Company: CHEF
Filing Date: 2025-03-26
Form Type: DEF 14A
Source: 0001517175-25-000003
Chunk: 42

Company: Chefs' Warehouse, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-26
Form: DEF 14A
Chunk 42
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 motivate and retain highly qualified executives by providing total compensation for each position that is competitive within our business sector and peer groups. We also seek to provide appropriate incentives for our named executive officers to achieve performance goals related to our company-wide performance. Finally, through the issuance of equity-based incentives, we seek to align the interests of our named executive officers with our stockholders and to reward performance that enhances our long-term value.

Our Compensation Committee strives to implement a compensation program that enables us to attract and retain high-quality leadership and to ensure that our named executive officers are compensated in a manner consistent with stockholder interests, the policies adopted by the Compensation Committee, internal equity considerations, competitive practice and the requirements of appropriate regulatory bodies. In determining the relevant amounts of each of these components, our Compensation Committee adopted a compensation program that consists of a mix of compensation that it believes:

• aligns interests of our named executive officers with our business plans by using company-wide performance metrics based on those plans and long-term incentive programs with multi-year vesting to retain employees key to their implementation;

• incentivizes achievement of annual and longer term financial, functional, and individual objectives; and

• creates a fair and measurable compensation model for rewarding performance and attracting and retaining key members of management.

#### Competitive Marketplace Assessment
The Compensation Committee, with the assistance of management and FW Cook, looks at two peer groups when considering its decisions regarding the compensation of our named executive officers: our primary peer group, which consists of companies similar to us in size and business characteristics and is used primarily when setting compensation levels, and our secondary peer group, which consists of large foodservice distribution companies and is used to inform our incentive compensation plan design.

Market data from our primary peer group was taken into consideration in setting the fiscal 2024 compensation of each of our named executive officers. The primary peer group, which was first developed in fiscal 2020 and used to set fiscal 2021 compensation was also referenced in our review of program designs for fiscal 2023, including an assessment of pay vehicles and performance metrics. The Compensation Committee considered the following factors in determining a primary peer group for fiscal 2024:

• Company Type - The companies in the primary peer group are all publicly traded on a U.S. exchange.

• Size - Companies with revenues between 0.4 and 2.5 times the Company’s revenue and market capitalizations between 0.2 and 5 times the Company’s market capitalization were targeted for review as potential peers. This size range reflected our near-term aggressive growth