Earnings Labs

Americold Realty Trust, Inc. (COLD)

Q1 2020 Earnings Call· Sat, May 9, 2020

$12.42

+1.26%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the Americold Realty Trust first-quarter 2020 earnings conference call. [Operator instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Scott Henderson. You may begin.

Scott Henderson

Analyst

Good afternoon. We would like to thank you for joining us today for Americold Realty Trust first-quarter 2020 earnings conference call. In addition to the press release distributed this afternoon, we have filed a supplemental package with additional details on our results, which is available in the Investors section on our website at www.americold.com. On today's call, management's prepared remarks and answers to your questions may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those discussed today. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, assumptions and beliefs, as well as information available to us at this time and speak only as of the date they are made, and management undertakes no obligation to update publicly any of them in light of new information or future events. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. More information about these non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to the comparable GAAP financial measures is contained in the supplemental information package available on the Company's website. We also would like to note that numbers presented in today's prepared remarks have been rounded to the nearest million with the exception of per share amounts. This afternoon's conference call is hosted by Americold's Chief Executive Officer, Fred Boehle; and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Marc Smernoff. Management will make some prepared comments, after which we will open up the call to your questions. Now I will turn the call over to Fred.

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Thank you, and welcome to our first-quarter 2020 earnings conference call. We hope everyone on this call and their families are well. This afternoon, I will provide a brief overview of the temperature-controlled food supply chain and how it's been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I will then discuss our first-quarter 2020 results and activity, and how these results were influenced by COVID-19. Mark will then review our quarterly results in more detail and discuss our balance sheet and guidance for 2020. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Let me begin by saying, I have never been prouder of the Americold family that I am today in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our global network of temperature-controlled infrastructure and the services we provide are an integral part of the temperature-controlled food supply chain. Our people are our greatest asset, and this has been underscored by our nearly 13,000 team members at 183 sites around the world, who have been working tirelessly day after day to help make sure grocery store shelves are stocked. Our infrastructure is absolutely mission-critical, and our team is truly essential and deeply proud of their role in protecting and providing access to food at this time. I am very grateful for their dedication and want to thank them for their incredible efforts. Further, the resilience of our diversified business model has never been more evident. Keeping our people safe and healthy has been and continues to be a priority. In addressing COVID-19, we took immediate action at the onset by mobilizing a global response team following the guidance of the CDC and enhancing our standard protocols to help protect our associates and safeguard the integrity of our supply chain. Since the start of COVID-19, we have invested in additional…

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

Thank you, Fred, and good afternoon, everyone. Today, we'll provide updates on our actual performance as well as certain metrics on a constant currency basis. We will also highlight areas of our business that were impacted by COVID-19. Let me begin by echoing Fred's comments, which bear repeating. Our results this quarter captured the impact of increased overall activity by our two largest customer types, food manufacturers and retailers. We are focused on being strong partners to our customers as we provide mission-critical infrastructure that enables them to adapt their supply chains through this pandemic. Both sets of customers were responding to elevated end customer purchases, driven by COVID-19 and stay-at-home requirements across the country. This activity was above what we typically see in the first quarter. For the first quarter, we reported total company revenue of $484 million and total company NOI of $135 million, which reflects a 23.1% increase and a 37.2% increase year-over-year, respectively. Core EBITDA was $104 million for the first quarter of 2020, an increase of 46.5% year-over-year. This was driven by our 2019 and 2020 acquisitions and solid growth within our core portfolio, including increased activity due to COVID 19. Our core EBITDA margin grew by 343 basis points to 21.5%. For the first quarter 2020, we reported net income of $24 million compared to a net loss of $5 million for the same quarter of the prior year. Our first quarter core FFO was $60 million or $0.29 per diluted share. Our first quarter AFFO was $67 million or $0.33 per diluted share. As a reminder, the full definition and reconciliation of core EBITDA, core FFO and AFFO to reported net income can be found in our supplemental. For the first quarter of 2020, Global Warehouse segment revenue was $381 million, which reflects…

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Thanks, Marc. The events of the past few months have been unprecedented, and uncertainty remains high as major sectors of the economy remain significantly slowed down. However, at Americold, our infrastructure has been proven to be essential. Our business has demonstrated its resilience, and our team of associates are proud to be important members of the global food supply chain. They have risen to the occasion to support our customers with incredible dedication, and I cannot thank them enough for their tremendous efforts. Thanks again for joining us today, and we will now open the call for your questions. Operator?

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Dave Rodgers from Baird.

Dave Rodgers

Analyst

Thanks for all the details on the quarter and the last couple of weeks. I wanted to go back to the temporary production shortfalls or your customer shutdowns that we've been reading about in the paper and the threads you tried to address. I guess a couple of things around that. I would say the first is that you did talk about how you have contracts in place that would help mitigate some of the rent on storage. So can you tell us on the protein side how much maybe that 25% of your business is in a fixed commitment? And then maybe a broader question around that is, how would that impact your services business if you were to see those shortfalls coming through the channel?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes. Thanks, Dave. Yes, most of our protein, and I think we've talked about this before, most of our plant advantage sites, sites that are connected to manufacturer funnel across the street or such as that, plants that are dedicated, the vast majority of that business is on a fixed commitment. So they're paying for the space regardless of the volume. So that's one place in our supply chain where you can count on, because that space is dedicated to have fixed commitments. So to your point, yes, the real impact that we feel is throughput, which, as you know, is kind of our lower-margin business, if you will. So that would affect the services side of the house. Again, plant shutdowns, I mean -- look, I think we have experienced a couple of plant shutdowns, but not nearly to the magnitude that some people are stressing it out there in the news. So many of these shutdowns that have been in the press literally are plants that were down for one day or for two days max. That literally has -- that's a blip and has no impact on us. As a matter of fact, a lot of these plants tend to shutdown to do maintenance and cleaning and such at some point during the year. So the plants that are shutdown right now, that are getting ready to ramp back up as a result of the executive orders, I guarantee what they're doing right now in those plants in addition to the cleaning is to take care of any maintenance and those types of things that ordinarily they might do at another point in time of the year. So bottom line is very little impact to us. Again, in those particular plants, there is the art of substitutability where people are going to -- people need protein. So if pork is not available or beef is not available, they're going to switch to fish or chicken. So we might see a minor hit of services in one plant, but we pick it right up in another. So...

Dave Rodgers

Analyst

Great. And then a follow-up, if I could. Just, Marc, you mentioned health care costs in the first quarter and that you saw no material increase from COVID-19. As you moved into the second quarter and we think about employee costs, things like compensation, overtime, additional healthcare costs as the virus spread, do you have any comments about kind of the last five weeks, I think, would be really helpful as well?

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

Yes. Look, as we look, as Fred said, we definitely witnessed higher labor costs because we're seeing higher throughput to support that business. Obviously, with the surge, we're definitely not as ideally efficient as we'd like to be, but we're really focused on making sure we can serve our customers and get that product out and through the supply chain, as Fred described in his prepared remarks. All that being said, overall, I think you saw it through our business, we've been able to maintain or grow our margin there. And on the healthcare front, the interesting phenomena there is, with many of these stay-at-home orders, we're actually seeing a reduced usage of some typical healthcare benefits as people have not been able to go to the doctor in the ordinary force. So we haven't seen regular healthcare costs up. So we're not expecting any major moves in healthcare as we move throughout the year.

Dave Rodgers

Analyst

Great thank you very much.

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

Thanks, Dave.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Nate Crossett from Berenberg. Please proceed with your question.

Nate Crossett

Analyst

Hey. Good evening, guys. Hope you're doing well. Obviously, a strong quarter from a metrics perspective, but you noted that you're expecting the demand to normalize. So I guess my question is, when we do normalize, do we go back to levels, such as occupancy that we saw pre COVID? Or do you expect some customer behavior to permanently change? And if it does, what does that look like?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes, boy, I'll tell you. Week to week, you're given different inputs. And I think a lot of this is really going to be dependent on how states reopen, how quickly consumers kind of switch their habits, how fast they kind of flood the restaurants, for example. That's really still kind of up in the air. If you think about our first quarter, it was very similar to our fourth quarter for us. Right? I mean, if you kind of compare par metrics, there was just a massive rush to retail. I like it and I used the phrase it like a hurricane. I'm an ex grocer, and I know the impact that hurricanes have on a marketplace for a short period of time. Everybody stocks up. And then that next week, nobody is shopping, right, because they already stocked up. So we've got to kind of watch how those consumer patterns. This is obviously far more complex than a typical hurricane, if you will, because it's sustained, and it's going to take a while to recover from. So it's really hard to predict exactly how it's going to balance out. I guess the point that I would make, though, is given the resiliency of our network and the diversification of our portfolio, we're going to easily be able to adjust on the. It won't be abrupt like what we saw in the first quarter. It will probably be more even-keeled and even-paced. We expect retail to be up at least for the next several months because we still think that retail will get a predominance of the buy versus pre-COVID. But when that levels back out to pre-COVID levels? If I had that answer, I'd -- yes.

Nate Crossett

Analyst

Well, I just, I mean, you mentioned that 30-day supply across the supply chain a couple of times. So I'm just wondering if that number goes up after this, so people kind of provision more forward?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes. Actually, there's 30 days of supply of inventory at all four nodes. So at any given time, there's about four months of inventory. So you're right, there was a lot of reports in the press about food shortages right after the spike of emptying out the grocery stores. People thought we were out of supply. No, it was just -- it was a massive tug and the whole supply chain has to react overnight without warning to replenish the forward node. So there's four months of inventory at any given time in the supply chain. There might be specific items that run out, that run shorter, but there's a lot of inventory. I have a lot of full warehouses. So I don't expect that there's going to be a huge surge. That said, the manufacturers and the retailers are making those decisions. Some will probably be more conservative and might add a little bit more inventory. Others may say, hey, four months of inventory is enough, we're good. So unfortunately, we don't control that. But my prediction and being a supply chain guy, I would say that after we clear the deck and COVID is well behind us, I would expect things to kind of return back to normal.

Nate Crossett

Analyst

Okay. That's helpful. And then if I could just quickly ask about dairy. Is there anything going on there, because there's also been kind of reports of farmers dumping milk and stuff? And I just want to know if that would have any effect.

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes. Not a strong impact on our supply chain. We do have some dairy that flows through and cross-stocks, but it's pretty minimal. Obviously, the stuff that's going to retail is still cross-stocking through and higher volumes. I think the dumping that you're seeing is because of their lackability to sell it through some of their other channels, which we wouldn't normally be involved in.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Ki Bin Kim from SunTrust.

Ki Bin Kim

Analyst

Could we just maybe take a step back for a high level? When did you guys start to see the benefits of people stockpiling food? And if you can kind of just paint a picture for us and how that played out till May 7?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes. I mean we actually had two phenomenons going on early in the first quarter. Speaking of protein, protein was amping up supply with the intention of exporting and so -- mainly to China. And obviously, this hit China first and all the shipping lanes slowed down. We couldn't get containers. So export kind of got jammed up and just stayed in inventory. So we started obviously receiving benefit very early on because of the extra holdings associated. And then it was kind of that late first quarter period of time, maybe three weeks before the end of the quarter, where you really start seeing some of the rush to the grocery stores. And it kind of happened in two big cycles, right? You had the early people that jumped in and were in panic mode right away. And when did -- and then things started getting serious, and we kind of had another surge, right? Now it's kind of evened out, because people have been putting limits on different types of products that you can go after, and therefore, we don't see as much of the surge in the tug that you saw in those very early stages. So we continue to see high demand, but there was a drop-off in retail right after that surge. And they got the grocery stores replenished. And now it's kind of leveled off. And what we're seeing today is more leveled off retail volumes, albeit higher than pre-COVID volumes.

Ki Bin Kim

Analyst

Okay. And you mentioned in your remarks the difference between retail that goes through the supermarkets and food service for the restaurants and other venues like that. What is the split in your portfolio? Or how much money you make on retail versus food service? And generally speaking, like what segment is more profitable?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Well, I think, two things. Number one, remember, the vast majority of our income, 76%, is by the food manufacturers. We really are kind of agnostic as to whose truck we're putting it on. So we don't care if it's Cisco's truck or Kroger's truck. Right? So we're agnostic to the vast majority of that. We don't really care which direction it's going. Now I will say that we actually run retail distribution centers, we don't actually run food service distribution centers. So we do get a little extra benefit associated with the retail distribution centers from a standpoint of throughput, albeit lower margin volumes like retail, moves a lot of cases. Right? Over the course of the year, we moved 750 million cases through retail. So we do get a little extra benefit associated with that retail bond.

Ki Bin Kim

Analyst

Okay. And if I could squeeze the third one in here. Tying that all together, I mean you obviously had a really good first quarter. You talked about the throughput volume leveling off, but still higher than pre-COVID levels. So I'm assuming that means higher than last year. Your same-store NOI was 11%. Strong same-store revenue. How come guidance does not change?

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

Look, I think the big picture is that we're reiterating guidance in this environment. What we would say is, when you look across the full year, and we do really focus on the full year, overall food consumption isn't changing. So even though while we saw a slight acceleration in this first quarter, as people procured more, it didn't mean they necessarily consumed more. So when you think about our guidance over the full year, and just as Fred mentioned, we're a little bit agnostic as to what channels. But on an overall basis, for the most part, people aren't eating more as a result of COVID-19.

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Right. So the big question to play out, which we just can't answer at this point, even just like we couldn't predict that this was going to happen in the first quarter, is you don't know if personal preferences have changed. Right? So we talk about core consumption not changing over the course of a full year, but which calories you're consuming is anybody's got. Right? So I joke and say, I probably eat more frozen pieces than I care to share in the last few weeks. I don't know if that's going to be a permanent shift with somebody or something and say, "Hey, I love those pieces, I'm going to buy more frozen pieces in the future, or somebody might say, I'm sick and of that frozen pieces, I'm going to take a break, and I'm going to eat something else. It's just really hard to predict exactly what that flow is going to look like. So again, as Marc said, we're confirming our guidance, we're not pulling our guidance like most people are. We're excited about the business. We're demonstrating the resiliency associated with it. But there's just a lot that can happen with the way that these reopen plans occur and with the consumer consumption habits that we just can't predict right now. So we need a little bit more time to get a better understanding of that.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Manny Korchman from Citi.

Manny Korchman

Analyst

If we think about sort of the other sectors, we talked about tenants asking for rent relief. You talk about your food service customers who are keeping their product with you, but their businesses may be closed or suffering from lower revenues. Have any of them come to you and said, "Yes, we've got this fixed contract with you, but you know what, we just can't pay it right now. Help us out, cut rents, let us defer," anything along those lines?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

As we said with our DSOs, our days sales outstanding have remained constant from last year through Q1 and through April. So we have not seen any slowdown in cash collections. Clearly, our customers, even though many restaurants are open for some sort of takeaway, they may not have done the regular sit down business that they've historically done, but there still is some activity flowing. It's just slower than what was historic norm going into the food service channel. I think the other thing to remember is where maybe an industrial landlord, for example, might be more impacted by that, because whoever they're leasing it to may have ceased manufacturing operations, their processing operations or distribution, right, depending on who they were. But in the temperature control sector, remember, even if the product is not moving, we're still providing a service, a very valuable service. We're preserving their goods. Those goods can sit in our freezers, because they're held at the right temperatures for a long period of time. So we're still providing value, we're still protecting their assets during these difficult times. So -- and the other thing to remember is the vast majority of our customers serve both channels. So they're seeing a shift from food service to retail, focusing more energy on retail. There are folks out there that are primarily dedicated to food service. Most of those are pretty sound, healthy companies. There might be pockets of smaller guys. But like I said, we haven't really faced any of that and don't expect it.

Manny Korchman

Analyst

How much of your portfolio is exposed to sort of other industries that are going to take longer to catch up and may not be necessarily replaced by their usage? I'm thinking something like the airlines or the cruise ships or casinos where it's less of, are you eating at home, are you meaning out, sort of maybe a third channel of consumption?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes. Again, those channels are typically serviced out of a food service provider, like a Sysco or U.S. Foods or somebody like that. They are manufacturers' customers. So we ship products to Sysco and U.S. Foods. They may have a slowdown. They may see a slowdown in shipping to the airline from there or somebody else. But they'll sell those same types of goods to restaurant channels and others. We've even seen stories of some of the food service guys shipping both chicken and beef products and that type of thing to grocers. And then the grocer -- the butcher itself is cutting it into different retail-friendly types of packaging and then packaging right there in the back of the store at your local grocery store. So we expect those channels to keep on going. Again, they adjust and they adapt and find other ways to consume.

Manny Korchman

Analyst

And, Marc, on guidance, it looks like your assumptions for income tax expense came down and guidance was maintained. I guess that would mean that there was an offset somewhere else in sort of operations or elsewhere? Was it just a matter of it all being within the range and chose not to move things around? Or is there something else we should be thinking about in terms of where your guidance landed with the 2 items that you did point out in the release sort of going and get the other way?

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

Yes. Two things. Just when you look at the overall guidance altogether, you had your current income tax expense come down, to actually have kind of the deferred piece come up in that range, which is an offset on overall taxes, so that factors in, as well as some of the FX headwinds. So clearly, the U.S. dollar has strengthened against most of our international ops. So that's put a little bit of headwind in the overall results. But all that being said, when we pull it all back together, we're comfortable reiterating our full-year guidance.

Manny Korchman

Analyst

Thanks, again.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Michael Carroll from RBC. Please proceed with your question.

Michael Carroll

Analyst

Yes. Thanks. Fred, so I don't know if this is too difficult to do or not, but can you quantify the surge of activity you saw in March versus today? I mean obviously, the earlier surge pushed the 1Q '20 results, noticeably higher. I mean should we expect that this still elevated pace is going to continue to drive elevated organic growth as we move into 2Q?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Look, Mike, I mentioned on the other question, it's really hard to predict exactly how things are going to pan out. But again, Q1 was unprecedented and the fact that there was this made peer service that occurred, that surge did not happen in Q2. Right? That surge kind of leveled off. It dropped off after the surge and then kind of came back up to a steadier level, albeit higher than from a retail perspective, higher than pre-COVID. But that surge, again, it's very much like a hurricane. When hurricanes predicted to hit South Carolina or North Carolina or wherever people rush to the store, they buy everything in the store, and then their refrigerators and freezers are full. And so they don't need to go to the store the next week. So they don't buy. And then they start to consume and then they kind of come back into their normalized buying habit. So I know that's a microcosm, but hopefully, that helps to explain kind of that binge and purge type of thing that happened. It's yet to be determined, like I said, with the pizza example. It's yet to be determined how consumer behavior is going to change in terms of what they consume as a part of their caloric intake. So hopefully, that helps. I mean it was just as every single facility like I described in the press release is every facility was pressed immediately and unprecedentedly to respond to the next node in the supply chain. That's what you saw happen in the first quarter.

Michael Carroll

Analyst

Okay. And then, I mean, how should we expect the environment to be normalized? Is it just typically people having their freezers filled up and they don't need to go grocery shopping anymore? Or I know you kind of mentioned this a couple of times in the Q&A, was it really the restaurants opening up, I guess? Since you have more grocery DCs than food distributor DCs, is that a big driver? So as long as we're in the stay-at-home environment, you're going to continue to see pretty strong activity through your system?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Well, sure. If the restaurants absolutely do not open, right, then that whole -- that balloon exercise that I do where the caloric intake, if it's 50-50 pre-COVID, you're sweeping the restaurants closed, all that consumption needs to be fulfilled via the other channel, which would be retail. So of course, if the restaurants are closed, we see benefits because of the retail distribution centers seeing more throughput, albeit that's services revenue, right. The fixed commitment for those retail distribution centers is in existence regardless of the amount of volume that's going through us. So the real only lift is the retail services revenue, right? So again, as this balances back out and goes more to food service, we're just loading up food service trucks instead of loading retail trucks, and we'll see a dip in volume from the services side and retail, and we'll see more throughput going to the food service distributors.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And our next question is from Joshua Dennerlein from Bank of America.

Joshua Dennerlein

Analyst

Appreciate all the color in the beginning on the supply chain and the detailed commentary. I guess I'm curious to kind of think through where maybe your margins are going, going forward? Maybe on the service side, I'm not sure, but you really touched on labor. Did you guys have to tap like temporary workers at all in the first quarter or over time that might normalize out in 2Q or going to need -- -- have you started to see that in 2Q if any workers have gotten sick at all?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes. So we've had fantastic attendance and very little turnover. So part of that is because we leapt on this early and protected our employees. So we haven't had those types of issues with the people. It's very similar to the fourth quarter. When we go into a fourth quarter, we're building up for the season, we have to bring in temporary workers, that type of thing to be able to support the business. The difference is, during that time, we have the time to train them up and get them into a highly productive state. In this particular phase, because the ramp was so quick, so immediate, we did a number of things. We moved people around between different facilities that felt the impact faster than other facilities. We went and hired a lot of people we worked with. A lot of people like Great Wolf Lodge, an example of an employer that had to unfortunately shutdown a lot of their operations. We worked with them. Their CEO and I aligned, and we got our HR teams together, and we were able to take people that work near one of their facilities, and we were able to employ them at one of our facilities. The great news is a lot of them were pre-trained. So we were able to bring them in pretty quick and get them in. But yes, we went ahead and we got extra labor. We worked over time. We did all of those things. So no doubt, labor cost was higher than our normal labor cost. But as you can see, with that volume going through our full boxes, we converted it.

Joshua Dennerlein

Analyst

Okay. Yes. Well, impressive. And then I don't think we touched on it, development. I believe that was going to start leasing up after the holiday season. Where does that kind of stand on the NOI J curve has started generating positive NOI? Or is that something we'll kind of kick in later in the year like 2Q, 3Q?

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

Yes. As we said, we're really pleased. We've seen very strong demand for that site. And as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, we have demand for over 80% of the space in that site, and that demand will be ramping on through the rest of the year. So we are performing consistent with our outlook for that site.

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes. Our goal, just to remind people, the goal is we expect that building to be fully stabilized from a run rate perspective in Q1 of next year.

Joshua Dennerlein

Analyst

Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from Mike Mueller from J.P. Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Mike Mueller

Analyst

Yeah. Hi. Let me see, just two quick ones here. One, Marc, can you talk a little bit about where you see the spot borrowing costs? And then just in terms of the margin improvement for the quarter, the up 130, can you have a sense as to how much of that was directly tied to COVID?

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

Yes. So two things. On the spot borrowing costs, as you saw, we actually did refinance our overall credit facility in the quarter, and we're able to actually tighten our overall credit spread by five basis points. So I think, especially, people have really seen, as Fred mentioned now, just the strength and the resiliency of the platform, especially through all these cycles. So not only we think our lending community really saw that. We've also obviously been approached by others of our letters in our longer-term paper. We have also expressed interest should we need to tap that market, but they'd be available and there to support us. If you look at our overall business and you think about the split and the overall growth, especially in the same-store, roughly the 11% growth, we think about half of that is related to the additional activity from COVID relative to the ordinary course of the business. So when you think about kind of our full-year guidance, obviously, we've been performing very well. And when we look at our recent trends of Q1 results, kind of Q1 over Q1, you'll see that roughly it's about 5% to 6% typically. And so I'd say, overall, this year from the NOI perspective, about half of that over 11% is reflective of COVID related growth.

Mike Mueller

Analyst

Thank you.

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

Thanks, Mike.

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from Bill Crow from Raymond James. Please proceed with your question.

Bill Crow

Analyst

Just taking a couple of the topics that I've already been broached and maybe restating a little bit. The 30% that goes out to food service, it goes to U.S. Foods or Cisco. How worried do you have to be about the underlying health of their clients, of the restaurants that are out there that are closed?

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes. That's very little, not that there, but very little. At that point, that's their transaction. By the way, food service, it's not 30%. I don't know where that number is from. But if we say pre COVID, I would estimate -- it depends on who you talk to, call it, 50-50, right? Half our volumes that food manufacturers make goes through retail, half goes through food service. Again, what we saw was the squeezing of the balloon where more is going to retail than food service at this point. But the bottom line is, and I think I mentioned this, those food service guys are getting creative and figuring out who else they can sell to, right? So they're actually selling to retail grocery stores and finding other avenues to be able to ship that product to. So I can't necessarily speak to the health of their customers in some of these restaurant chains and such, but we're really kind of agnostic to that.

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

And I just want to just remind everyone, when you look at our customer base, roughly 76% is focused on food manufacturers that typically service both channels. And we've seen, as Fred mentioned earlier, then shift towards the retail-centric product in this environment. The other 22% is predominantly retail.

Bill Crow

Analyst

Okay. And then any comments on the poultry side of things? That -- I think we've talked about beef and pork. We haven't said much about poultry.

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Yes -- no. I've got a lot of full warehouses of chicken. So -- I mean, look, I think the protein industry as a whole is healthier than what's being for trade out there. We have lots of inventory across the enterprise. Again, I applaud what the grocers are doing, and they're making sure that we don't have another toilet paper fiasco on our hands by doing the limits early on based on the news, but the supply is slowing. The product is blown across all those protein categories. Again, we might see spot short-term shortages, if you will, in terms of throughput happening. But I think this executive order gets everybody back to work and I don't think we'll really feel it.

Marc Smernoff

Analyst

The other thing I want to say while we talk about these percentages, often that business is spread across multiple sites and supporting multiple manufacturing nodes. And one of the things, I think more of the news has been around the beef and pork sites that have seen higher instances of COVID. But even if you look across our network, we service multiple manufacturers across multiple nodes. So the business is extremely diversified even within those categories. That's right.

Operator

Operator

And we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. And I will now turn the call over to Fred Boehler for closing remarks.

Fred Boehler

Analyst

Thank you. And again, thanks for joining us tonight. I know it's a busy week of earnings here. Again, I just want to end with, we're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish, very proud of the 13,000 associates that we have around the world. They're really doing a great job out there in servicing all of us, quite frankly, as consumers. I think that if you look at our business, the things that we've been touting for the last couple of years, I think, really rang true as we're going through this crisis. And that's the resiliency of our business due to the diversification of our portfolio and the commercialization of our business and the way that we operate in a consistent manner with the Americold Operating System. So again, I think these things have never rang truer. So again, excited about where we're heading. I know it's difficult to predict where we're going, but we were able to confirm guidance. I think that's a good thing in this environment where a lot of people are pulling that and we're growing it. We're in a good state, and we'll watch it closely and see how this business transpires with consumer behavior through the rest of the year. So thank you. Have a great evening. Stay safe. Be well.

Operator

Operator

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