone, particularly the specialty suppliers. If you think about a legacy, a specialty produce supplier or protein supplier, we've got all those great products. What we were lacking was the service model to get those products to the customer on a more frequent delivery basis. You know, very difficult in high urban areas where you're taking in 53-foot trailers to do that four or five days a week, right? It just isn't worth it. With Pronto, we've proven that model. We've proven the ability to capture, share in doing that. It was just about a year ago where we started to take that to our existing customer base. As we did that, you know, we ran a pilot in six or so markets through the course of last summer into the fall. We were really wanting to make sure of two key things. One is that we did not cannibalize our existing broadline business and just make those deliveries more inefficient, if you will. Secondly, that we are able to capture the margin profile that we needed to, to justify the increased service. Through that piloting work, we are excited to say that, you know, it has proven out quite well. Pronto penetration, we call that with existing customers, is now live in 10 markets. I think the right way to think about that is twofold. One is those 40 markets with legacy. I think those are all ripe for Pronto penetration. Beyond that, you know, when we enter a new market with Pronto, we may go live with one or two trucks. The important part is as we scale it across markets, we also have the opportunity to penetrate those markets further with increased volume as we prove the model and grow it there. Very, very excited about what it means in terms of growth. We've seen a 10%-15% uplift in cases where Pronto has been successful. I think it's going to mean good things here as we scale it. We've talked about, you know, Pronto being a helpful contributor to growth. Our expectation is between the Pronto Legacy and the Pronto Pen that we'll be talking about it being a growth enabler for a long time to come. Last year, it did $730 million of run rate. We've talked about a potential billion dollars. Wouldn't be surprised. We're talking about a bigger number in the not too distant future. Dave said this is something we're excited about. The other reason we like it so much is other than the trucks, these products are coming out of our existing distribution centers. It is a very capital-efficient way to offer that differentiated service to customers. Great. I'll try this one. Assuming my model's right, you guys are going to hit the highest EBITDA and EBITDA margins, I think in the company's history this year. You may know better than that. I hope your model's right. Me too. You will be running, I think, north of 5% EBITDA margins next year and over the next couple of years. Is there a limit to the long-term margin structure? Anything structural there? Do you see opportunity for continued expansion? We do not see any limits in the, you know, midterm, near midterm. We have got a lot of runway ahead. I mean, and that is why, you know, we talk about and, you know, we genuinely are excited about the self-help. We do think we still have plenty of opportunity for runway, not even just through our current LRP, but, you know, well beyond that to continue to improve. You know, many of these ways are really just taking waste out of the system that also improves quality, improves social experience, customer experience. We have got a lot of opportunity for margin expansion still ahead. Great. This is a little bit of a longer-term one, but just like technology tools, broader systems, investments, what do you see as the most meaningful potential unlocks near term, long term? You have the rollout of Dukart, generative AI, the automated warehouse we talked about. You just pointed to four or five. I’d like to say there’s just one or two, but there really isn’t. I think, you know, distribution is complicated. Part of what we’ve done here is simplify our journey in the top line and all portions of the P&L. I think the important thing for everybody to take away is that we’ve got a lot of self-help in each one of those areas. We’re still just getting started in many, many ways. It really isn’t just one or two key things. I think, you know, we’re blessed to have the focus on all parts of the P&L, an organization that’s very aligned on what we have to deliver there. We just continue to ramp up that execution. It's also a contributor when we talk about, you know, with the self-help and things, it's not just, "Hey, Dirk, you need to work harder and you need to work faster." These are tools to enable that across each of the areas of the business. That sets me up for my final question. Are there any, you know, one to two things that you both want to leave investors with? Obviously, your stock has reset higher just from a valuation perspective, which is something that we hear. What do you tell a new investor as to why the right time is now for US Foods? Yeah, let me make a couple of comments there and then obviously Dirk can come in. If you want to take away a few things from our story, first of all, I think it's the simplicity of our focus. You know, I like to say this, we're the only U.S.-focused food service distributor that's pure play with large national scale. A lot of our competitors are doing a bunch of things. Ours is a simpler story. Importantly, we're focused on the three most profitable customer types in the industry. We've been doing it for a long time. The second thing I'd say is, and we've talked about it here this morning a lot, we've got a long runway of self-help initiatives and line of sight to the future that actually spans well beyond, you know, the next three years. I think that leads to the last point is we're going to be an earnings compounder for a long time to come that's going to span well beyond our three-year time horizon. With all that, I'd say it's not too late. Join us, you know, for this journey. You know, if you just have line of sight to what we've put out in terms of our EBITDA targets for the next three years, you know, the stock has a lot of room to grow. We believe that. I think an extremely important point as part of that is that compounding is not from just one thing. It is we are growing the top line in a very healthy way. We are expanding margins resulting in the roughly 10% EBITDA growth in our algorithm. That is leading the capital allocation as agreed upon on top of that, getting to the 20% EPS growth. That is what, you know, why we get excited about the sustainability of it, of getting to that industry-leading 20% EPS growth over this next three years and beyond. Dave, Dirk, thank you very much for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you.