Performance Food Group's

The foodservice distribution industry is highly competitive. Certain of our competitors have greater financial and other resources than we do. Furthermore, there are two larger broadline distributors with national footprints. In addition, there are numerous smaller regional, local, and specialty distributors. These smaller distributors often align themselves with other smaller distributors through purchasing cooperatives and marketing groups to enhance their geographic reach, private label offerings, overall purchasing power, cost efficiencies and to assemble delivery networks for national or multi-regional distribution. We often do not have exclusive service agreements with our customers and our customers may switch to other distributors if those distributors can offer lower prices, differentiated products, or customer service that is perceived to be superior. We believe that most purchasing decisions in the foodservice business are based on the quality and price of the product and a distributor’s ability to fill orders completely and accurately and to provide timely deliveries.

We believe we have a competitive advantage over smaller regional and local broadline distributors through economies of scale in purchasing and procurement, which allow us to offer a broad variety of products (including our proprietary Performance Brands) at competitive prices to our customers. Our customers benefit from our ability to provide them with extensive geographic coverage as they continue to grow. We believe we also benefit from supply chain efficiency, including a growing inbound logistics backhaul network that uses our collective distribution network to deliver inbound products across business segments; best practices in warehousing, transportation, and risk management; the ability to benefit from the scale of our purchases of items not for resale, such as trucks, construction materials, insurance, banking relationships, healthcare, and material handling equipment; and the ability to optimize our networks so that customers are served from the most efficient distribution centers, which minimizes the cost of delivery. We believe these efficiencies and economies of scale will provide opportunities for improvements in our operating margins when combined with incremental fixed-cost advantage.