All told, we delivered sales growth of 8.2% versus 2019.
We outperformed our fiscal 2022 growth goal of 1.2 times the market in the first quarter, delivering the strongest growth versus the market in the last 5-plus years.
Gross margin for the quarter was impacted by a high rate of inflation, which increased to approximately 13%.
We have improved from posting a loss in Q3 of 2021 to breaking even in Q4 to making more than $60 million of adjusted profit in our Q1 of fiscal 2022.
The combination of these results delivered a strong adjusted operating income for the quarter of $685 million and adjusted earnings per share of $0.83.
Topic 2, let's turn to our business transformation, which is highlighted on slide five.
As shown on slide six, during our first quarter, we successfully closed on the Greco and Sons transaction, which we expect to deliver over $1 billion in incremental sales to Sysco in fiscal 2022, ahead of our deal model expectations.
More importantly, we plan to leverage the Greco business model to build a nationwide Italian platform that is the best in the industry, which will further deliver incremental sales beyond the $1 billion just mentioned.
Importantly, our first quarter results exceeded our 1.2 times market share growth target for fiscal 2022.
As such, we remain committed to growing profitably 1.5 times the market as we exit our fiscal 2024.
We leveraged extensive digital marketing and a streamlined hiring process to net more than 1,000 new supply chain associates to bolster our troops.
Lastly, you may have seen the recent announcement regarding the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration's requirements for employers with 100 or more employees.
The safety of our associates and our customers is our #1 priority, and we remain steadfast in protecting our team.
We now have more than 10 consecutive months of gaining market share, and we are on track to deliver our stated goal for the year, growing 1.2 times the industry.
And our Recipe for Growth strategy will enable us to accelerate, over the next three years, and grow at 1.5 times the industry by the end of our fiscal year 2024.
Our strong first quarter fiscal 2022 financial headlines are: growing demand with sales exceeding Q1 fiscal 2019 by 8.2%; a profitable quarter, exceeding our plans with EBITDA comparable to pre-COVID 2019 levels; aggressive investment by Sysco against hiring a snapback, allowing Sysco to lead the industry in otherwise turbulent times; purposeful investments in working capital to continue to lead in product availability; a strong return to profitability by our international business; and great progress against our balanced capital allocation strategy, including continued investments against the five pillars of our Recipe for Growth and upgrade to BBB of our investment-grade rating by S&P the elimination of all debt covenant restrictions on our ability to repurchase shares or increase our dividend in the future; and a decision that we are announcing today, namely that we have satisfied our internal criteria to commence share repurchase.
In the second quarter of fiscal 2022, we will begin our repurchase of up to $500 million of shares over the course of this fiscal year.
First quarter sales were $16.5 billion, an increase of 39.7% from the same quarter in fiscal 2021 and an 8.2% increase from the same quarter in fiscal 2019.
In the United States, sales in our largest segment, U.S. Foodservice, were up 46.5% versus the first quarter of fiscal 2021 and up 11.6% versus the same quarter in fiscal 2019.
SYGMA was up 11.8% versus fiscal 2021 and up 5.1% versus the same quarter in fiscal 2019.
Local case volume, within a subset of USFS, our U.S. Broadline operations, increased 23.8%, while total case volume within U.S. Broadline operations increased 28.1%.
International sales were up 34% versus fiscal 2021 while also improving sequentially over prior quarters to down less than 1% versus fiscal 2019, indicating that we have more upside to come.
Foreign exchange rates had a positive impact of 1.1% on Sysco's sales results.
Inflation continued to be a factor during the quarter at approximately 13%.
Gross profit for the enterprise was approximately $3 billion in the first quarter, increasing 33.9% versus the same quarter in fiscal 2021 and also exceeding gross profit in fiscal 2019 by 2%.
While it is gross profit dollars that count, inflation did impact our gross margin rates for the enterprise during the quarter as it decreased 79 basis points versus the same period in fiscal 2021 and finished at a rate of 18.1%.
Adjusted operating expense came in at $2.3 billion with expense increases from the prior year driven by three things: first, the variable costs associated with significantly increased volumes; second, more than $57 million of onetime and short-term transitory expenses associated with the snapback; and third, more than $24 million of operating expense investments for our Recipe for Growth.
Together, the snapback investments and the transformation costs totaled approximately $81 million of operating expense this quarter and negatively impacted our adjusted earnings per share by $0.12.
Even with those significant snapback and transformation operating expense investments, we leveraged our adjusted operating expense structure and delivered expense as a percentage of sales of 13.9%, an almost 200 basis point improvement from fiscal 2021 and a 64 basis [point] improvement from the same quarter in fiscal 2019.
Doing the simple math, if we removed the transitory snapback investments and the transformation investments I referenced earlier, total opex would have been at 13.4% of sales.
Finally, for the first fiscal quarter, adjusted operating income increased $320 million from last year to $685 million, putting us basically on par with adjusted operating income for fiscal 2019, even with the snapback investments and the transformation investments.
This was primarily driven by a 58% improvement in U.S. Foodservice and strong profitability from international.
Adjusted earnings per share increased $0.49 to $0.83 for the first quarter.
Perhaps pointing out the obvious, if we extract the $51 million of incremental interest expense we are carrying in Q1 of fiscal 2022, resulting from the COVID-related precautionary bonds we issued in 2020, our adjusted earnings per share results for Q1 of fiscal 2022 would have been more in line with our pre-COVID adjusted earnings per share results for Q1 of fiscal 2019.
If you go a step further and exclude both the interest expense and the $81 million of snapback and transformation costs, you really begin to see why we believe that in the long term, Sysco has significant earnings potential.
Cash flow from operations was $111 million during the first quarter as we responded to rising sales and purposely invested in inventory in support of managing product availability during the snapback better than the industry.
We also purposely invested in longer-lead inventory to support customers such as K-12 schools and healthcare facilities during the snapback, consistent with Sysco's purpose statement.
Our net capex spend was $79.4 million and is ramping up as teams submit business cases for investments against the Recipe for Growth.
Free cash flow for the first quarter was $31 million.
At the end of the first quarter, after our investments in the business, payments of the acquisition price for Greco and our dividend payments, we had $2.1 billion of cash and cash equivalents on hand.
In May, we committed to supporting a strong investment-grade credit rating with a targeted net debt to adjusted EBITDA leverage ratio of 2.5 times to 2.75 times, which we continue to expect to hit by the end of fiscal 2022.
Later this year, we plan to pay off the $450 million of notes due in June of 2022 and may, should the circumstances warrant it, take further action against our debt portfolio.
We also paid our increased dividend of $0.47 per share in July and again in October.
As I mentioned earlier, we plan to commence share repurchase activity under the $5 billion share repurchase authority we announced in May at Investor Day beginning in the second quarter.
As I stated a moment ago, that will take the form of the repurchase of up to $500 million of shares by the end of the fiscal year.
As Kevin highlighted, we expect to continue to grow at or above 1.2 times the market in fiscal 2022.
Fiscal 2022 earnings per share will be in the range of $3.33 to $3.53, reflecting the $0.10 increase that we called out last quarter.

Summary:
Importantly, our first quarter results exceeded our 1.2 times market share growth target for fiscal 2022.
First quarter sales were $16.5 billion, an increase of 39.7% from the same quarter in fiscal 2021 and an 8.2% increase from the same quarter in fiscal 2019.