The Chef's Warehouse Inc Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Greetings, welcome to The Chefs' Warehouse second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Alex Aldous, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary, and Chief Government Relations Officer. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, operator.

Good morning, everyone. With me on today's call are Chris Pappas, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, and James Leddy, our CFO. By now, you should have access to our second quarter 2026 earnings press release. It can also be found at www.chefswearhouse.com under the investor relations section. Throughout this conference call, we will be presenting non-GAAP financial measures, including, among others, historical and estimated EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA, as well as historical adjusted net income, adjusted earnings per share, adjusted operating expenses, adjusted operating expenses as a percentage of net sales and as a percentage of gross profit, net debt, net debt leverage, and free cash flow. These measures are not calculated in accordance with GAAP and may be calculated differently in similarly titled non-GAAP financial measures used by other companies.

Quantitative reconciliations of our non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures appear in today's press release and second quarter 2026 earnings presentation. Before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our estimated financial performance. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Some of these risks are mentioned in today's release. Others are discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, which are available on the SEC website. Today, we are going to provide a business update and go over our second quarter results in detail.

We are also providing an update to our five-year financial targets. For a portion of our discussion this morning, we will refer to a few slides posted on The Chefs' Warehouse website under the investor relations section titled Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Presentation. Please note that these slides are disclosed at this time for illustration purposes only. We will open up the call for questions. With that, I will turn the call over to Chris Pappas. Chris? Thank you, Alex, and thank you all for joining our second quarter 2026 earnings call.

Today, Jim and I will begin our remarks with an update on second quarter results and provide an increase to our full year 2026 financial guidance, followed by an update to our five-year financial targets, taking our previously provided 2028 targets out to 2030. Second quarter 2026 displayed strong growth in both revenue and profitability. Our regional The Chefs' Warehouse teams continue to deliver excellent execution across markets and product categories. We are driving market share gains via growth in product penetration, case volume, and unique customers, combined with ongoing improvement in operational efficiency to provide customers with the highest quality ingredients and flexible on-time delivery. Momentum continued into July, and we currently expect double-digit top-line growth to start the third quarter.

Our Middle East operations are improving gradually as they enter the seasonally slower summer period. This trend has remained fairly steady through recent weeks. During May and June, our business located there operated at approximately 94% of prior year. I would like to thank all our teams from sales, procurement, and pricing, operations, and all the supporting functions for their dedication to serving our customers and our communities as we go to market as The Chefs' Warehouse family of brands and companies in North America and the Middle East. Please refer to slide 3 of the presentation. A few highlights from the second quarter include organic net sales grew 12.2%. Organic specialty sales were up 10% over the prior year, which was driven primarily by unique placement growth of 7.2% and specialty case growth of 6% and price inflation. Unique customers grew 3.6% year-over-year.

Reported unique customer growth was impacted partially by the conflict in the Middle East. Excluding this impact, second quarter unique customer growth was approximately 4.9%. Pounds in center of the plate were approximately 8.8% higher than the prior year second quarter. Gross profit margins increased approximately 49 basis points. Gross margin in the specialty category increased approximately 47 basis points as compared to the second quarter of 2025. Gross margin in the center of the plate category increased approximately 75 basis points year-over-year. Jim will provide more detail on gross profit and margins in a few moments. For an update on certain of our operating metrics, including continued improvement in year-over-year gross profit per route and adjusted EBITDA per employee, please refer to the slides provided in the appendix of our second quarter 2026 earnings presentation.

I'll turn it over to Jim to discuss more detailed financial information for the quarter and an update on our liquidity. Jim? Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone.

I'll now provide a comparison of our current quarter operating results versus the prior year quarter and provide an update on our balance sheet and liquidity. Please refer to slide four of the presentation. Our net sales for the quarter ended June 26th, 2026, increased approximately 12.9% to $1.169 billion from $1.035 billion in the second quarter of 2025. The growth in net sales was a result of an increase in organic sales of approximately 12.2%, as well as the contribution of sales from acquisitions, which added approximately 0.7% to sales growth for the quarter. Net inflation was 4.9% in the second quarter, consisting of 4% inflation in our specialty category and 6.4% inflation in our center of the plate category versus the prior year quarter.

Gross profit increased 15.2% to $292.9 million for the second quarter of 2026, versus $254.3 million for the second quarter of 2025. Gross profit margins increased approximately 49 basis points to 25.1%. Selling, general and administrative expenses increased approximately 9.6% to $234.2 million for the second quarter of 2026 from $213.8 million for the second quarter of 2025. The increase was primarily due to higher costs associated with compensation and benefits, facilities and distribution to support sales growth, as well as higher depreciation driven by facility and fleet investments. Adjusted operating expenses increased 8.4% versus the prior year second quarter, and as a percentage of net sales, adjusted operating expenses were 17.5% for the second quarter of 2026. Operating income for the second quarter of 2026 was $58.6 million, compared to $40.2 million for the second quarter of 2025.

The increase in operating income was driven primarily by higher gross profit, partially offset by higher selling, general and administrative expenses. Our GAAP net income was $33.8 million, or $0.76 per diluted share for the second quarter of 2026, compared to net income of $21.2 million or $0.49 per diluted share for the second quarter of 2025. On a non-GAAP basis, we had adjusted EBITDA of $88.1 million for the second quarter of 2026, compared to $65.4 million for the prior year's second quarter. Adjusted net income was for $34.7 million, or $0.78 per diluted share for the second quarter of 2026, compared to $22.5 million or $0.52 per diluted share for the prior year's second quarter. Turning to the balance sheet and an update on our liquidity, please refer to slide number five.

At the end of the second quarter, we had total liquidity of $321.1 million, comprised of $135.5 million in cash and $185.6 million of availability under our ABL facility. During the second quarter, we repaid $30 million of our ABL debt, reducing the outstanding drawn balance to $70 million. As of June 26th, 2026, total net debt was approximately $478.5 million, inclusive of all cash and cash equivalents, and net debt to adjusted EBITDA was approximately 1.6 times. Please refer to slide six. As Chris mentioned, we are raising our full year 2026 guidance as follows. We estimate that net sales for the full year 2026 will be in the range of $4.5 billion-$4.6 billion. Gross profit to be between $1.102 billion and $1.125 billion, and adjusted EBITDA to be between $305 million and $315 million.

Please note for the full year 2026, we expect the convertible notes maturing in 2028 to be dilutive, and therefore, we expect the fully diluted share count to be between approximately 46 and 46.7 million shares. I will now turn it back over to Chris for an overview on our updated five-year financial targets and to highlight certain of our initiatives supporting our growth expectations.

Thank you, Jim. Please refer to slide eight of the presentation. As we are halfway through the five-year financial target ranges we set out in 2023 and are on track to meet or exceed those targets sooner than expected, we felt it appropriate to update our expectations to full year 2030. Our organic growth has exceeded the 4%-7% target range established in 2023, with the focus on full year 2028. Much of this growth has been driven by the accelerated investment cycle in a number of our key areas, including our expansion and distribution capacity, sales teams and product specialists, investments in technology, consolidation of facilities and routes, and key strategic acquisitions. Referring to the slide titled 2030 Financial Goals, our updated target ranges are as follows. An annual revenue growth rate of 7%-10%, reaching full year 2030 revenue of $6 billion-$6.5 billion.

We assume organic growth will be the primary driver. With the potential for moderate acquired growth of approximately 1% per annum. In certain years where more significant M&A would occur, we would expect total growth to exceed the estimated range. Adjusted EBITDA of $450 million-$520 million, adjusted EBITDA margin of 7.5%-8%. Achieving these goals will not come from one or two areas of execution, but from many initiatives across our platform coming together over time to drive continued growth, market share gains, and improved operational efficiencies. In summary, we will continue to grow our differentiated model in the food away from home industry, focusing on the upscale casual to higher-end dining experience customer base, bringing together our unique supply chain and marketing model with deep product expertise and the ongoing training of a maturing sales force.

Increasingly positioning our people as trusted advisors to the best chefs, combined with the deployment of our ever-evolving technology and a flexible distribution platform. We expect to continue to deliver operating leverage going forward by driving volume through invested capacity, consolidating routes and distribution centers into efficient and state-of-the-art facilities and processing centers, to both reduce cost per unit and drive top line growth via marketing opportunities with existing and potential customers. We will continue to invest in distribution capacity across our network to provide both growth and operational efficiencies going forward. Current plans include New England, Texas, Las Vegas, the Midwest, and potential new markets as they develop. We have begun and expect to continue to deploy AI-based tech across our functions, including sales, pricing, and procurement operations, inventory management, logistics, and customer experience.

Building on the data and the analytics platform we have rolled out across operating companies, these tools give our teams real-time information to serve customers better, upsell more effectively, and manage inventory and cost more efficiently. CW teams across our regions and functions are committed to continual improvement and innovation in these areas and others, all with a laser-like focus on maintaining and growing our unique culinary focus culture that has been curated over 40 years. These areas represent the key components to The Chefs' Warehouse differentiation or moat within the industry. These competitive advantages, combined with the significant size of the under-penetrated market opportunity in virtually all our regions where we believe we remain in the early innings of penetration, will allow us to continue to grow market share going forward. I will turn it over to Jim to review our thinking on capital allocation. Jim? Thank you, Chris. Please refer to slide nine of the presentation.

We expect our capital allocation model going forward to be consistent with the approach we have taken over the past few years, as we have generated approximately $270 million of free cash flow since implementing the plan at the start of 2024. We expect total CapEx to average approximately 1% of revenue going forward and capital deployment to be focused on the following areas. Continued investment in growth via distribution center development and fleet expansion to accommodate capacity needs for markets as they mature. Investment in AI and other technology improvements focused on key areas, operations and inventory management, customer-facing digital enhancements, driving upsell opportunities, enhanced search, and other value-add services. Enhanced sales force training and data utilization to better understand our customer needs and behavior, and dynamic pricing and sourcing initiatives.

We're going to maintain a strong balance sheet and increase share repurchases. Target net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage of 1.5 to 2.5, and we expect to allocate more dollars to share repurchases as leverage remains in the target range. We expect to retain dry powder to facilitate tuck-in M&A should accretive opportunities arise. Going forward, we expect free cash flow conversion to be in the range of 40%-60% of adjusted EBITDA. Thank you. At this point, we'll open it up to questions. Operator? Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session.

If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing these star keys. One moment, please, while we pull for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Alex Slagle with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

Thanks. Good morning. Really impressive growth. I just wanted to get your perspective on what's gone on from a demand perspective. I mean, really strong demand in your U.S. business, and we can kind of see the broader demand in food service at the upper end. Where are you seeing the biggest acceleration, or what surprised you the most? Both placements and the new customer growth are really strong. Is it a business you're winning from other specialty players, or is it more just broadening of new types of customers trying to expand the quality of what they put on the menu and I guess just some more color on that would be great.

Yeah. A really easy answer. You mentioned everything, Alex. There's no one secret thing going on. It's kind of Goldilocks. The large investments we made into building a sales force, giving our team new buildings with capacity, ability to add categories, cross-selling, team building, specialists, maturing of a lot of new people that we've been hiring coming out of COVID. It's just execution on all sorts of levels, and you see the outlook. We think we're just getting started, really, and building this thing for so long. It's a 40-year-old business that's maturing now as a public company, and we're just finally getting the scale that we could start to leverage what we thought would be a great business model at The Chefs' Warehouse.

Got it. You raised the longer-term outlook for the organic sales growth also. Is that additional market share gain baked in, kind of going from 4-7 to, I guess, 6-9, the organic sales growth outlook?

Thanks, Alex. If you look at the algo that we put out in 2023 to 2028 was 4%-7%. We've been outperforming that by 200 or 300 basis points since then. We just think it made sense to kind of raise that algo to 7%-10%. It is risk-adjusted to what we're doing the last couple of quarters. We've been growing above 10%, there is some conservatism in there, risk adjustment. I think we feel good about it because it's still an industry-leading growth algo, both from top line and adjusted EBITDA growth cadence. It's really just kind of aligning with what we've been doing and where we see all the things that Chris just mentioned, the capacity we've put in, the capacity we're going to put in as we continue to make a measured amount of investments across our network.

It really just kind of aligns with our plan.

Okay. Thank you very much. I will pass it on to others.

Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Carden with UBS. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning. Thanks so much for taking the question. You guys continue to generate pretty strong top-line growth, really across the business. Building on Alex's main question a bit, did you see much fluctuation on a monthly basis? Do you think that you saw much of a benefit from unique events like the World Cup and the Knicks being in NBA Finals? Just any incremental color there and how it's been holding up quarter to date with some of the unique events like Cyclospora and some of the wildfires.

It's been pretty consistent. Our year-over-year growth in the second quarter was a little bit higher than the first quarter, you have to remember, we had two major storms and the start of the war in the first quarter, and we talked about that having about 150 basis point impact on the year-over-year. Really kind of taking that out of the equation, our first half growth was pretty consistent across the board. I wouldn't say there was anything that really stood out other than the normal seasonality. The World Cup, we don't think had a major impact for us. We talked to a lot of our customers, and they did not see a huge uptick. Even in our major cities, we think that it was more sports bars and pubs that got the uptick from the World Cup for those four or five weeks.

Some regions that we don't really operate in, like Kansas City, and obviously we're not in Mexico or Canada. We are in Canada, we didn't see much of an uptick there. I wouldn't say there was anything to call out. We've seen pretty consistent strength throughout the first part of the year.

That's great. Thanks. It sounds like your Middle Eastern business is proving to be pretty resilient, just given all the turmoil in the region. You mentioned that you're in this slow period there. How long does that last? Outside of the conflict, how impactful have the Middle Eastern events just been on your product sourcing? Thinking about the blockades and whatnot. Thank you. To the last part of the question, we haven't seen an impact on our sourcing into North America.

Obviously, our team over there has been dealing with some challenges around getting product in the Middle East, but they've done an amazing job of working with suppliers to reroute, go into different ports, go over the air, over the ground, where we used to take it over the water. Obviously there's some long leads, and the prices of product have increased as a result of those logistics changes. Our team there is doing an incredible job of managing through that volatility.

In terms of the first part of your question, we did build in some conservatism into the forward guidance. We are comping to a period this summer where there's not a lot of tourists in Dubai, and that's been the main difference between operating at 100%, and we were operating at 75% in the beginning of the conflict. As we got into the summer, we were comping to a period where it's 120 degrees there, and you don't really have a lot of tourism. The hotels were not as full last year as they were this year. We moved up into that mid-90s range. It's still uncertain whether the level of tourism that will come back in the fourth quarter, so we did build in some conservatism into our guidance as it relates to that.

Makes sense. Appreciate it, guys. Good luck. Sure. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Todd Brooks with Benchmark StoneX. Please proceed with your questions.

Hey, good morning. Congrats on another amazing quarter, guys.

Hey, Todd. A couple of questions for you, if I can.

One, you kind of educated us over the years, Jim and Chris, that this is a hard business to inflect margin meaningfully, and it's more of a yearly grind. Let's get our 20, 30 basis points out of EBITDA margin. The last couple of quarters, the EBITDA margin performance has been amazing. The new forward five-year plan is taking us into that upper 7%-8% range, which is kind of a new frontier for profitability in the business. How should we think about the ratability of the improvement between this year where we may end up in the high sixes and getting into that high sevens? Is this just a step-up year for some reason, or we reset to that 20, 25 basis points a year in the guidance framework? How should we think about that?

Yeah. I'll let Chris comment as well. Todd, I think, if you know us, we tend to be a little conservative in our forward guidance, and we've risk-adjusted the five-year algo as well. I think there's definitely potential for upside to that, but we want to build in potential things to happen that we don't control. I think it implies really industry-leading top-line growth, industry-leading adjusted EBITDA margin improvement over the timeframe, and continued operating leverage. You never know what the cadence is going to be exactly, but I think we're not saying that we can't repeat what we've been doing recently. This is a five-year look, and obviously, we're going to build in some risk adjustment.

Yeah. It's a great question, Todd. If you go back through our history again, we're celebrating our 41st, going into our 41st year since we started the business as mainly a specialty business. Before we went public and started adding a lot of cost to build the model, it was a much higher EBITDA business. It was 10% plus. Adding all the infrastructure to build The Chefs' Warehouse and adding new divisions. You've heard me say for years, "Listen, this is a big drag." Once we get scale, the EBITDA margins will go up, and I'm not going to cap it. We just updated our model till 2030, which is pretty much based just continuing as a specialty broadliner. As we fill up, we're giving ourselves room.

We're building new facilities every year, and when you add space, usually you're adding more space than you need, so you're carrying more overhead. That's a little drag on EBITDA. As we fill them up, as we're starting to do right now, you start to see the real EBITDA of the company starting to show itself. Right? I think I've said many times, we have a lot of our core business, way over 10% EBITDA businesses. This is a model that purposely, we built the moat around. It's very hard to copy because there's such a long tail to what we do. We always say we do the hard stuff. We have 170 different olive oils. Right? You have a very long tail. You're carrying extra inventory. Your overhead's higher than a typical broadliner.

The flip side, once you execute and you start to get scale, it's very hard to replicate. Right. This is a 40-year-old business, you can get leverage on it, which you're starting to see. Tomorrow there'd be great opportunity. You see our model takes us over $6 billion. We could be $10 billion, but we've added more businesses that we thought there was opportunity that were lower margin to turn into The Chefs' Warehouse types of business like we've been doing over the past 10 years. Our forecast, again, is based on continuing to do what we're doing, moving into new buildings, expanding into new territories, and continuing to execute with our team sell, our cross-sell, and continuing to add new customers and sell our customers more products, which we think we can execute into a 2030 plan.

Add that with a bunch of tuck-in small specialty businesses, you can easily be $8 billion, $9 billion. A very high margin business. Add some more businesses that are great businesses, but they'll need four or five years like other businesses that we've bought. Maybe that prevents us from going to a 9%, 10% EBITDA. At this point, I'm so proud of the team and the execution of all teams that I'm not capping where the EBITDA can go percentage-wise.

Okay, that's great. Thanks to you both. Just a quick follow-up. You're talking more overtly about your moat and laying out the case for how you've built it through investment over the past five years here. What's your competitive environment like in specialty, and how are you winning market share? Because you're obviously aggressively taking it. Is it these capabilities and the moat and customers recognizing that, or is your competition not performing as well and opening potential businesses' eyes to the possibility of making a switch to The Chefs' Warehouse? Thanks. Yeah. There's plenty of competition.

We fight every day. I think with the technology, we're just getting better and better, implementing better and better technology, making it easier for customers to do business with us and order more items. I think, we believe that was what's going to happen, and it's happening. It's good to be right once in a while. It takes five to 10 years to develop people. As much as everything is going online, and it's a great tool, we are in a relationship business. We sell the best chefs in the world, and they need information, and they constantly need new product. It's a stressful environment. You have to execute. When you're at the top, they're expecting a lot, the supply channels are always challenged for some reason, the logistic team, we rely on them, really.

We cannot leave our customers without product, right? It's not like you're at a $20 average check average, and you could substitute, and no one's really going to complain. Our customers are very demanding, and we have to execute at a very high level. To do that takes a lot of expertise. You can't just rely on computers. It takes a lifetime to develop that type of team, and I think that the results you're seeing is because of that lifetime investment in people. We're very proud of them, and we know how hard it is to duplicate this.

Well, congrats again, guys. Really impressive.

Thank you, Tom. Thanks very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan Harbaugh with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Yeah, thanks. Good morning, guys.

Good morning. You've talked in the past about some of the younger markets could be 3x, maybe 4x the size they are today.

I guess, as you think about adding a $2 billion of revenue over the next 5 years, where are we in some of those, or what opportunity are you assuming in some of those big, relatively under-penetrated markets?

We have the microscope to look at what we've done in other businesses in other cities as they've grown, right? The West Coast, East Coast obviously is the most populated, and we look at how we've grown our more mature markets over the last 40 years. As our new markets are developing, they're developing very similar to how we developed more mature markets like New York and San Francisco. When we look at Texas and Florida as big markets, and then we have our smaller markets, Nashville, Detroit, and as we push into the Carolinas and Colorado, we see lots of similarity. It gives us the ability to pretty much forecast. Places like Texas and Florida, we see customer growth, we see maturity of staff, we see logistical efficiencies starting to form, where it's almost like a repeat of a playbook.

As salespeople mature, as everybody gets better, as logistics get better, we start to sell more products, margins improve, and we continue to add people. That's why we see the 3x, 4x, 5x in those markets, because we're really small with lots of opportunity. Go to a market where not a lot of people, not a lot of customers, I think there's a ceiling. Even if you get all your categories humming, the business is only going to grow so X. That's why we see our bigger markets really adding a big amount of that growth we're talking about.

Sounds good. Is there any of the tech investments you've made or maybe uses of AI that you'd point to as actually kind of driving margins today? I think certainly some of this is from just efficiency and like sales force efficiency, warehouse efficiency. You talked about that. How would you sort of point to some concrete examples of technology investments helping as well?

I like to use the metaphor of you have a really smart student, he/she is doing great, but they've always had a lack of great eyesight, right? You put great glasses on them, and now they could do even better, right? They can digest the information quicker, make better decisions, and go faster. You give the same pair of great glasses to an average student, they'll still do better. I look at The Chefs' Warehouse as we had a great student, and we gave them really powerful lenses and they are doing a even better job, right? The tools are just assisting them to be a lot more efficient and do what they need to do, execute at a higher level. It's definitely making a difference and we think it's going to continue to enhance our model and the ability to sustain our growth rate.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kelly Bania with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Morning. Thanks for taking our questions and congrats on just some really strong execution here. Had just maybe a near term question and then some longer term, given the new targets. I guess first, as we look at the second half guidance for 2026, sounds like top line continuing at this low double digit rate. I guess my question is just if the top line continues at this pace, is there any reason why the margins wouldn't be as strong as they were in the first half? Obviously, the OpEx leverage was very strong this quarter, but just curious if there's any reinvestment or other factors, or maybe why the margin wouldn't be quite as strong.

Kelly, are you referring to gross profit margin or EBITDA margin?

EBITDA margin. No, I don't think there's any reason that our EBITDA margin would be anything different than the kind of the cadence that we normally perform seasonally.

Obviously, the first quarter is the weakest, and then you get the second and third quarter are fairly similar. Usually, the second quarter's a little stronger than the third quarter, and then the fourth quarter seasonally is pretty much for everybody in food distribution, the kind of powerhouse quarter driven by December. No, I don't think there's anything. I think the guidance implies really good cadence.

Obviously, the top line growth in the second half we have in the guidance is a little bit slower year-over-year, but that's really driven by, I talked about earlier, a little bit of conservatism on the Middle East, and then we lack the Italco acquisition in the fourth quarter, and that's about 70 basis points of year-over-year growth. I think her question, Jim, was mainly on the second quarter, why the EBITDA margin wasn't higher with such great growth. No, it was about the second half. Yeah. Maybe I've got it wrong. Our EBITDA margin was up 120 basis points year-over-year.

Yeah, I guess I was just kind of looking at the model. I know the top line is planned more conservatively in the second half, but if the growth stays at this double digit rate, the OpEx leverage that's coming through is very strong. Just trying to get a sense of what the upside could be to the second half if we keep at this double digit pace.

Yeah. I think the full year guidance implies now 6.8% adjusted EBITDA margin. That'd be a 70 basis point improvement year-over-year on a full year basis. Yeah, I think as you know us from history, even though we've raised the guidance pretty significantly, we would've raised it in Q1. It's really kind of two raises at once. Implies very strong operating leverage. Is there upside from there? Sure. That's our history, is we tend to be a little bit conservative on our guidance.

Got it. That makes sense. Just another question, Chris and Jim, as you think about kind of taking this organic profile over the next couple of years up, I guess from 4-7, maybe 6-9 on an organic basis, do you think you need to ramp up hiring of the sales force? Obviously, that takes a long time to mature. Or are you kind of expecting to extract more organic growth per salesperson? Just was curious how you think about the kind of sales force hiring plans over the next few years.

My instructions are if you find a great talent with potential, hire them. With our growth rate, we never have enough people, and it takes so long to train them. That's why we got to make sure that we're hiring. I always say, we're giving them such a great career opportunity. We really should get a 10-year contract guarantee, right? Because the first few years is just putting so much investment in these people. Yes, the mature people are doing better and better. The people that have come on in the last four or five years are continuing to evolve and getting better and better. You constantly need that bench. At our growth rate, which was 12%+ this last quarter, you just can't have enough people. We spend a lot. Again, we blew up HR years ago.

We took a different philosophy, hired a new leader, and we really focus on the hiring process. Hire slow, fire fast, right? You don't want to put the investment into people and two years later, you got the wrong person. It's a capital drain. We spend a lot of money on The Chefs' Warehouse University and recruiting, and it's something that we talk about every single day.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Peter Saleh with BTIG. Please proceed with your question.

Great. Thanks for taking the question, congrats on the quarter and really the year.

Thanks. I wanted to ask, historically, you guys have mentioned that the business has a lot of natural attrition, maybe in the high single-digit range, or more, and you kind of have to outgrow that.

I'm curious if that natural attrition has moderated at all, and that's kind of helping boost some of these more near-term results.

No, not really, Pete. We see a pretty consistent attrition rate in this industry, just in general, given the cyclical nature of our customer base. I wouldn't say it's changed materially.

Understood. Okay. Then just on the gross margin gains, they're pretty substantial, really, in the first half of the year. I guess I was kind of under the impression, going back a couple of years, that that gross margin rate didn't really have all that much upside to it. Maybe can you just talk about, do you think there's more upside from where we are today? Where is some of the growth going to come from? Is it more on the OpEx side or more on the gross margin? Just trying to understand where we go from here. Thanks. You're correct. All of the above.

It's just not one particular thing that is going to drive margins and EBITDA up. It's getting leverage on all the investments, right? Once the bulk of your fixed overhead is built in, right? You're building and obviously, you're always going to add trucks, but your efficiencies. I go back to as the team matures. Remember, we were a family business that was only about $300 million, I think, when we went public 14, 15 years ago. It took a lot longer than I expected to build the platform, build the team. Like I said, unless we buy a commodity-driven business that has much lower margins, kind of like we did in Texas and kind of like we did in New England and in many other markets.

The platform as it exists today, there's no reason. We're going to be conservative because we didn't see the plague coming, the COVID and the war and everything else that happens. The platform is built to get leveraged and to produce better margins and better EBITDA. Saying that, anything could go wrong, but what you're starting to see is execution, better logistics. When we open up Texas, we have tremendous headwinds in logistics. We don't have the volume. We're moving products, LTL, which costs a fortune. You have a lot of bad inventory because you're trying to forecast a lot of perishables and stuff that's very hard when you're small, but you have to have the product. As it grows and as it builds leverage, it should continue to improve on every single department, which should produce better results.

Pete, I'll just add on the gross profit margin side. While on a quarter-to-quarter basis or year-over-year, it's often impacted by your product mix changes and the level of inflation. I'll just echo Chris. We've made a ton of investment in our pricing teams and technology, our procurement teams, leveraging our scale. Just the level of collaboration between these teams and our sales leaders and sales teams has been a big contributor to that gross profit margin improvement side. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Margaret Mae Bienstock with Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask a little bit about the timeline and some of these AI investments. What have you guys done already? What should we be expecting to come and when, just to understand some of the ROI and when we could expect to see it? Thank you. I think you're starting to see it.

We never called it AI, but we've always been investing in the technology that makes us faster, more efficient, and I think we're already getting a great ROI, and we think we're still in the first inning. We continue to invest. We have great leadership in that department, and we continue to hire really smart people. We outsource a lot also to people that are developing the AI tools for us. We're producing them in-house and outside. I think we're not moon shooting, expecting to get five, six points to the bottom line somehow, miraculously. I don't think that's the way our industry works.

I think the tools, the agents, and everything else that we call them, I think it's just a part of our normal day-to-day business at this point, and we're constantly going to continue to invest, and we think it's going to keep producing good ROI.

Super helpful. I just wanted to ask, just to check in on the M&A environment. Any differences in the environment, like what you guys were seeing, versus six months ago to today? Thank you. Yeah. I think it's getting frothier and frothier.

I think a lot of businesses that came out of COVID and, or some of the roll-ups that we've seen that also came out of COVID that are way behind trying to exit. My desk is full, but we continue to be very diligent and disciplined and probably do some tuck-ins, probably do some new market acquisitions. Our organic growth is so strong. I would still rather keep investing in people and just keep adding talent and can grow at a much better ROI than a lot of the acquisitions that we're looking at, that we're passing on.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Charles with TD Cowen. Please proceed with your questions.

Great, thanks. Two for me. First, Jim, you talked about conservatism in the 2026 guidance. I'm curious, just given the volatility of fuel costs, what are you embedding within guidance for the back half of the year when it comes to fuel?

Pretty conservative assumption. We just modeled forward what we're experiencing now, whether $5-plus diesel on average across the nation. Obviously, in places like California, it's even more expensive than that. Yeah, it's in the guidance. We're not modeling any significant decrease or increase from that, I think we've shown that the power of our growth is overwhelming the fuel impact right now.

That's helpful. The other piece as well is the produce category showed very impressive 34% growth in the quarter. I'm also just curious there for July or just what's embedded in the back half of the year around guidance for this line, just in light of recent news surrounding Cyclospora.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with the 34%, but produce prices and inflation year-over-year has been pretty high. Most of that is due to logistics costs and driven by fuel, a lot of it driven by your first question, fuel. We haven't really embedded an assumption, anything different from what we've been seeing recently.

Still a small division. Produce is generally around 14% of our overall revenue, I'm not sure what the 34% is.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Mullan with Piper Sandler. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, this is Allison Armstrong for Brian Mullan. Thank you for the question. Last quarter, you noted that we would fully lap the Texas non-core customer attrition in Q2. Now that we're through that comparison, curious what you're seeing in terms of the underlying customer and volume trends in Texas.

Thanks for the question. It was producing some noise on our reported volume and inflation because it was such a big program in the center of the plate category, but very low margin and really no profitability. We're through that. Our Texas business is growing really nicely. We're in the process of working out the real estate solutions in both Dallas and the big markets there, Dallas and Houston. Dallas being first, we'll be looking to take on new space and build it out and consolidate some facilities. That's down the road. Right now, our businesses there are growing really nicely. We've improved our overall Texas EBITDA margin by multiple hundred basis points versus the last couple of years. We're really happy with how it's growing right now.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

We have reached the end of the question and answer session. Now I'd like to turn the floor back over to Chris Pappas for closing remarks.

Yes. Well, again, we thank everybody for their interest and joining our call. I couldn't be prouder of the CW family team, their execution, and devotion to the company and pushing it forward. I think the results speak for themselves. We're very excited about what's happening at Chef, and we look forward to speaking to everybody at our next quarterly call. Thank you. Have a great day.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.