Sprouts Farmers Market, Inc. (NASDAQ:SFM) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call March 2, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Susannah Livingston – Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury

Jack Sinclair – Chief Executive Officer

Chip Molloy – Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Erica Eiler – Oppenheimer

Mark Carden – UBS

Karen Short – Credit Suisse

Anders Myhre – Guggenheim

Krisztina Katai – Deutsche Bank

Ben Wood – BMO Capital

Kendall Toscano – Bank of America

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Sprouts Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Susannah Livingston.

Susannah Livingston

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased you have taken the time to join Sprouts on our fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. Jack Sinclair, Chief Executive Officer; and Chip Molloy, Chief Financial Officer are with me today.

The earnings release announcing our fourth quarter and full year 2022 results, the webcast of this call, and quarterly slides can be accessed through our Investor Relations section of our website at investors.sprouts.com.

During this call, management may make certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our expectations for 2023 and beyond. These statements involve several risks and uncertainties that could cause results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.

For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our SEC filings and the commentary on forward-looking statements at the end of our earnings release. Our remarks today include references to non-GAAP measures. Please see the tables in our earnings release to reconcile our non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP figures.

With that, let me hand it over to Jack.

Jack Sinclair

Thanks, Susannah, and good morning, everyone. We ended 2022 on a strong note with fourth quarter results that included comparable store sales growth of 2.9%, total sales growth of 6% and diluted earnings per share growth of 31%. For the full year, our diluted earnings per share growth was 14%, which is in line with our long-term strategy.

Highlights for the year include opening 16 new stores, 60% in our new smaller prototype, growing sales of our Sprouts brand to over $1 billion increasing sales of local produce by over 100%, creating 1,600 new jobs, launching approximately 8,400 new innovative products and digitally connecting with 13% more customers.