Tonya Robinson
Analyst · Oppenheimer. Your line is open
Thanks, Jerry. For the third quarter of 2022, net income increased 18.5% to $62.3 million. And diluted earnings per share, which includes a benefit from share repurchases, increased by 23.7% to $0.93. Revenue growth of 14.3% versus last year was primarily driven by a 7.9% increase in average unit volume and store week growth of 6.1%. For the quarter, comparable restaurant sales increased 8.2%, driven by 7.7% average check growth. Guest traffic was up by a half a point overall with dining room traffic up 3.3%. We continue to see positive mix driven by year-over-year improvement in the percentage of guests choosing to dine in as well as dining guests continuing to order higher price to entrée. Our restaurants averaged over 129,000 in weekly sales in the third quarter, and to-go represented approximately 16,300 or 12.6% of these total weekly sales. To-go sales volumes were consistent throughout the third quarter with a percentage increasing slightly in the back half of the quarter. By month comparable sales grew 3.9%, 9.9%, and 10.4% for our July, August, and September periods respectively. And our sales momentum have continued into the fourth quarter. For the first four weeks of the quarter, weekly sales averaged 130,000 with comparable sales up 8.3% as compared to the same period in 2021. For the third quarter, restaurant margin dollars grew 12.5% to $152 million and were 15.4% as a percentage of total sales, down 26 basis points as compared to last year. Restaurant margin benefited from a $6.6 million adjustment to other sales related to a change in our historical gift card breakage assumption. As a reminder, in the third quarter of 2021, we had a similar benefit in other sales of $4.8 million. Food and beverage costs as a percentage of total sales were 34.7% for the third quarter, up nine basis points compared to 2021. This increase was primarily due to commodity inflation of 8.8% in the quarter, mostly offset by the benefit of menu pricing. With roughly 70% of our fourth quarter commodity baskets secured with fixed prices, we have lowered our full year commodity inflation expectation to approximately 10.5%. Looking ahead to next year, we are projecting commodity inflation of 5% to 6%. We currently expect the first quarter of 2023 will be impacted by higher inflation as we lapped easier comparisons and will moderate as we move through the remainder of the year. While our guidance assumes that the cost of many of the items in our commodity basket will remain elevated, most of our inflation next year will be driven by higher beef costs. Labor as a percentage of total sales increased 24 basis points to 33.5% as compared to the third quarter of 2021, while labor dollars per store week increased 8.6%. This increase in labor dollars per store week was driven by wage and other labor inflation of 7.7% and growth in hours of 1.8%. These increases were partially offset by lapping a $2.6 million adjustment to our quarterly reserve for workers' comp and group health insurance. Based on current trends, we continue to expect approximately 8% of wage and other inflation for the full year. For 2023, we are forecasting wage and other inflation of 5% to 6% with upcoming state mandated increases representing nearly 2% of the increase. Other operating costs were 14.8% of sales, which was flat as compared to the third quarter of 2021. The year-over-year benefit of sales leverage was offset by a continuation of the higher costs that we are seeing in areas such as utilities, credit card charges and repair and maintenance expense. Other operating also benefited from the impact of adjustments to our quarterly reserve for general liability insurance. These adjustments include a $4.4 million benefit this year compared to a $3.2 million benefit last year. Moving below restaurant margin G&A for the third quarter grew year-over-year by 3.8% and came in at 4.3% of revenue. The primary drivers of the increased year-over-year G&A spend were a $4.1 million increase in cash and equity compensation and a $2 million increase in meeting and travel expense. These increases were partially offset by a $2.5 million adjustment to a cost of our managing partner conference held in the second quarter and the effective lapping the approximately $3 million expense for the abbreviated conference that we held in the third quarter of last year. Our effective tax rate was 15.2% for the third quarter, and we continue to expect that our full year 2022 tax rate will be approximately 14%. Assuming no changes to the tax code, we would expect an income tax rate of approximately 15% for 2023. With regards to cash flow we ended the third quarter with $185 million of cash, which is up $5 million from the end of the second quarter. Cash flow from operations was $96 million and was offset by $65 million of capital expenditures and $31 million of dividend payments. We continue to expect full year 2022 capital expenditures will be approximately $230 million increasing to approximately $265 million for 2023. Now I'll turn the call back over to Jerry for final comments.