Steven Spinner
Analyst · Scott Mushkin with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead with your question
So let's see let's start with the last one first. We have a great deal of confidence in Wholefoods we have a great deal and confidence in their management team, their competitive, their store experience and again I've said this couple of times we sell primarily to the central of the store which is strong, as it has been strong, continuous to be strong, and we get the benefit of their new store opening. So our overall growth within the super natural channel continuous to be good and were fairly optimistic that it will continue to be good. As it relates to Direct, this is kind of my view of Direct, it certainly it's always been there, has it been a little bit more ramped up now than it has been in the past, maybe. But then I think a lot of that is just being driven by the hype around the space and the retailer’s kind of emotional need to want to have the products at retail. But again, been at this now for seven years and the trend always seems to come back to, if you look on paper economically looking solely at the difference between cost to distribution through UNFI or cost on distribution to captive or direct. And remember that only 25% of our business had a captive option, the rest doesn’t. And so when you look at this whole direct notion, ultimately what the better retailers come back to is that, yes, maybe they can save 400 to 500 basis points in distribution feed by moving it from distribution to captive. But when they calculate the service level difference, in other words, they know the UNFI service level, because we are the largest consolidator of slow moving product in the country, which means we know how to aggregate freight, move to freight, get it to the right DCs at the right point which drives up our service level. So when the more sophisticated retailer say, okay, we know we have 400 to 500 basis points of savings on the distribution side, but UNFI still rate is 95%, our ability to fill it in a captive is only 82% or 83%, the lost gross margin at retail, because they don’t have the product on the shelf, is far greater than the 400 to 500 basis points of distribution margin. We invariably get a lot of that captive business back. And so I still think that that is going to continue to happen maybe there is a little bit more short-term pain to come, but as we look across some of these retailers, we lose it, a lot of it comes back and we set that standard. I also believe that again there has been a tremendous migration to put a lot these SKUs in a lot of retail points and like I said earlier, I think that there is going to be a day of reckoning as retailer say, hey, wait a second this product move so slowly, it's better having 24 feet if we’re going to have 18, or we’re going to have 12 or we’re going to have six, which means that overtime some of that volume is going to find its way back into UNFI. And like I said earlier as well, I am a firm believer that the more people that we can get to try the products we sell that are healthy and natural organic, the better it's going to be for us over the long haul. So I’m sorry that’s a kind of long winded way to answer the question, but that’s how we kind of see things. And the last question that you raised was on competition and the world has always been competitive. I am not sure that I would agree with anyone that it's any more competitive today than it is at any other point. People are always going to do irrational things and that doesn’t mean that we will. We provide a lot of value in the service that comes from UNFI across a wide variety of platforms, when we need to be right on price, we’re right on price, because I can tell you there is nobody in North America that has a lower cost to serve than UNFI. There is no one in North America that has distribution centers closer to the consumer than UNFI. But again I can’t speak to customers making irrational decision, I can’t speak to competitors making irrational decisions, I know that over the course of time we’ll be proven correct on this issue and I wouldn’t let one customer judge what’s going to happen in the past or in the future.