Company: CHEF
Filing Date: 2025-02-25
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001517175-25-000002
Chunk: 20

Company: Chefs' Warehouse, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-25
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 20
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 most of our fleet which allows us to monitor the delivery of product to our customers on a real-time basis. For our direct-to-consumer business, we ship through nationally recognized couriers. We also use GPS and vehicle monitoring technology, including on-board camera technology, to regularly evaluate the condition of our delivery trucks and monitor the performance of our drivers, by tracking their progress relative to their delivery schedule and providing information regarding hard braking, idling and fast starts. Our use of this technology allows us to conduct proactive fleet maintenance, provide timely customer service and improve our risk management.

Our Technology Systems

We maintain an advanced information technology platform that enables us to manage our operations across our various markets, as we seek to drive our growth and profitability and ensure that the needs of our customers are met in an accurate and efficient manner. Over recent years, we have made significant investments in distribution, sales, information and warehouse management systems and are in the process of implementing and improving a fully-integrated Enterprise Resource Planning system. Our systems improvements include the implementation of route optimization software, a warehouse management system at all specialty warehouses that integrates with pick-to-voice and directed put-away systems. We are driving increasing sales volume through our e-commerce platform by optimizing our customers’ re-order and product discovery journeys. We believe we will be able to utilize advancements in search and artificial intelligence to enable us to better predict our customers’ needs so that we can deliver the same level of service online as we do offline. We also leverage a reporting and analytics platform that provides our sales team and management with the information required to drive efficiency and growth. We believe that our current systems are scalable and can be leveraged together with targeted investments in new technology to provide the fuel to drive profitable growth.

Intellectual Property

We have registered and/or applied to register a variety of trademarks and serve marks used throughout our business, as well as domain names, and rely on a combination of copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade names, licenses, franchises and concessions. We are not aware of any facts that could materially impact the continuing use of any of our intellectual property.

Competition

The foodservice distribution industry is highly competitive. We compete with numerous smaller distributors on a local level, as well as with a limited number of national broadline foodservice distributors. Certain of these distributors have greater financial and other resources than we do. Bidding for contracts or arrangements with customers, particularly larger hotels and caterers, is highly competitive and distributors may market their services to a particular customer over a long period of time before