I’ve been thinking about the power of a bagel lately. Last month my wife and I attended an out of state funeral service of a good friend of hers who passed away unexpectedly. Her friend was known for his love of bagels; not so much the bagel itself, but what it could do. He used bagels to gather people together, connect with individuals on a deeper level, and show compassion to those in times of need. I learned some of his sayings (food themed, of course), like ‘trust the chef (have a little faith),’ ‘make a bigger table (bring more people into your life),’ and ‘sip slowly (stay in the moment).’

It really got me thinking: how true, and what a brilliant set of metaphors to demonstrate how important hospitality is in our lives. A bagel is simply flour, yeast, water, and salt. But it builds community, relationships, families, friends, and careers, and it supports losses, grief, and triumphs. If it were not for hospitality and those that support it, where would we be? 

I checked, and we serve 1,196 bagel shops nationwide. Think of all the stories those bagel shop visits could tell! And if you think of the stories ALL of our customers beyond just bagel shops enable, then wow, it’s staggering to think about the power that food service has on the human experience. 

Running a restaurant is no joke, and this past year was a tough year for many of our customers. We saw headlines like ‘America is Falling Out of Love with Pizza’ (WSJ), ‘Why a $500 Steak Dinner Only Yields a $25 Profit’ (WSJ), and ‘US Drinking Rate at New Low as Alcohol Concerns Surge’ (Gallup), and I know, I know, that last one is either part of the problem or part of the solution depending on who you talk to. But what we can all agree on is it has never been more important for us at Clark Associates to be supporting our customers so they can in turn do the work in our communities that truly is a cornerstone to purposeful living. 

Picking up on last year’s letter theme, how we support our customers is through sustained hard work, not the cheap easy wins of fluff and optics. A few highlights of where we dug deep: 

• We went live in our largest and most sophisticated distribution center to date, in Hagerstown, Maryland. This new facility will allow us to more efficiently and quickly get orders to our customers who rely on our products to run their businesses every day. With over 7 miles of conveyor belt in the facility, Hagerstown was designed to support roughly 50% higher line volume than a conventional distribution center. By rethinking layout, automation, and flow, the facility enables our teams to operate at twice the labor efficiency of legacy designs.  
  
  
• We built Yes, Chef!, an internal AI agent that helps our employees find answers to questions about systems and processes so they can do better work. Yes, Chef! answers over 600 employee questions per day. It contains over 15,000 internal wiki articles and documents, and Yes, Chef! searches these documents in milliseconds for every question.
  
  
• TRS opened its second and third store in the state of Florida, a new market for us, where we’ve been very pleased with the reception we received. Our Orlando location broke both the sales and volume record for a store's performance within its first year of being open, beating the previous record by 58%.
  
  
• Clark National Accounts posted its largest growth year in its history. Its roster of clients across the chain, leisure / hospitality, and institutional segments has never been more impressive. We grew the business 60% YOY. One might think that growth came from one or two new key accounts, but the breakdown is much more interesting. It shows our ability to connect with our customers to provide real services and solutions. Our existing partnerships accounted for 36% of that growth YOY; that is to say, our customers are trusting us with larger and larger portions of their business.
  
  
• Through key hires and team structural changes, we worked on our organization’s leadership capacity to take on the never-ending rush of new challenges and opportunities. The world has never been changing and evolving faster, and our leadership team’s ability to ‘level up’ has never been more important.

I could go on with examples, but the result of that sustained hard work in 2025 has been that we served a greater number of food service customers than ever before. They see the value in how we serve them, and it’s not something we take for granted. In fact, it’s a continued call to action for us in reaching ever higher levels of service and value. 

2026 is going to be a great year in how we serve our customers – faster shipments, improved product quality and damage rates, better selection and availability, new member perks and services, better site search performance ... just to name a very few things we have in the works to deliver value to our customers. 

To our team members across Clark Associates Companies that make this all possible, our work has never been more important. We’re not the bagel makers, but we’re the people who help our customers make more bagels! The power of those bagels is more than we’ll ever be able to truly understand. 

As we move through 2026, whether you’re a team member, customer, or supplier, I appreciate the part you play in the work we do here. May we all see the importance and impact in the individual roles we play and the positive impact it has on others in the year ahead. 

L. Gene Clark
CEO, Clark Associates