Latest news with #UNFI
Yahoo
14 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
United Natural Foods Unveils Top Industry Trends to Help Retailers Plan for the Holiday and Winter Selling Season
Trends to watch include the rise of industry disruptors, health and wellness, and private label products More than 30 suppliers were honored in second annual UNFI Circle of Excellence Awards PROVIDENCE, R.I., July 31, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--During its second Holiday and Winter Selling Show of 2025 in Uncasville, Conn., United Natural Foods, Inc. (NYSE: UNFI) (the "Company" or "UNFI") brought together more than 3,900 attendees, connecting more than 1,400 retailers and over 750 suppliers. Exhibitors showcased thousands of unique products, spanning the natural, organic, fresh, specialty, and conventional grocery categories. Differentiation that Drives Results During the show, UNFI experts shared the latest industry insights and emerging growth opportunities to help grocers stand out during the upcoming holiday and winter selling season. Top industry trends include*: Promotions are on the rise – Promotional activity has ramped up with one-third of grocery volume focused on deals or value. Private label is gaining popularity – Investment in private label continues with an expected 40% sales growth by 2030. Disruptors are picking up speed – Challenger brands are gaining an edge, generating 27% growth in the food sector last year. Health and wellness brands are booming – Fresh, high-protein and better-for-you options are outpacing the rest of the store. Experiences are essential – Unique assortments and in-store experiences continue to drive traffic and volume for retailers of all sizes. To help customers and suppliers capitalize on these trends, UNFI leaders also highlighted how their Professional Services offerings – including data platforms like Scan Advantage – can make it easier to use consumer insights and analytics for better assortment and promotional planning during high-volume seasons. "UNFI Professional Services has been a game changer for us," said Emily Brown, Store Manager, Catherine's Market. "Scan Advantage gives us the insight we need to align our operations and product mix with seasonal trends and consumer preferences. It helps us stay ahead of what they're looking for, whether it's national brands or ideas we can translate into our house-made bakery and deli offerings." Honoring Outstanding Suppliers At the Holiday and Winter Selling Show, UNFI honored 31 supplier brand partners across 15 unique categories in its second annual Supplier Circle of Excellence Awards. The awards recognize suppliers for excellence in brand performance, category leadership, product innovation, and more. "This year's Supplier Circle of Excellence Award winners represent the best of our industry, and we're proud to recognize their meaningful contributions," said Sandy Douglas, UNFI CEO. "Their leadership, creativity, and commitment to excellence in an increasingly competitive market is defining the future of the consumer-packaged goods and grocery retail industries." UNFI recognized the following three companies with the highest Circle of Excellence award, Supplier of the Year: Impact Supplier of the Year – Chobani Broad Market Supplier of the Year – Loisa Supplier of the Year – The Hershey Company "At Chobani, our commitment to our people and our communities runs deep—we live it every day by working with local partners to end hunger," said Marcin Moscicki, Vice President of Sales at Chobani. "Our partnership with UNFI has helped us extend that impact even further, bringing nutritious food to more communities and making a meaningful difference where it's needed most." To see the full list of UNFI's 2025 Supplier Circle of Excellence Award winners, visit the UNFI Newsroom. Sources*: Power of Produce, 2025 NielsenIQ Discover Morgan Stanley "Private Label Tipping Point" J.P. Morgan "U.S. Food Producers" NielsenIQ Better for You SBI Team Analysis and Opinion About UNFI UNFI is North America's premier grocery wholesaler delivering the widest variety of fresh, branded, and owned brand products to more than 30,000 locations throughout North America, including natural product superstores, independent retailers, conventional supermarket chains, ecommerce providers, and food service customers. UNFI also provides a broad range of value-added services and segmented marketing expertise, including proprietary technology, data, market insights, and shelf management to help customers and suppliers build their businesses and brands. As the largest full-service grocery partner in North America, UNFI is committed to building a food system that is better for all and is uniquely positioned to deliver great food, more choices, and fresh thinking to customers. To learn more about how UNFI is delivering value for its stakeholders, visit View source version on Contacts For Media: Grace For UNFI Investors: Kristyn -or-Steve
Malaysian Reserve
a day ago
- Business
- Malaysian Reserve
Kuehn Law Encourages Investors of United Natural Foods, Inc. to Contact Law Firm
NEW YORK, July 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Kuehn Law, PLLC, a shareholder litigation law firm, is investigating whether certain officers and directors of United Natural Foods, Inc. (NYSE: UNFI) breached their fiduciary duties to shareholders. According to a federal securities lawsuit, Insiders at United Natural Foods caused the company to misrepresent or fail to disclose that (1) despite its cost saving Value Path initiative, United Natural Foods had not invested in improving its data management and related infrastructure; (2) as a result, the Company could not respond adequately to cost changes, such as inflationary pressure; (3) as a result, the Company could not appreciate the benefits of procurement gains and inventory gains achieved during fiscal 2022; (4) as a result of the foregoing, the Company's profitability would be materially adversely impacted; and (5) as a result of the foregoing, positive statements about the Company's business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. If you currently own UNFI and purchased prior to March 10, 2021 please contact Justin Kuehn, Esq. here, by email at justin@ or call (833) 672-0814. Kuehn Law pays all case costs and does not charge its investor clients. Shareholders should contact the firm immediately as there may be limited time to enforce your rights. Why Your Participation Matters: As a shareholder your voice matters, and by getting involved, you contribute to the integrity and fairness of the financial markets. Your investment. Your voice. Your future.™ For additional information, please visit Shareholder Derivative Litigation – Kuehn Law. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes. Contacts:Kuehn Law, PLLCJustin Kuehn, Esq.53 Hill Street, Suite 605Southampton, NY 11968justin@ 672-0814
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
United Natural Foods (UNFI) is Back for an Unusual Options Sequel
While history may not be guaranteed to repeat, those who follow the quantitative methodology may want to keep their eyes on United Natural Foods (UNFI). UNFI stock has been shaking things up on Wall Street, gaining roughly 3% last week and rising over 31% in the trailing month. Despite this tremendous performance, UNFI is only up a little over 3% for the year, raising some questions about sustainability. If unusual options activity is any barometer, United Natural could still have some legs remaining. More News from Barchart Alphabet Posts Lower Free Cash Flow and FCF Margins - Is GOOGL Stock Overvalued? Tech Earnings, Tariff Deadline and Other Key Things to Watch this Week Option Volatility And Earnings Report For July 28 – Aug 1 Markets move fast. Keep up by reading our FREE midday Barchart Brief newsletter for exclusive charts, analysis, and headlines. Heading into the weekend, UNFI stock represented one of the 500 names making up Barchart's Unusual Stock Options Volume screener. Total volume hit 4,687 contracts, representing a 46.79% lift over the trailing one-month average. Interestingly, though, call volume reached only 673 contracts, while put volume jumped to 4,014 contracts, yielding a put/call ratio of 5.96. On the surface, this would seem to imply more traders buying puts than calls, implying a bearish posture. However, unusual options activity is a tricky beast because the contracts can be either accumulative (debit-based) or distributive (credit-based). Options flow, which focuses exclusively on big block transactions likely placed by institutional investors, provides additional clues regarding sentiment. On Friday, net trade sentiment stood at $12,000 above parity, with the bullish positions being bought calls. As for the high volume of puts, most of them expire in January 2027, implying a hedged position. A Bullish Signal Flashes a Second Time for UNFI Stock While I believe that unusual options activity represents an important datapoint — potentially indicating what the smart money may be thinking about — analysts must do a lot of inference. There's no magic behind these numbers. Unless you're interviewing all options traders and they agree to disclose their strategies, you're never really 100% sure what the unusual activity signifies. In other words, unusual options — like so many other screeners and indicators — reveal facts, not necessarily truth. That might sound like a controversial statement but here's what I'm trying to say. Ultimately, as traders, we're seeking asymmetric risk-reward setups. However, we're likely not going to reliably find such favorable asymmetry through facts. For the most part, the common narratives all stem from those facts and now, AI engines are absorbing them and spitting out content at an exponential rate. To have an edge, we need to look at truth. And the only objective truth I see in the past ten weeks is that the market voted to buy UNFI stock six times and voted to sell four times, yet the overall trajectory during this period was negative. For brevity's sake, we can label the sequence as 6-4-D. At first glance, it may seem odd to compress the price action of UNFI stock into a simple binary code. But by doing this, we can analyze the sentiment voting record if you will of United Natural. Going back to January 2019, it's possible to extract UNFI's full demand profile: L10 Category Sample Size Up Probability Baseline Probability Median Return if Up 1-9-D 2 50.00% 58.77% 3.58% 2-8-D 6 66.67% 58.77% 3.61% 3-7-D 16 43.75% 58.77% 1.71% 4-6-D 34 61.76% 58.77% 3.03% 4-6-U 10 70.00% 58.77% 2.99% 5-5-D 37 62.16% 58.77% 5.06% 5-5-U 23 30.43% 58.77% 4.76% 6-4-D 35 71.43% 58.77% 3.42% 6-4-U 25 56.00% 58.77% 4.01% 7-3-D 9 55.56% 58.77% 3.20% 7-3-U 55 67.27% 58.77% 4.63% 8-2-D 3 33.33% 58.77% 0.07% 8-2-U 28 42.86% 58.77% 3.64% 9-1-U 4 75.00% 58.77% 5.02% Effectively, the null hypothesis — that is, a bullish wager on UNFI stock assuming no mispricing — is a next-week upside probability of 58.77%. In any given week, UNFI bulls enjoy a fairly strong upward bias. However, the 6-4-D is our alternative hypothesis, which claims that the odds have now jumped to 71.43%. What's more, the median return assuming the positive pathway is 3.42%. Should the bulls maintain control of the market for the next three weeks, investors may anticipate an additional median performance boost of 2.53%. With UNFI stock closing at $28.21 on Friday, it could theoretically be on course to hit $29.91, possibly up to $30 given the psychological significance. Enticingly, there's precedent here. At the beginning of the month, I noted that UNFI stock had flashed the same 6-4-D sequence (though the anticipated success ratio at the time was slightly lower at 70.59%). Back then, I focused on the 23/25 bull call spread expiring July 18. Look at the chart. Sure, the spread left some cash on the table but come on! The dynamic, the ebb and flow, was called almost perfectly. Going for a Repeat Performance To be perfectly clear, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the market is guaranteed to give you another swing at the ball. Even assuming that the 71% success rate is totally accurate (which is a difficult claim to make given the market's open system), it still means a chance of failure 29% of the time. With that said, I'm very interested in the 29/30 bull call spread expiring Aug. 15. This transaction involves buying the $29 call and simultaneously selling the $30 call, for a net debit paid of $50 (the most that can be lost in the trade). Should UNFI stock rise through the short strike price at expiration, the maximum reward is also $50, a payout of 100%. While I can't provide any guarantees, I genuinely believe that the 6-4-D sequence is empirically intriguing. Running a one-tailed binomial test reveals a p-value of 0.1832, meaning that there's an 18.32% chance that the forecasted outcome of the 6-4-D could occur by chance rather than by 'intention.' Scientifically, such a high p-value would be considered statistically insignificant. Nevertheless, the entropy of the stock market means that, I as a forecaster, should receive some wiggle room. Besides, you've seen the sequence flash before. If you believe that lightning can strike twice, this is your chance. On the date of publication, Josh Enomoto did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Axios
21-07-2025
- Business
- Axios
Cub Foods closing Midway St. Paul store
Cub Foods will close its Midway St. Paul store on Aug. 2 and could lay off all 96 workers, parent company UNFI Inc. informed state and city leaders today in a required mass layoff notice. Why it matters: The pending loss of Cub means Midway is losing a second large discount grocer in six years, as Walmart closed it neighborhood store in 2019. Between the lines: The writing has been on the wall for a few years. The store has stopped stocking hand baskets, frequently ran out of shopping carts (citing theft), shut down self-checkout lanes and was often short staffed at registers, according the Pioneer Press. Yes, but: Cub Foods has struggled in recent years, executives at Rhode Island-based UNFI have told investors. Promises to resuscitate the brand have not produced the desired results. Sales in the company's retail division, which is 70% Twin Cities Cub stores, have declined 2.1% over the last three fiscal quarters, according to an SEC filing. UNFI also abruptly closed its Uptown Minneapolis store in June and has not said when it will re-open. What they're saying: "Like any food retailer, we're constantly working to optimize our footprint, which includes investing in stores — like our newly remodeled Cub in Burnsville... as well as closing underperforming stores where necessary so we can operate as efficiently and effectively as possible," UNFI said in a statement. Zoom in: With nearby Target and Aldi stores still open, the closure won't make Midway a food desert. But interim Ward 4 City Councilmember Matt Privratsky said it's unfortunate Cub didn't stick it out to benefit from the new hotel, offices and restaurants that are part of the latest phases of the new United Village development at that corner. Privratsky said he'd love to see a retailer like Mississippi Market open in the Cub space, because the neighborhood would like to shop at a grocer with union workers. UFCW Local 1189, which represents 84 of the store employees, said the majority if its members have layoffs protection and will be working to get them placed in other UNFI facilities.
Miami Herald
18-07-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
The Friday Checkout: UNFI's stock price has roared back post-cyberattack. Will its customers recover as quickly?
United Natural Foods, Inc.'s disclosure on Wednesday that the cyberattack it suffered last month would result in hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales could have sent investors heading for the exits. Instead, the grocery distributor's share price surged that day by more than 12% and moved up further on Thursday to its highest level since the attack as traders celebrated the company's new projection that, despite the incident, revenue for the year would actually be higher than it had previously expected. UNFI had more good news, assuring stakeholders on Wednesday that insurance would cover the expenses it incurred in response to the online intrusion and adding that it believes most of the financial fallout stemming from the incident would be contained to its current quarter. Of course, Wall Street's jovial response to UNFI's latest announcements hardly paints a full picture about the breadth of the cyberattack's effect on the company and its customers - not to mention the sobering warning the attack sent that the grocery industry at large is vulnerable to online criminals. Many grocers that depend on UNFI - including independent retailers - had to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain products when the distributor's systems went offline. Retailers also faced the task of explaining to shoppers why some items were suddenly unavailable, not to mention the possibility that consumers who turned elsewhere might never come back. The question now is whether UNFI's customers will set aside memories of the cyberattack as quickly as investors have. In case you missed it A top Prime Day buy: protein shakes While apparel, household essentials and home goods were the star categories, about 14% of Amazon Prime Day shoppers bought groceries - 1 percentage point higher than last year, according to Numerator's Amazon Prime Day Tracker. Premier protein shakes were the most purchased item while paper plates under the Amazon Basics brand grabbed the No. 5 spot, Numerator found. Two-thirds of Prime Day shoppers were highly satisfied with Amazon's deals, and over half said they compared prices with other retailers before placing their orders, Numerator found. New York City greenlights boost to grocery delivery workers' pay The New York City Council on Monday approved legislation that increases pay for workers, including nearly 20,000 grocery delivery couriers, ABC7 reported. The new legislation requires third-party apps like DoorDash, Uber and Instacart to pay workers $21.44 an hour. Instacart decried the move, telling ABC7 that the legislation "would jeopardize a lifeline thousands of New Yorkers rely on." Lidl launches weekend-only LTOs The discounter announced in a Thursday email that it is kicking off a weekly promotion for six items only from Fridays through Sundays. "We're carefully curating these offers to give our customers exactly what they want: unrivaled savings when they shop with us the most," Pete Poutre, chief buying officer at Lidl US, said in the announcement. The weekend promotion adds to Lidl's recently refreshed savings lineup, which also includes deals on Mondays and Wednesdays. Impulse find We all scream for ice cream! This coming Sunday is National Ice Cream Day and Stop & Shop is looking to scoop up some sales. The Ahold Delhaize banner announced this week that it plans to dish out a free 1.5-quart container of Stop & Shop brand ice cream to shoppers who check in at an in-store kiosk from Friday through Sunday. The kiosks, which Stop & Shop finished rolling out to all of its stores earlier this year, allow customers to activate digital coupons from the weekly flyer and personalized deals without a smartphone or computer. The grocer's private label ice cream comes in 15 flavors, including the ever-popular vanilla and chocolate as well as mint chocolate chip, coffee and Neapolitan, the announcement noted. Sounds like a sweet way to reward shopper loyalty! Copyright 2025 Industry Dive. All rights reserved.
