Restaurant Brands International Inc. (QSR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Awesome. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. I'm Kendall Peck, the Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury at RBI. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us, whether in person here in Miami or live via our webcast. I have the very exciting job of reminding you that today's remarks will include forward-looking statements, and these statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties set forth in our SEC filings and the press release posted this morning, which can be found on our Investor Relations web page. Today, you will be able to hear from Patrick Doyle, our Executive Chairman; Josh Kobza, our CEO; Sami Siddiqui, our CFO; and Tom Curtis, our President of Burger King U.S. and Canada. The 4 of them will be doing prepared remarks, after which we will be having a panel with all of our business unit presidents, including Tom, and he'll be joined by Axel Schwan, our President of Tim Hortons Canada and the U.S.; Thiago Santelmo, President of International; Peter Perdue, President of Popeyes U.S. and Canada; and Mike Hancock, President of Firehouse U.S. and Canada. We know some of you were unable to join us today due to the difficult weather in the Northeast. And so for those participating live on our webcast, you may submit a question during our Q&A session by e-mailing [email protected]. Please include your name and your firm, and we will ask that question during the live Q&A session should time permit. For those of you joining us live in Miami, thank you for making the journey down here. We are also very fortunate to have 30 of our most senior leaders from the company with us today. We hope you take the opportunity to get to know them during breaks and lunch. They're amazing, and we'll provide you with a lot of insights into some of the work that we're doing here at the company. Thank you again for joining us. And with that, I'd like to welcome our CEO, Josh Kobza.

All right. Thank you, Kendall, and good morning, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for being here with us today in Miami. It's great to have you at our headquarters. Miami is a special place for our company and one we're proud to call home. Many people don't realize that Burger King was founded right here over 70 years ago by Jim McLamore and David Edgerton. In fact, the very first Burger King was opened just 5 miles from our headquarters here. Jim and David built Burger King around flame grilled burgers and established it as the home of the Whopper. While Burger King story began here in Miami, each of our brands has its own origin story, rooted in unique communities, cultures and guest needs, but built on the same principles, bringing guests quality food and beverages, great service and convenience. In 1964, Canadian hockey legend, Tim Horton, opened his first doughnut and coffee restaurant in Hamilton, Ontario and soon teamed up with former police constable, Ron Joyce. From the beginning, Tim Hortons was built around great coffee, baked goods and the community. Al Copeland opened the first Popeyes just outside of New Orleans in 1972, rooted in craveable fried chicken with bold flavors and an authentic Louisiana heritage. And in 1994, Brothers and former firefighters, Chris and Robin Sorensen, opened their first Firehouse subs in Jacksonville, Florida, built around hearty hot subs and a deep commitment to service. Across all 4 of our brands, there's a common thread. They were built by dedicated operators, focused on creating something durable, relevant and meaningful for guests and for their communities. Their legacy shapes how we run RBI today with an ownership mindset, deep respect for our franchise partners, their teams and their communities and a willingness to invest through cycles and make hard decisions. Most importantly, we all have a commitment to building our brands in a way that their founders would be proud of. We decided to host an Investor Day because we know there are important questions about our business, and we want to address them directly. Today, we'll be hearing about what's working, where we need to improve and how we're positioning RBI for the future. As you listen, I'd ask you to keep this simple vision in mind. Our vision is that by 2028, RBI will be a 99% franchise company, delivering 5% plus net restaurant growth with predictable earnings growth, a strong investment-grade balance sheet and attractive double-digit total shareholder returns. At the same time, we aim to be the franchisor of choice for the best operators and the employer of choice for the best talent in the industry. In doing so, we are committed to being the most respected, loved and trusted restaurant business in the world across all of our stakeholders, from guests to franchisees to shareholders. Everything you'll hear today from the work we're doing here at Burger King to our global growth plans, to our path to simplification and our capital allocation strategy is designed to move us closer to that outcome. With that context, let me walk you through the agenda. I'll start with an overview of RBI and how our structure supports our 2028 vision. Then Tom Curtis will join us to share progress on Reclaim the Flame. I'll come back to outline the building blocks to 5% plus net restaurant growth by 2028. After a break, Sami will walk through our simplification and capital allocation priorities. Patrick will share his thoughts, and we'll hear from our business unit presidents in a panel and Q&A. With that, let's get started with a quick reminder of who we are as a company. I joined Burger King in June of 2012, just after we went public again. At the time, we had one brand, $16 billion in system-wide sales and about 13,000 restaurants in 85 countries around the world. Since that time, we acquired 3 iconic restaurant brands, Tim Hortons, Popeyes and Firehouse Subs and solidified ourselves as a world-class global restaurant business, operating in 4 of the strongest QSR categories worldwide. Today, our brands collectively generate nearly $47 billion in system-wide sales across more than 33,000 restaurants in over 125 markets, with each brand playing a distinct role in our portfolio. Tim Hortons is the clear leader in coffee and breakfast in Canada, a brand deeply woven into the daily routines of millions of Canadians with unmatched convenience and one of the most engaged restaurant owner groups in the world. Burger King is one of the most globally recognized restaurant brands with nearly 20,000 restaurants around the world, serving our guests our iconic flame-grilled Whoppers their way. And Popeyes has grown tremendously since our acquisition in 2017, bringing its bold Louisiana flavors and truly differentiated best-in-class fried chicken to one of the fastest-growing QSR categories in the world. Finally, Firehouse Subs, our newest brand, is an important emerging growth driver in an attractive category, differentiating itself through its high-quality subs and strong community roots. Across our portfolio, our brands consistently deliver what matters most to guests, quality, service and convenience. Those fundamentals matter more than anything else, and they're where great restaurant companies differentiate themselves over time. Stepping back, it's also worth reminding ourselves that we operate in an excellent industry. The quick service restaurant industry is one of the most stable, long-standing and attractive consumer categories globally. Restaurants meet a daily need. People need to eat 3 times a day, every day. And QSR wins on affordability and convenience. Within QSR, franchising, when done well, scales that model effectively by aligning capital, local ownership and long-term brand stewardship. The combination of these dynamics with our ownership mindset, aligned franchise partners and operational know-how positions our brands to endure through the cycles, adapt and serve millions of guests every day. With that context, it's worth spending a moment discussing the top 3 advantages of our multi-branded structure. First, our ability to scale brands globally; second, our ability to allocate capital with a long-term lens. And third, our ability to develop talent and share best practices and capabilities across our system. Let's start with our ability to scale brands internationally. Based on the conversations I have with our investors, I believe the quality of our international business is often underappreciated. We've built one of the strongest global growth platforms in the industry, supported by a deep network of well-capitalized franchisees, suppliers, quality assurance and local support teams. That infrastructure was developed over decades through Burger King's global expansion, and it's not easily replicated. It's a true competitive advantage that only a select few global players enjoy and one we are leveraging as we bring Tim Hortons, Popeyes and Firehouse Subs to many new markets all around the world. An important extension of that advantage is the opportunity we create for franchise partners to scale multiple brands within their markets. Take Gregorio Jimenez ,or Goyo as we call them, who began operating Burger Kings in Spain in 1981. And Borja Hernando Salba, CEO of Restaurant Brands Europe, we call him Borja. Goyo transformed Burger King into the largest QSR business in Spain with $1.7 billion in system-wide sales and nearly 1,000 restaurants as of 2025. Together, Borja and Goyo built on that foundation to expand Burger King to Portugal, and bring Popeyes to Spain and Italy, leveraging their real estate expertise, operating infrastructure and local market knowledge. While I love to tell their story, I thought it might be better for you to hear from them directly. [Presentation]

Awesome. What a great story from Borja and Goyo. You can see the power of our ability to scale globally very clearly what we're doing at Popeyes International. When we acquired Popeyes, it had around 475 restaurants and less than $300 million in system-wide sales across about 25 countries and territories outside the U.S. and Canada. Today, Popeyes is a top 10 Western QSR business globally with more than 1,800 international restaurants, over $1.7 billion in system-wide sales and nearly 40% system-wide sales growth in 2025. Growth like that at this scale doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen without the foundation that we built at Burger King. A fantastic example of the brand's international potential and our ability to scale quickly by partnering with well-capitalized local owner operators is Popeyes in the U.K. We entered the U.K. in November of 2021. And under CEO, Tom Crowley's leadership, we quickly scaled to roughly 110 restaurants and nearly $250 million in system-wide sales as of 2025. Tom has a ton of experience running restaurants. So I thought it would be best for you to hear directly from him what makes Popeyes U.K. so special. Let's roll the clip. [Presentation]

Awesome. Thanks, Tom. Looking ahead, it's stories like Tom's that make us so excited about the opportunity for Popeyes in the international markets. With significant white space, superior product quality and a proven new market entry playbook, we believe Popeyes has the potential to become one of the most meaningful growth engines in our portfolio. The second advantage for RBI is the strength of our free cash flow generation across brands and geographies that grants us the flexibility to allocate capital with a long-term perspective. Each of our 5 business unit presidents is accountable for executing their strategy across marketing, development, franchising and operations. At the enterprise level, our role is to ensure ample investment across all of our businesses while leaning in to accelerate growth where appropriate. This allows us to invest through cycles, take a disciplined approach to returns and avoid short-term trade-offs that undermine long-term value creation. That flexibility is especially important in the restaurant business, where sustainable improvements can take time, and it's an advantage that stand-alone brands often don't have. Third, our structure lets us share back-of-the-house capabilities and talent. Centralizing legal, finance, procurement, communications and global business services reduces friction for our brand teams and allows leaders to stay focused on brand building and running great restaurants. Our global RBI procurement team is a great example of the value this unlocks for our brands, franchisees and suppliers. The team led by Paul Lacy Smith is anchored in 3 core tenets: deep category expertise, a seamless and disciplined process and the ability to leverage RBI's global market presence to deliver better outcomes for all of our stakeholders. Over the past 3 years, Paul and his team, and Paul is right over there, have delivered around $700 million in cumulative savings for franchisees across multiple food, beverage, paper, packaging and media categories while also improving service levels, unlocking access to innovation and building more collaborative relationships with suppliers, all of which serve to support a better guest experience. Underpinning everything that we do is our people. We attract and retain strong talent. Our people are given meaningful responsibility and the opportunity to build rewarding long-term careers across our brands, functions and geographies. The result is a shared talent base that allows us to place experienced leaders where they can have the greatest impact, while giving our brands the benefit of deep institutional knowledge and fresh perspective. When I look across our teams, I see an amazing combination of homegrown talent and industry veterans. Take Peter Perdue, our President of Popeyes U.S. and Canada; or [ Catarina Gliptis ], who runs Tim Hortons in the U.S., for example. They both started their careers at RBI and have worked across our brands. or [ Hope Bagozzi ], Tim Canada's Chief Marketing Officer; and [ Joe Yczinnski ], Burger King's CMO, who both have decades of marketing experience with the largest burger QSR player in the industry before they brought their expertise to RBI. We also developed leaders from within our own restaurants. Joe Hoffman is a great example. Joe started in Burger King in the back of house as a teenager and now oversees our Carrols and Burger King company portfolios. And we have a strong track record of matching the right leader to the right brand at the right moment, like Axel, who grew up in his family's restaurant business and spent 7 years in various roles at RBI before stepping in to lead Tim Hortons in late 2019. Axel has since helped drive one of the strongest and most consistent performance stretches ever in the brand's history. A key reason our talent development works is our deeply embedded ownership culture. Ownership for us is very intentional. It means accountability for outcomes, comfort making decisions that may not pay off immediately and an understanding that this is a business built on long-term partnerships. This is especially important in a franchise system like ours, where our franchisees are making multi-decade investments in their restaurants and in their communities and trust and alignment truly matter. That philosophy is reinforced through how we structure our incentives. Nearly 50% of our corporate RBI employees are equity holders and senior leaders have meaningful personal stakes in the business. In total, our director level employees and above own roughly $350 million of RBI stock or $750 million when you account for unvested equity, which vests over 3 to 4 years. This creates an aligned long-term approach across the organization. And my 9 direct reports and I each have the vast majority of our net worth invested in the company. This ensures decisions are made through the same lens our franchisees and shareholders use with a focus on durable value creation over time. Our leaders here are all in. And the result is a talent flywheel. We attract leaders who act like owners. They develop the next generation, and that continuity strengthens our brands. While my direct reports bring an average of more than 15 years of restaurant experience, what gives me the most confidence is the depth of talent behind them, many of whom are with us here in the room today. Alongside our commitment to talent is our commitment to our franchisees. We work with a high-quality group of franchise partners around the world who share our ambition and our ownership mindset. And we've been very intentional about building trust across the system, publishing our franchisees' profitability publicly and tying our compensation to their bottom line. While there will always be natural moments of friction, I believe alignment across our systems is stronger than it's ever been. And that alignment is critical and gives us confidence that we're moving forward together. All of that sets the backdrop for the conversation we want to have today about our performance, progress and what still needs to change. When we spoke at the New York Stock Exchange in 2024, I spent a lot of time emphasizing the fundamentals of this business: quality, service and convenience. Delivering those basics consistently at scale is what drives traffic and unit economics across our brands. That belief hasn't changed, and it's been an important lens for how we've navigated a challenging operating environment over the last 2 years. At that event, we laid out our long-term growth algorithm, 3% plus same-store sales and 5% plus net restaurant growth, translating to 8% plus organic adjusted operating income growth on average from 2024 to 2028. We're roughly halfway through the algorithm period. And while the macro environment has been less favorable than we and others in the industry had hoped, we've still delivered consistent performance near the high end of our closest peers. We've grown same-store sales nearly 2.5% on average with continued strength at Tim Hortons and our international business and burger QSR industry outperformance at Burger King. On top of that, we've maintained strong cost discipline and delivered over 8% organic adjusted operating income growth in each of the first 2 years of our algorithm period. That said, we need to deliver this level of profit growth alongside stronger absolute top line growth for us and our franchisees. And there are parts of the algorithm, specifically net restaurant growth that have required more work but are now greatly derisked after the deliberate actions that we took over the last year. We're going to walk through those pieces today. We also know that beyond delivering 5% net restaurant growth, we need to simplify our business, provide a clear capital allocation framework and demonstrate steady, predictable growth across all of our brands. As I mentioned before, our vision is that by 2028, RBI becomes a 99% franchise restaurant company, delivering consistent 5% plus net restaurant growth with strong and predictable earnings growth and attractive double-digit shareholder returns. Today, we're going to show you how we get there, starting with Burger King. While Burger King U.S. and Canada is only 18% of our operating profits, it's the largest focus of our investors. And beyond that, we also think that our approach to running Burger King is the best window into how we've evolved as a company and how much more operationally focused we've become. Tom Curtis has been doing an amazing job leading Burger King for nearly 5 years and has been the driving force behind Reclaim the Flame. Tom is a great example of the deep restaurant talent that we have at RBI, starting his career as a franchisee for roughly 20 years and bringing decades of operating experience to his current role. That background shows up everyday in how he runs the business. And with that, it's my pleasure to welcome Tom Curtis, President of Burger King in the U.S. and Canada. [Presentation]

Good morning, everybody. It's great to see you here today, and I appreciate you taking the time to spend your day with us. I joined Burger King almost 5 years ago after a 35-year career at Domino's. And during my time here, I had the privilege -- during my time there, I had the privilege of participating in one of the most exciting turnarounds in the restaurant industry led by Patrick. Seeing what was possible when you do the right things, not the easy things, gave me confidence that the same kind of transformation was possible at Burger King. Now Burger King was a brand that I grew up loving. The Whopper was and it still is the absolute best burger in the business. and being given a crown was always special. But somewhere along the way, this brand lost its focus. It's focused on what made it great in the first place, flame grilling, the Whopper, have it your way. And those things were not being delivered with the consistency, care and hospitality that our guests deserved. But I also knew something else. The love for this brand had never disappeared. It was still there, just waiting to be reignited. And that belief, combined with the team, the mindset and a great group of franchisees and the willingness to invest is what brought me here and what continues to motivate the work that we do every day. This morning, I'm excited to share what's changed over the last several years and why we believe this brand is on track to continue improving from here. I'll start by taking you back to the intent behind Reclaim the Flame. When I joined this brand, it was a business in need of a reset. The cracks in the foundation had become evident coming out of the pandemic. Franchisee profitability had fallen to a trough of around $125,000 a year, which simply wasn't enough to support reinvestment in growth. Restaurant execution was inconsistent. And on top of that, the physical state of the restaurants lagged the category and in many cases, was actively turning our guests away. To break this cycle, the team worked together with franchisees to develop a comprehensive turnaround plan and Burger King committed to an investment of $700 million to support marketing, technology and restaurant modernization. The plan, which we called Reclaim the Flame, was designed to deliver on our brand promise and included well-sequenced initiatives to address our most urgent needs, operations, franchisee quality, restaurant image, marketing and unit economics. Now first, operations or the guest experience is the foundation of any good restaurant system. And to anybody that knows me, it's no surprise that operations is that first pillar. I've been working in restaurants for far longer than I've been working on restaurants. And I know that success and growth come from repeat business, not onetime business. And that is what operations is all about. Since 2021, we've worked deliberately to rebuild operations in partnership with our franchisees. We've been relentlessly focused on what we call repeatable precision. We've doubled the size of our field teams to support our restaurants. And our field teams have also implemented targeted standard operating visits with some of our bottom-performing restaurants. In 2025, these visits delivered notable uplifts in same-store sales and traffic with both metrics outperforming the control group by 1.8 points and 1.3 points, respectively. We also launched Royal Roundtables, an annual touch point with every restaurant general manager and franchisee to educate and energize teams to drive fundamental changes in their restaurants. The team just finished our fourth year of Royal roundtables and the energy was incredible, which I think comes through in this quick video. [Presentation]

Our first year of Roundtables started with whopper execution. It might sound simple, but if a Burger King restaurant could execute the whopper correctly, it can do just about everything else right. And as a result, whopper product satisfaction is now over 87%, a nearly 10-point improvement from 2022 levels. We've also been standardizing our tech stack, improving consistency and uptime from 92% in 2022 to over 99% today. And we'll continue to enhance it by rolling out a singular point-of-sale system. More than half of our restaurants are already on this new system, and the rest are expected to be converted by the end of this year. And our network, our kiosk and our menu board display systems are already the same across the country. And all of this helps with standardization, which makes it easier for team members to execute. And in addition, we're implementing AI-driven technology in our restaurants to make life easier for our team members and improve franchise profitability, and I'll expand on that tool later on. Our commitment to operations is backed up by investment. As part of Reclaim the Flame, we invested $100 million matched one-for-one with our franchisees into what we called our Royal Reset refresh program. Franchisees updated broilers, fryers, toasters and other kitchen equipment, and we provided assistance to install kiosks, computer hardware and new signage. This refresh benefited over 5,300 restaurants. And while none of that work garnered headlines, it improved the guest and team member experience in a meaningful way. Overall, I think you'd be very hard-pressed to find another major player in this industry who is as focused as we are on improving the guest experience. And this operational work is paying off. Across the system, overall satisfaction has improved across all key metrics, including taste, order accuracy, friendliness and speed of service. And we're seeing this progress relative to our peers as well. According to Circana, in 2020, Burger King ranked 10th out of 12 in overall satisfaction among top U.S. QSR brands. And by 2025, we had moved up to sixth. We also saw revisit intent move from fifth to third out of 12. Now that's meaningful improvement, and it didn't happen by accident. Our goal is to be consistently in the top quartile. And from my time at Domino's, I know that getting these metrics moving in the right direction is a sign of good things to come in the years ahead. Part of resetting expectations also meant taking a hard look at our franchisee base. In 2021, we implemented our franchisee success system to gain a better understanding of franchisee and restaurant level performance. And we prioritize placing restaurants in the hands of great operators while moving underperforming restaurants and franchisees out of the system. Since 2022, over 1,000 restaurants have changed hands and each of the new engaged local operators has driven improvements relative to the path those restaurants were on under prior ownership. We also redesigned our incentive programs to reward better operators by providing them with larger remodel incentives. And this had the combined benefit of motivating all operators on the to improve on the guest experience and positioning our A operators to grow their portfolios but when guests show up to these restaurants, the building should reflect the brand that we're advertising and make it easier for our team members to deliver on a great guest experience. And that's why modern image is equally as important in delivering on our brand promise. We knew that the system needed to move past outdated restaurants, but some unit volumes didn't support remodels without co-investment from Burger King. So as part of Reclaim the Flame, we committed $450 million toward franchisees' cost of remodeling restaurants. And our franchisees responded with contractual commitments to accelerate the pace of those remodels. We started this journey with less than 40% of our restaurants in modern image, and we're now closing in on 60%. And increasingly, those remodels are done in our Sizzle image. Sizzle, which we introduced to the system in October of 2023, offers fun and exciting seating options for the whole family and lights up at night to attract late-night traffic. And importantly, it improves operations with a simplified, more digital flow that's seamless for team members. Last year, over 35% of our remodels were done in this image. And looking forward, the vast majority will be Sizzle. At first, remodels drive performance at the individual restaurant level, improving guest perception, smoothing operations and lifting sales and profitability. But as penetration increases across the system, guests stop associating Burger King with this and start associating it with this. And over time, that shift compounds, and it creates a system-wide halo effect. And we're not there yet, and we didn't expect to be, but we know we're getting much closer. And our Miami market is a great example of that. We've been accelerating our pace of remodels the past 3 years. And we saw the market outperform the rest of the system in 2025 by over 8 points on same-store sales. And that is our long-term vision. A Burger King system where guests look around and see modern inviting restaurants is the norm and where the physical restaurant itself becomes a competitive advantage. Now everything that I've described so far, operations, franchising, modern image, it's about fortifying the foundation and enabling customer retention, and that's where marketing comes in. Our share of voice must allow us to effectively reach consumers and the voice of the brand must effectively communicate a reason for them to visit. To help increase our share of voice, Reclaim the Flame featured $120 million ad fund investment by Burger King corporate from late 2022 through 2024. And this was coupled with a commitment from our franchisees to increase their ad fund contribution rate from 4% to 4.5% through at least 2026, if we reached $175,000 in average 4-wall profitability by 2024. We did achieve that. And now there's a second target of $230,000 by the end of 2026 that would enable a continuation of the 4.5% rate for 2027 and 2028. Now we may fall short of that mark due to all-time beef costs. But our franchisees know that these headwinds are temporary and that this co-investment has contributed to 4 years of burger QSR industry outperformance. I'm happy to report to you today that our franchisees have overwhelmingly voted yes to continue the 4.5% ad fund contribution through at least 2027. And if we reach $230,000 by the end of 2027, that rate continues on again through 2028. Now after that important good news, I wanted to move on to our brand positioning. Our marketing is now anchored in a few core truths about Burger King. The Whopper is our hero. It's the best burger. It's differentiated because it's flame grilled, and we see an opportunity to continue strengthening that position. And Have It Your Way isn't just a slogan. It means guests have a choice and control in the restaurant experience. And that's the foundation of our You Rule positioning, and it's the framework that we'll continue to build on going forward. We've been highlighting our best burgers through platforms like Million Dollar Whopper and Whopper by You, both of which were literally designed by guests and for guests. Over the last year, as guests reconnected with the brand through Whopper innovation like Barbecue Brisket Whopper and my favorite, the Crispy Onion Whopper, we saw an improvement in regular price combo meal incidents, even as much of the industry remain very narrowly focused on value. And those are higher check, higher gross margin tickets for our franchisees and also remind guests why they love Burger King. Now value is an important part of our messaging and how you deliver value matters just as much as having it in the first place. Today, we feature consistent value that communicates quality and choice at an easily accessible price. I'm very happy with how our primary value platform, $5 Duos and $7 Trios performed in 2025. Through all of the competitor noise, we've been consistent with our messaging. We found price points that work for our guests and importantly, our franchisees as well, and we stuck with them. I'm confident that we have our value platforms right. And finally, every element of the Reclaim the Flame plan ladders back to healthier franchisee profitability. When franchisees earn strong returns, they reinvest back into their restaurants. Operations improve and the business grows in a sustainable way. And from that $125,000 trough that I mentioned, franchisee profitability improved to approximately $205,000 in both 2023 and 2024. Now commodity costs in a tougher consumer environment, those are real headwinds in 2025 and resulted in a step back to around $185,000 a unit. But when you look through the impact of unprecedented beef prices and the ad fund transfer, franchisee profitability actually grew last year. And while those are real expenses for our franchisees, I just say this to highlight that the actions within our control, operations, marketing, remodels, franchising, they're working to expand franchisee profitability even in a challenging environment. Also within this brand, there's significant upside as more restaurants climb the quality curve. In 2025, A restaurants generated average sales of $1.9 million and roughly $245,000 in profitability, over 30% higher than the system average. And while this number is not where we want it to be long term, that gap is proof of what's possible with strong execution, and it gives me confidence that the system has room to grow. Now the last area I want to circle back to is technology. There's a lot of discussion around AI in restaurants, and it's often focused on reducing labor. Here at Burger King, we see it differently. When I was a restaurant manager, much of my time was spent on very repetitive tasks, looking up standards, monitoring inventory, verifying temperatures. That work pulled me away from what was really important, leading the team, engaging with guests, being present in my community and technology and AI can solve all that. When managers and team members can focus more on leadership and customer interaction, growth follows. I've seen firsthand that as technology improves the guest experience, team member efficiency improves as well. And so as traffic does increase, a more effective team can handle higher transaction counts without adding more labor. And those team members are just better. They have more capacity. And that is the inspiration behind BK Assistant. It's the manager and the team members assistant. It's their partner, it's their analyst. Our Chief Digital Officer, Thibault Roux, has been instrumental in bringing BK Assistant and Patty, who you meet in just a moment, to life by leveraging real-time data in our restaurants to improve the lives of our team members. And to show you what that looks like in practice, I'll share this video. [Presentation]

We are really excited about BK Assistant. I've got to tell you, Joe and I have spent about a total of 80 years in restaurants and not much surprises us, but we're like a couple of giddy teenagers when we get to play with this thing. It's amazing. And while it's only in about 500 restaurants today, it's going to be available to all 7,000 by the end of the year. So as we look toward the future, there are 4 important opportunities that I'd like to highlight. First, and it won't surprise you, I continue to see growth opportunities from operational improvements. Between bringing highly motivated new franchisees into the system, continuing our focus on repeatable precision and now that's BK Assistant, opening the door for everyone to give better customer service, I'm confident that you'll get even better, more consistent guest experience. Second, we're continuing to execute on these quality remodels. And while our pace was modestly slower due to that franchisee P&L compression in 2025, we're starting to reach the point where it's benefiting our overall results. And as we execute more and more sizzles and modernize more restaurants, that halo effect is going to start to materialize, and that's exciting. And then third is culinary. Now this is not an area where you've heard us talk a lot about over the years, and we haven't placed significant emphasis on it, largely because we already have a strong high-quality food foundation in place. But now that we're showing the necessary progress in those other foundational areas, we can turn to elevating our menu. And this year will be full of product news, and that news will start with the Whopper. We're elevating our flagship burger with the rollout of new glazed buns, a creamier Mayo and clamshell packaging designed to enhance both the eating experience and the premium feel of the Whopper. And you can expect additional product quality improvements over the coming quarters, led by our new head chef, Amy Alarcon, who brings nearly 2 decades of experience leading culinary innovation at Popeyes. Finally, we see a real opportunity to win with kids and families, which represent nearly 20% of QSR traffic, but only 10% of Burger Kings. Now this hasn't always been the case. 20 years ago, we had a large vibrant kids business. And over the past few years, we've been intentional about regaining that. In addition to improving the guest experience in our restaurant image, we've leaned into family-friendly partnerships like Spider-Verse, Adams Family, How to Train Your Dragon and most recently, SpongeBob, paired with real menu innovation designed for families to make every visit feel special. You can expect to see more family-friendly IP partnerships done the Burger King way in the years ahead. And what's important here is that these partnerships, when executed well, drive durable behavior change. King Junior Val incidence is now at its highest level in over a decade, and we're earning repeat visits from families who are rediscovering the brand during these windows. In fact, over 35% of guests who visited during our last 3 IP partnerships returned to Burger King within 30 days. A great proof point for that, despite the severe weather in January, Burger King's underlying trends have improved following our SpongeBob collaboration in December. This opportunity for family and kids is significant. As this chart shows, even modest progress in reclaiming our share can put meaningful wind in our sales. And given the size of the family occasion, that emotional connection that it creates and the lifetime value of those guests, this is something we believe can be very big for Burger King over time. The most important point that I want to leave you with is that while I'm very proud of the foundational progress that we've made over the past 4 years, we are certainly not done. Much like our franchisees, we think like owners and owners are never done. The work we put in thus far was about building a foundation that allows us to play offense going forward. Across every part of our business, we've built real momentum with meaningful growth levers still ahead of us. And I hope that we've given you a clear perspective today on what's changed at Burger King and why we're very confident in where we're headed. Altogether, we are investing over $700 million to strengthen the Burger King U.S. system. And our franchisees have stepped up beside us and are committing over $1.5 billion of incremental capital toward remodels, kitchen equipment, technology and marketing. And this goes back to a point that Josh made a little bit earlier. RBI is deeply committed to its brands. And it's clear to me that while RBI still possesses the incredible financial discipline and firepower that defined its early years, that's now balanced with deep restaurant experience, long tenure and strong operating instincts. And that combination has driven meaningful fundamental change over time. It's hard to look at the data and not recognize that this is a fundamentally different business than it was 4 years ago and that this plan is working. And there's still plenty of work to do, but that's what makes the team and I excited every single day. We've already seen some great results. And relative to others in the space, we still have a lot of levers to pull to continue driving outperformance. And with that, I'll pass it back to Josh. Thank you.

All right. Thanks, Tom. Can we get one more round of applause for the amazing work Tom and team are doing? I'm most hopeful that by next time we get together, Thibault can help me out and maybe Patty can just do this presentation for me. We'll see. We've got some time. All right. So I now want to change gears a little bit and focus on net restaurant growth, which expands the reach of our brands to new guests around the world and is a clear indicator of franchisee confidence and returns. Two years ago, we said that RBI should be able to deliver 5% plus net restaurant growth on average. Since then, the trend has clearly not been favorable, but it's easily explainable. Our results were negatively impacted by softness in a few select markets, most notably in Burger King China. In fact, when you look at the numbers outside of Burger King China, our net restaurant growth has averaged 4% over the last 5 years, underscoring the strength and consistency of our core development engine. That said, we know that the consolidated number matters and getting back to 5% plus NRG is important. So today, I'll walk you through the building blocks that will get us there. At a high level, it's fairly simple. By the end of our algorithm period or 2028, 5% plus net restaurant growth equates to roughly 1,800 net restaurants per year, coming from 3 main building blocks. First, 300 to 400 from our businesses in the U.S. and Canada; second, 300 to 400 from our 3 brands in China; and third, 1,100 from international, including about 700 from our top 10 growth markets and 400 from the balance of the portfolio. Together, that gets us to roughly 1,800 net new restaurants per year or 5% plus net restaurant growth by 2028. That's the framework. So now let me walk you through why we believe each of these building blocks is repeatable and increasingly derisked. We'll start with the U.S. and Canada. We expect 300 to 400 net new restaurants per year compared to roughly 90 on average from 2023 to 2025 or just north of 200, assuming Burger King was neutral during that time. Within that, Firehouse Subs will serve as the primary driver, delivering about half of our net new units. Burger King should gradually return to a neutral position, and Tim Hortons and Popeyes will drive the remainder of growth in the U.S. and Canada. We have high visibility into this pipeline. Starting with Firehouse Subs, Mike and the team achieved an important milestone in 2025, surpassing 100 net new restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. And we've increased the pace by more than 5x versus pre-acquisition levels. With less than 4-year paybacks, a strong franchising team and growing brand awareness, we see a clear path for Firehouse to open between 150 and 200 net new units per year by 2028. Shifting now to Tim Hortons. After a return to positive net unit growth in 2025, Tim Hortons is expected to continue accelerating in underpenetrated regions like Western Canada and Quebec as well as dense markets like the Atlantic region, where franchisees are opening restaurants to keep up with demand. This growth is further supported by very attractive paybacks, which are less than 3 years on average in Canada. In the U.S. market, Katarina and her team are introducing Tims to new markets like Virginia, Florida, Delaware and Tennessee, while building further density in our existing markets like New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Texas. Tim Hortons in the U.S. recently achieved its highest level of gross openings since 2014, and we anticipate further acceleration from here. Meanwhile, the Burger King U.S. portfolio cleanup is largely behind us, giving us confidence that we'll be able to return to net neutral growth. And while Popeyes has slowed development, Peter and his team are laying the operational groundwork needed to position the brand to accelerate sustainably once ready. This deliberate sequencing is the primary reason we introduced a lower bound to our combined U.S. and Canada net restaurant growth outlook. Taken together, while 300 to 400 net new restaurants represents a step up from today, given our level of influence in home markets, including our own capital investments, we're confident that it's achievable. The second bucket of growth is in China, which has historically been the largest swing factor in our global net restaurant growth. We entered our first master franchise agreement in China with Burger King in 2012. And from there, we scaled the business from around 50 units to over 1,000 restaurants, adding nearly 300 net new units in 2019 alone. However, the business struggled during and after the pandemic. Given its importance, we temporarily took control in February of 2025. And over the following 9 months, we built an exceptional local leadership team, reignited marketing, optimized the restaurant portfolio and drove 10% same-store sales in the back half of 2025. From the start, we believe the right solution would be to partner with a well-capitalized, ambitious local operator. And in November, we announced a joint venture agreement with CPE, a leading Chinese investment firm with a strong track record of scaling consumer brands in China. Post closing, CPE invested $350 million of primary capital on day 1, becoming the majority shareholder with an 83% stake in the business. Importantly, CPE committed to doubling Burger King China's footprint to 2,500 restaurants in the next 5 years. No one is better positioned to explain the path forward than Johnson Huang, our Chairman of Burger King China, who spent years leading KFC in China; and Mark Mao, Managing Director of CPE. So I'll turn it over to them. [Presentation]

Great. Thanks to Johnson and Mark for that. As you heard, we now expect Burger King China to open over 200 net new restaurants per year by 2028 with continued acceleration thereafter. When you layer in Popeyes and Tim Hortons in China, we expect an additional 100 to 200 net new restaurants per year combined by 2028. Both businesses are earlier in their development curves and require capital for sustainable growth. So we expect a bit more variability year-to-year versus a more mature system, which is why we've been conservative in the ranges that we're giving. Taken together, China should contribute 300 to 400 net new restaurants per year, with the high end of this range slightly ahead of our prior guidance of 300. We believe CPE's ownership and involvement in Burger King meaningfully derisk the market and view Popeyes and Tim Hortons as providing incremental upside over time as we prove out the unit economics. That brings us to the rest of International, which should deliver roughly 1,100 net new restaurants per year. International is a real source of strength for us. And as I mentioned earlier, one that we view as underappreciated by the market. Since 2013, we've built 5 international businesses with more than $1 billion in system-wide sales each and won Burger King France with over $2 billion. We've grown these businesses by partnering with local operators who share our long-term vision for the brands and bring a true ownership mindset to execution. Burger King France is a perfect example. We entered the market in 2013 through a master franchise joint venture with Groupe Bertrand, led by local entrepreneur, Olivier Bertrand. Through strong execution and beautiful well-located restaurants and a deep understanding of the local market, Olivier and his team grew Burger King France into a $2.3 billion system-wide sales business with over 600 restaurants in 2025. I could spend a lot of time highlighting the strength of this business and its team, but it's more compelling to hear directly from Olivier himself, along with Alex Simon, CEO of Burger King France, who joined the company in 2028. Take it away, guys. [Presentation]

Awesome. Hope you enjoy that. Alex and Olivier are truly special partners, and we're tremendously lucky to have them. So France is an incredible market, but what's just as exciting to me is that our international success isn't concentrated in just 1 or 2 markets. Our 10 largest international businesses account for less than 60% of total international system-wide sales, which speaks to the breadth and diversification of our portfolio. That matters because we're not just growing units to drive a headline net restaurant growth figure. We're expanding in attractive markets with great average unit volumes that contribute meaningfully to system-wide sales and deliver strong flow-through to adjusted operating income. Our international restaurants generate average unit volumes of $1.3 million. compared to a global average of $1.4 million. As a result, as we add units, we'd expect only modest dilution between NRG and system-wide sales growth. In fact, when you look on a consolidated basis in the last 3 years, we've seen 0 drag from same-store sales plus net restaurant growth to system-wide sales growth. This is a key differentiator of our growth model versus others in the industry. Importantly, our growth is being fueled by healthy franchisees who are seeing attractive returns and reinvesting in their businesses. Since 2020, nearly $2 billion of primary capital has been injected into 13 of our largest and fastest-growing international businesses. Burger King India is a great example. Since joining in late 2013, CEO, Raj Varman, who was actually previously one of our top-performing general managers across North America and the U.K. before he became a franchisee, has grown the business from 0 restaurants at the start of 2014 to nearly 600 today, establishing Burger King as a leading brand in India's fast-growing QSR market. The business has delivered 5 consecutive years of positive same-store sales and increased net restaurant growth to nearly 70 net new units in both 2024 and 2025. And earlier this year, Restaurant Brands Asia, the parent of BK India, announced plans for up to $165 million of new primary capital from the Agarwal family, the new controlling shareholder. With this capital, the team is well positioned to increase team development in the years ahead. Let's hear from Raj. [Presentation]

Amazing. I'm sure you can all tell how amazing of an operator that Raj is if you were on the shelf behind them, you probably noticed his trophy collection. That's because he won last year, he actually won Developer of the Year and Franchisee of the Year for his incredible work in India. Burger King France and Burger King in India are great represents of how our international growth business works. Strong operators, local expertise, well capitalized with a clear line of sight to continued development. With that context, let me discuss our path to 1,100 net new international restaurants in 2028. We expect our top 10 growth markets to provide a solid base of 700 net new restaurants annually compared to about 600 on average from 2023 to 2025. These markets, including India, the U.K., Mexico, France and Japan are diversified across Europe, Asia and Latin America. Growth in these markets is being driven by strong unit economics with an average payback of 4.5 years. And importantly, we are not even close to full penetration in these markets, which gives me confidence that we have ample runway to continue growing for a long time. These top 10 international growth markets only represent a small portion of our overall footprint. The rest of our international portfolio, which is around 175 brand market combinations, should deliver the remaining 400 net new international restaurants per year. For perspective, this group contributed around 350 NRG on average from 2022 to 2024. While 2025 represented a step back to just over 200, this was largely due to geopolitical disruptions that impacted some markets in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the impact of which we believe is now behind us. As pressures ease and we entered new markets with Popeyes and Firehouse, we're confident in our ability to reaccelerate growth to 400. Putting it all together, we have between 300 and 400 net new restaurants from the U.S. and Canada and 700 from our top 10 international growth markets. This is lower risk, repeatable growth, supported by strong operators, attractive economics and established development pipelines. When you add 300 to 400 net new restaurants from China, the midpoint represents about 1,400 net new restaurants annually or more than 4% unit growth from just 13 markets where we have more visibility. From there, an additional 400 net new restaurants come from the rest of international and bring us to 1,800 net new restaurants per year or 5% plus net restaurant growth by 2028. I can easily point to upside in each area, particularly in countries like India, Japan and China. And if something arises in one of the markets, I'm confident we'll be able to overachieve in another. Importantly, our growth is coming from a wide variety of businesses all around the world. And by addressing the situation in Burger King China, we've now removed the largest historical source of net restaurant growth volatility. All of this is supported by healthy development pipelines and strong franchisee alignment, which gives us confidence that this level of growth is not only achievable but sustainable. So that's the framework. And that's why we believe that the path back to consistent 5% plus net restaurant growth by 2028 is now clear. With that, we're going to take a break. We've got our beautiful Tim Hortons bakery showcase and some new beverages next door for everybody to try, and we'll start back here at 10:30 with an update from Sami. Thank you all very much. [Break]

Good morning, everyone. Good morning. I can see we're all hopped up on coffee. I hope everyone enjoyed the delicious Tims products, but please, please save room because we have tons of food to come at lunch later on today. So just quickly on agenda. For the rest of the day, I'm going to provide a financial update. Patrick will join us to give us his thoughts on the plan. And lastly, our brand presidents will take the stage for a panel and live Q&A. It would be great to hear directly from our brand leaders on the exciting paths ahead for their respective businesses. I personally had the pleasure of sitting in some of their seats over my 13 years at RBI, working on 4 of our 5 business units all around the world, from Miami to Toronto to Singapore. And collectively, as a leadership team, a few years ago, we stepped back and made some difficult but needed choices, short-term trade-offs to drive long-term results. We chose to acquire and operate restaurants to invest in early-stage international businesses, and they put a record amount of capital behind Burger King's Reclaim the Flame plan. We made those decisions for the benefits of our brands and our franchisees. They required capital and added G&A and complexity, but we firmly believe they were the right things to do. And now that those investments are starting to take shape, our focus now shifts towards simplifying. And that's what I'd like to discuss today. There are 3 things that you need to believe in: one, that we can deliver consistent earnings growth; two, that those earnings clearly translate into steady and growing free cash flow; and third, that we allocate capital in a way that creates the most long-term value for our shareholders. And with that framework, let me be more specific. We expect to continue growing organic AOI at roughly 8% on average through 2028, return to a roughly 99% franchise business and sunset the Restaurant Holdings segment by 2027 and achieve corporate investment-grade leverage by 2028. This will drive greater earnings predictability and sustainable free cash flow generation, which allows us to return increasing amounts of capital to shareholders through both the growing dividend and share repurchases. Let me start with the most important point. Our algorithm has not changed. We continue to believe that the system can deliver 3% plus same-store sales on average from 2024 to 2028 and return to 5% plus net restaurant growth by the end of the outlook period. And that combination supports 8% plus organic AOI growth on average over the algorithm period. We've delivered that level of organic AOI growth over our first 2 years of the period, even though net restaurant growth hasn't been exactly where we want it yet. I think it's worth spending a moment on what drove AOI growth in 2024 and 2025 because there has been some noise in the numbers. Over that period, AOI benefited from solid underlying fundamentals, including healthy same-store sales outperformance across our largest businesses as well as continued cost discipline. Layered on top of that were a handful of onetime items, including ad fund dynamics, bad debt movements and the impact of Burger King China as we work through the ownership transition there. Some of those benefited us and some created short-term headwinds. But overall, we were able to drive over 8% organic AOI growth over the first 2 years of our algorithm period. And as we look ahead, that noise, it largely clears. There are 3 core structural drivers that will support our ability to continue delivering the AOI algorithm. The first is ramping the 5% plus NRG. The second is a structural tailwind in our royalty rate. And the third is disciplined cost management. So on the first, before the break, Josh walked you through our building blocks to 5% net restaurant growth by 2028, which translates to roughly 1,800 net new restaurants annually. While we internally manage the business on absolute net new units, another way to look at that is how do you bridge from the roughly 3% net restaurant growth today to 5% plus in the target. That gap is roughly 200 basis points. And when you break down those 200 basis points, they come from a few very clear buckets. The biggest is Burger King China. We've made a lot of progress here, and it will pivot from roughly a 70 basis point headwind in 2025 to a 60 basis point tailwind by 2028. That 130 basis point swing, it's already prefunded by CPE, which gives us confidence in the development ramp, consistent with the growth plan that Johnson and Mark outlined earlier in their video. The remaining 70 basis points will be split across 2 main drivers: Popeyes International and Firehouse North America. Both of these platforms have tangible momentum and a clear line of sight to incremental unit growth. Popeyes International continues to expand and take share in underpenetrated markets, supported by our existing international partner networks and strong demand from our guests. I can't think of any other international businesses of such scale that are consistently compounding system-wide sales at nearly 40%, and this is just the beginning. Meanwhile, Firehouse is hitting its stride in North America with sub 4-year paybacks and a robust development engine in place. You've already seen the pace of development of Firehouse almost 5x in the past few years, and we expect more acceleration in the years to come. Beyond those drivers, there will, of course, be puts and takes, which is a reality for a business of our scale. In any given year, we're opening restaurants in over 70 different countries all around the world, which to me, just highlights the strength and diversity of our global pipelines. As those numbers accelerate over time, we'll see this flow through nicely to system-wide sales and to ultimately AOI growth. The second dynamic that's worth highlighting is our effective royalty rate expands modestly over time due to mix shift towards higher-growth business units like international and Firehouse as well as higher contractual royalty rate step-ups in many of our international markets. Burger King China is a prime example of this. We told you on our last earnings call that we will resume collection of royalties in 2026, which is a modest tailwind to our '26 AOI growth. Royalties will start a couple of points below our standard 5% international rate for Burger King with a contractual ramp to the full rate over time. That creates a built-in tailwind to AOI as the business scales in China. And on a global basis, we expect our blended royalty rate to expand by 1 to 2 basis points per year through at least 2028, largely driven by this dynamic in international. And our nearly $50 billion of system-wide sales with nearly 100% flow-through, that's a really nice tailwind to AOI. So the third driver I want to talk about regarding AOI growth is disciplined cost management and G&A leverage. We often hear that we have a reputation for being cost cutters. But as you can see here, the numbers tell a far different story. Since before 2020, we've grown segment G&A by around 50%, adjusting for Firehouse, peaking at around $650 million in 2023, up from $400 million just a few years before that. We made deliberate investments across RBI, particularly in field support and other franchisee-facing functions to strengthen the foundation of our business and our operations. And more recently, since I've been CFO, we've rightsized our segment G&A a bit with all of the step down coming from corporate and back-office functions. Meanwhile, our brands have actually held steady to ensure that we continue to provide comprehensive support for our franchisees and for our restaurants. As we sit here today, I'm confident that our brands are at the right level of G&A to support our strategy and to deliver against our growth ambitions. And looking forward, you should expect segment G&A to grow roughly in line with inflation or at about 2% annually, while system-wide sales will grow meaningfully faster. This will create operating leverage. As a rule of thumb, approximately 2% annual segment G&A growth will drive approximately 1 point of AOI growth leverage. So taken together, these 3 factors, increasing system-wide sales from a ramp-up in unit growth, a modest increase in our overall effective royalty rate and G&A leverage support our outlook for roughly 8% organic AOI growth on average through 2028, and it sets the stage for the simplification actions I'm going to walk through next. So on to simplification. Let me turn to restaurant Holdings. While organic AOI growth, our framework actually excludes restaurant Holdings, and the segment is less than 2% of our reported AOI and adjusted EPS. We recognize it's added some complexity to your models, so it's important to be clear about how we think about it. Restaurant Holdings was created intentionally. It allowed us to step in where needed, acquiring Carrols to accelerate franchising efforts and modernization at Burger King and to scale early-stage international businesses like Popeyes China and Firehouse Brazil. As we look ahead, Restaurant Holdings is not a permanent part of the model, and it was never intended to be. Our long-term objective is to operate a 99% franchise business with a small intentional base of home market company restaurants. To sunset RH, we're actively working on 2 things. First, we're working to place Popeyes China and Firehouse Brazil in the hands of long-term local partners. And second, we plan to refranchise the Burger King company restaurant portfolio down to its steady-state level of roughly 300 restaurants from around 1,100 today. We expect to accomplish both of these objectives by the end of 2027, at which point the Restaurant Holdings segment can wind down. Of course, refranchising transactions are not linear. So we may ultimately sunset RH with up to 500 remaining Burger King U.S. company restaurants, still with the long-term goal of reaching a steady state of 300. As a reminder, when we acquired Carrols back in May of 2024, we said refranchising would play out in years 3 through 7 following the acquisition or in other words, from 2026 to 2030. Last year, we accelerated the plan, refranchising the first group of restaurants ahead of schedule. The team has already built a strong pipeline for 2026, giving us confidence that we're on the path to reach our steady-state company restaurant target ahead of schedule. We'd expect 2026 refranchisings to be back half weighted and to accelerate into 2027. And from a modeling perspective, there are a couple of important points to note. First, we expect a few pennies of EPS dilution per year from refranchising Burger King restaurants over the next 2 years as earnings shift from company-operated AOI to a more traditional royalty-based stream. Once restaurant holdings winds down, the remaining Burger King company-operated restaurants will roll into the BK segment like our existing company-operated restaurants do today. At that point, if there are additional restaurants remaining to refranchise, those will happen in the normal course of business. Second, once we find new partners for Popeyes China and Firehouse Brazil, we will start to see a nice tailwind to AOI and to EPS as start-up costs transition from the RH P&L over to the new operator. I also want to take a moment to emphasize the why behind this whole process. Refranchising, whether at Carrols or in China, is first and foremost about putting restaurants into the hands of the right operators, owners who live in their markets, who run great restaurants and who reinvest in their people and their businesses. That's the #1 priority. To bring that to life, we thought it would be helpful to hear directly from a few franchisees who are stepping in and taking on more restaurants. Let's roll the video. [Presentation]

It's amazing. It's amazing to see a duo up there who some of you may have met over the years and used to be part of our corporate team here as a leader. So hopefully, that video paints a bit of a picture of the excitement that there is right now in the Burger King system. Stepping back, we recognize that we've added more layers to the business in recent years. That was intentional and necessary to strengthen the foundation and best position RBI for long-term growth. I believe 2025 was the most complex year. And from here, the model steadily simplifies. We've addressed Burger King China. We're actively refranchising Burger King U.S. restaurants. And by year-end 2027, you should be able to delete the restaurant Holdings tab from your models. As that happens, the translation from sales growth to AOI to free cash flow becomes more predictable and more durable. I guess spreadsheet jokes kind of get the audience going on. So now we've talked through our vision for a more steady-state P&L. The natural question is, what do we do with the significant free cash flow that our business generates. We generated approximately $1.6 billion of free cash flow in 2025. And as we look ahead, we expect free cash flow to grow meaningfully, driven by 3 core dynamics: First, continued delivery of 8% plus AOI growth; second, the scale down of Reclaim the Flame remodel investments; and third, declining capital demands over time as refranchisings accelerate and RH eventually winds down. This visibility has naturally caused us to refine our approach to capital allocation. Our first capital allocation priority will always be investing in our brands. Over the last several years, capital spending has been elevated as we made deliberate investments behind our brands. Today, we're modestly revising our long-term CapEx outlook down to reflect a more efficient, highly franchised model. We now expect total CapEx, tenant inducements and incentives, what we refer to as CapEx and cash inducements to be around $400 million for 2026 and 2027. We expect this to step down and settle around $300 million from 2028 on as RH goes away. This should generate a nice tailwind to our free cash flow growth. And when we break down that run rate $300 million of CapEx, roughly half or $150 million will be allocated to Tim Hortons development and renovations as we continue to accelerate the business there. The remaining $150 million is split fairly evenly across 3 buckets. First, company restaurant remodels and repairs and maintenance across our U.S. businesses; second, general corporate spend in technology, facilities and in our supply chain business. And third, we are earmarking $50 million for other investments as they may arise. In 2028 and 2029, given the slightly longer-than-expected time line for reaching our Burger King modern image goals, we anticipate the majority of this $50 million to be deployed against our existing Reclaim the Flame commitments. And to be clear, the total quantum of $700 million committed to Reclaim the Flame, that's not changing. We ultimately believe $300 million of annual run rate CapEx and cash inducements, it's a healthy level of investment to support our brands over the long term. Our second capital allocation priority is maintaining a healthy and growing dividend. Returning capital to shareholders through the dividend has been a core part of RBI's value proposition for a long time, and that is not changing. We've now delivered 52 consecutive quarters of year-over-year dividend growth, and we are committed to maintaining that trajectory. Our previous long-term guidance was for a 50% to 60% dividend payout ratio, and we finished 2025 slightly above that range at 67%. Looking ahead, we're committed to a durable dividend with a payout ratio moving to around 60%. Our third capital allocation priority is to continue supporting our strong balance sheet, which we view as a strategic asset. Over the past several years, our capital allocation strategy has been guided by a focus on maintaining balance sheet flexibility as we navigated a period of elevated complexity. During this period, we prioritized deleveraging, closing 2025 at 4.2x net leverage. And we've taken deliberate steps to further strengthen our balance sheet, extending maturities, accessing capital at very attractive rates and maintaining strong liquidity. As we've previously discussed, once leverage reached the low 4x range, we plan to reassess the needs of the business and refine our longer-term leverage expectations. Having now reached that point, what we're outlining today tightens our long-term targets and provides clear visibility into how we expect to deploy excess free cash flow. Moving forward, we intend to continue deleveraging and are targeting net leverage of approximately 4x in 2026 with a long-term leverage target of low to mid-3x net leverage, which we expect to achieve by 2028. That long-term target is at the low end of our previous 3 to 5x range because our intention is to become an investment-grade company. And based on our conversations with rating agencies, we believe this net leverage range is consistent with that goal. We're already well on the path to becoming IG. Fitch recently rated our first lien debt as IG facility, and we expect to reach additional upgrade thresholds with the other rating agencies over the next 1 to 2 years on our path to corporate investment grade. While the business has historically supported much higher levels of net leverage, we view investment grade as the right long-term capital structure for RBI. Being investment grade provides tangible benefits, including a lower relative cost of debt, access to deeper, more durable pools of capital and the ability to issue longer duration debt, sometimes with 20- or 30-year maturities. As I look around the room at the RBI leaders here in our audience, we're all personally large owners in this business, as Josh mentioned earlier. So we think in decades, not in years. And we believe being an investment-grade company is the right capital structure for us over the long term. However, we don't need to be overly aggressive to achieve our goals. Based on where we sit today, we believe we can achieve corporate investment-grade leverage by 2028 through earnings growth without the need for voluntary debt paydown. This positions us well to optimize our cost of capital as well as renew our debt facilities in the coming years while creating capacity to return excess free cash flow to shareholders by resuming share repurchases. Importantly, on that basis, we're only a couple of years away from achieving our leverage goals. And given our significant free cash flow generation, we can do it all, invest in the business, reduce our net leverage and return capital to shareholders through both dividends and buybacks. On the topic of buybacks, we believe our shares are currently undervalued and that this is an attractive time to invest in our own stock. In 2026, we expect to repurchase approximately $500 million of shares and together with our dividend, return over $1.6 billion of capital to shareholders. Share repurchases should grow from this level over time as we expect to use the majority of excess free cash flow to buy back shares annually. From a modeling perspective, it's important to note that we target a year-end cash balance of around $1 billion that we reserve for normal course liquidity, ad funds and gift card balances and working capital needs, including our quarterly dividend. Until we become IG, we do not intend to fund share repurchases with incremental leverage. And once we do become IG, we fully intend to operate the business within IG leverage parameters. At that point, we can plan to meaningfully step up the quantum of share repurchases with incremental leverage capacity each year as EBITDA and earnings grow. Lastly, I want to quickly touch on M&A. Historically, M&A has been an important part of our strategy, and it's been a meaningful driver of value creation over time. However, more recently, our focus has been on reinvestment and driving stronger fundamentals across our current portfolio. As such, M&A is not a priority today. We are focused on running the brands we have at the highest levels. So taken all together, all of these priorities establish a balanced capital allocation framework. We'll invest in our brands where returns are compelling. We'll maintain a healthy and growing dividend. We'll reduce leverage over time as earnings grow and become an investment-grade company, and we'll return the majority of excess cash to shareholders through share repurchases. Let me put some numbers around that. When I look at our dividend yield of around 3.8% today, and I add in $500 million in share repurchases, that delivers a roughly 5% yield to shareholders in a business that's growing AOI by 8% per year. This means that in 2026, we'd expect to deliver double-digit total shareholder returns, which should grow over time as our share repurchase capacity increases. That's pretty exciting. I now want to turn it over to a guy who knows a little bit about driving shareholder returns, our Executive Chairman, Patrick Doyle. I've now had the opportunity to work with Patrick for just over 3 years. We sit 3 seats from each other upstairs in the office, and we speak almost every day. I continue to be impressed by the ambition of his vision and the intensity of his commitment to winning. He's been an invaluable resource for me, Josh and the rest of the leadership team as we position the business to accelerate growth and drive long-term value for shareholders. Patrick, over to you.

Thanks, Sami. We're now at the exciting part of the morning where the team wonders whether or not I am going to stick to a script. And I'm not. I had a couple of conversations at the break with folks about BK Assistant and Patty. And I want to make sure everybody understands what you just saw there. We understand how technology can drive extraordinary results in a restaurant company. I have experienced that myself. The old days of having 500 people in a room coding, which we had in Ann Arbor, building things is not the way you operate anymore. With AI, you can do things much faster, much deeper, get extraordinary things from it. So what did you just see with BK Assistant and patty. What you saw with every team member wearing a headset is a personal coach for those team members. So not only can they find out anything about what's going on in the restaurant at any given time. And not only will they be told when the Freestyle machine is out of a flavor and they should go replace it, which used to take over a day on average before the cartridge will be replaced and is now taking under an hour for that to be replaced because they're being prompted on it. But they're getting coached because it can listen to the conversations that they're having. It can coach them on, are they being friendly? Are they saying welcome? Are they saying thank you for coming to Burger King, right? It is extraordinary. It is a game changer in terms of how you run restaurants. And I think our team is doing an amazing job. I don't know if anybody else out there is on this yet, but it is a very, very big deal about how you run restaurants, the hospitality you bring, ultimately, efficiency. It's going to predict things and say, you know what, sales are coming in higher or lower than we expected, and so you should adjust labor and all of those things are going to be coming through the headset. It is really, really, really a big deal for our business going forward. I'm very excited about it. So before I get into all of my thoughts about the business, I want to spend a minute or 2 on the things that Sami was just talking about. As many of you know, I joined RBI 3 years ago, first and foremost, as an active investor, putting a significant amount of my own capital into the business. Shortly after I joined and made that investment, I spoke with all of you at the NYSE about why I believe my investment was going to generate great returns and what I believe needed to be done within the company to make it even better. A very large percentage of my net worth is in this company. And listening to Josh and Tom and Sami, there are 3 takeaways that really excite me as an owner of RBI. First, RBI will always make the right decisions and investments for the long-term health of this business, even if it has created some short-term complexity. Sorry about that little bit of complexity you had the last couple of years, it's starting to go away, right? RBI operates with an ownership mindset, right? That's how we think about the business. That is perfectly aligned with how I approach business, and it's the right answer for generating the best returns for our shareholders over the medium and long term. Second, the earnings algorithm is intact, and it's becoming more predictable. That allows me to even more confidently underwrite consistent future growth in this business. And third, this business generates significant free cash flow, $1.6 billion in 2025 with that number growing through our adjusted operating income growth and returning to a 99% franchise business. Relative to our market cap today, it's a pretty impressive figure and one that provides a ton of optionality, including what we have now announced, which is an acceleration in shareholder returns. I'm not usually one for slides. because that controls what I'm going to say. But I do have one slide here today. And I think it's important to make the point because Sami walked you through what our total shareholder return is expected to look like in 2026. And then I started debating it and saying, well, look, here, I'm doing a little bit of air math, grabbing a napkin. So I did some napkin math, which they have illustrated with a napkin. And so here's the point. With our 8% AOI growth per year, I can easily envision a scenario where we are returning over $2.5 billion of capital through share repurchases and dividends, the first full year after we become investment grade and unlock leverage capacity. So to be clear, our intent is once we're IG, then we can increase the quantum of debt while remaining investment grade, which will allow us to return more. So assuming no change in our share price, which would make me extraordinarily disappointed in everybody sitting in this room, my rough napkin math would add another couple of percent to shareholder returns on top of Sami's low teens that he laid out. They wouldn't let me do the math on the chart, but I said a couple of more points, so you can do that math in that mysterious red box yourself. That's mid-teens total shareholder return. When I look at the multiple for companies with that kind of return relative to where we are trading today, I see a significant gap. And at some point, the market, again, that means you will recognize that our valuation today does not line up with the growth and free cash flow potential of this business. And I would expect multiple expansion on top of that yield and earnings growth. To me, that's pretty compelling as an investor. So to be clear, I already put all of my money in. And now the company is going to start more consistently buying back shares with its own cash, and I invite all of you to join us. So those are my takeaways on the financial side of things that I just wanted to call out. But beyond that, I want to talk about one of the fundamental reasons I invested in and joined RBI in the first place. And that's because I love the restaurant business. You can tell it. I mean I love this business. I get so jazzed about some of the stuff that we are talking about, and I saw a great restaurant company in RBI. Now what makes a great restaurant company. It's really not complicated, and it has not changed over time. Great restaurants everywhere in the world are built on the same fundamentals, great brands, great people, great franchisees, great food and great service to your guests, all done at a consistently great value. You can dress it up however you want, talk about it, however you want, but that's the formula. And none of that works without compelling franchisee returns. If unit economics aren't healthy, nothing else matters. You're going to have a brand, a great brand and food that people love and you have great marketing, beautiful restaurants. But if the franchisees aren't earning strong cash-on-cash returns, growth eventually slows, reinvestment stops and the system breaks down. It's why when you saw Josh showing you the buildup on the 5% NRG, in every case, he was talking about these are the returns that people are getting in this section, right, in this part of it, why they would want to do this because the returns are good. In a franchise model, the single best predictor of long-term success is whether franchisees are making enough money to reinvest in their restaurants and build new ones. It's as simple as that. I have seen this play out over and over and over in my career. The companies that win over decades aren't the ones chasing every trend or reacting to every headline. They're the ones that do the basics exceptionally well year after year and make sure the economics work for the people who own and run the restaurants. At RBI, we understand that deeply. That's why franchisee profitability sits at the core of everything that we do. It's why we have invested behind our brands. It's why we don't shy away from the hard decisions when something isn't working the way that it should. Now you may hear some conflicting narratives out there about who we are and how we operate. And if they're conflicting with what I'm telling you, I'm telling you they're wrong. So let me give you my perspective on how we embody the core tenets of a great restaurant company across brands, people, franchisees, food service and value. First, I don't think it's a debate that we've got great brands with great food. In fact, it was one of my main takeaways when I joined the RBI business a few years ago prior to investing. The brands and the food are tremendous. Each of our brands is compelling on its own with clear points of differentiation, loyal guests and long runways to grow even though the 4 brands are in different stages of that growth. But they have one thing in common, and that's incredible food. From the Whopper at Burger King to our incredible handbattered chicken at Popeyes to our coffee and baked goods at Tims and Hot Subs at Firehouse, it is undeniable that we have exceptional products, which, of course, is the foundation of any great restaurant business. Now the question becomes whether you have the people who know how to build on that foundation over the long term. This company is led by people who know restaurants. Look at our leadership. Josh has now been in this industry for 14 years. And you've seen the ownership mindset he brings to how we run RBI. Sami has spent 13 years here and is deeply familiar with every single segment of our business. Both Josh and Sami have been in this business as long as I had when I became CEO at Domino's. They are restaurant people. Every single one of Josh and Josh's direct reports have at least a decade in the restaurant business. Across the brands, you have leaders like Axel and Tom, Hope, Joel, Nara, Peter, Mike and Thiago, operators and brand builders who have spent their careers in restaurants, in the field with franchisees. This is a restaurant company run by restaurant people. Axel started working in his family's restaurant business as a kid, basically from age 12. which is apparently legal in Germany. Before he ran that business, joined RBI and then eventually took over as President of Tim Hortons. He is a restaurant guy. Tom was a Domino's franchisee for 20 years before he ever stepped foot in the corporate world. Peter has built his entire career in restaurants and learned directly from Tom the importance of consistent operations in driving guest retention and the results. That's why he is the right person to lead Popeyes today. At a moment, we need to lean in and focus on restaurant-level execution and delivering a great restaurant experience day in and day out. And it's not just Josh's direct reports. As Josh told you, we've built real depth behind them, many of whom are here with us today. One of our biggest competitive advantages is that we can develop and attract amazing talent and then train them and develop them. It's the best that I've seen. And all of that talent at the senior level in this company now has deep restaurant experience. We can then move them around across the brands and geographies to deepen their experience where they need to get more learning and experience in the restaurant business. And that cross-pollination makes the entire company smarter, faster and better at solving problems. And our people think like owners because they are owners. It's not just Josh, Sami and me who have significant personal equity in this business. The rest of the leadership team, as we've said today, has the majority of their personal net worth in RBI stock. Since the beginning, RBI has had a long-standing philosophy of broad-based equity ownership. And as we said, about half of our RBI employees today collectively own about $0.75 billion of vested and unvested equity in RBI. Having managed a lot of people and a lot of a handful of organizations over my career, I can tell you that, that kind of alignment is a game changer. When people have real skin in the game, it impacts how decisions are made and changes how trade-offs are evaluated. You worry less about next month and more about whether what you're doing is actually strengthening our business. the business in 1 year, in 5 years or 10 years from now. And we've been doing that, and we've made the hard choices that show that. And that ownership mindset doesn't just align us with our shareholders, it aligns us with our franchisees, which brings me to my next point. I talk a lot about franchisee profitability. But the one thing that sits at the heart of that conversation and doesn't always get enough attention is the quality of the relationship between the franchisor and the franchisee because that relationship and that trust is what ultimately allows you to get things done in the system at pace. At RBI, we've done a ton of hard work to strengthen those relationships across the system. In Canada, Axel and the team had to fundamentally reset the relationship at Tim Hortons several years ago. It required making real changes, including structural decisions that weren't easy or always popular at the time, but they were necessary. And today, Tim Hortons has one of the healthiest restaurant owner systems in the industry. In fact, the relationship is strong enough that their franchisee association recently decided to dissolve. After enough years of seeing our actions drive their results, they trust that we have their best interest at the center of our decisions. It's unbelievably powerful when that happens. At Burger King alignment took a different form. We asked franchisees to reinvest meaningfully in their restaurants, and we committed to doing the same thing. That partnership resulted in one of the largest and most visible reinvestment programs in the industry ever. You don't get that level of commitment unless franchisees believe in the leadership team, believe in the plan and believe that the franchisor is fully in it with them for the long term. It doesn't mean that we don't have strong, healthy debate. That's critical to making the best decisions. But I do believe that the majority of them trust that we are making the right decisions with their success in mind for their business. That's why the vote just passed with 97% support for the ad fund rate extension. That's amazing. That is unbelievably powerful. We came back to them and said, beef costs are high. We're sorry. We're really focused on this. This is the right thing for the medium and long term and short term for your business. And 97% of the restaurants said, "Yes, we get it. We'll keep investing." At Popeyes, we benefit from some of the strongest franchisee relationships I've seen in the industry. The system is anchored by highly capable operators who genuinely love the brand. They know what Popeyes can be, and they know that right now, under Peter's leadership, we're taking the steps required to get the business back to that level quickly. At Firehouse, our operators are engaged and mission-driven with strong ties to their local communities. They know what Firehouse stands for. They love it, and they are in it. In our international business, we have an incredible group of master franchisees, many of whom have decades of experience running restaurants in their local markets. You heard from some of them today, and they're a big part of how we've been able to drive consistent growth while navigating very different market dynamics around the world. Their partnership is essential to our success. The important point here is that we do not approach franchisees transactionally. We work with them as long-term partners with aligned incentives and shared accountability. They are owners in our business just like us, in many cases, for much longer than us. And they must and will be treated with respect. And that ownership mindset shows up in other ways culturally. We don't avoid tough issues. When something isn't performing the way it should, we address it with the full weight of the organization. And that ends up showing up in our operations and execution at the restaurant level. You don't hear us saying focus on this. ignore that, terrible message for the market, horrible message for franchisees and the brands that you're saying they're not our focus. We did that at Tim Hortons with Back to Basics, focusing on elevating food and beverage quality, improving operations and rebuilding franchisee trust. Nothing flashy, but it worked and those results have compounded over time. We stepped in decisively at Burger King China when it became clear the situation needed to change. And now we're sitting here a year later with a fantastic new partner. There is no kicking the can here. Burger King is the clearest example of this mindset. I'll be frank. I think the investor perception of Burger King right now is meaningfully disconnected from what I'm seeing inside the business and from what our guests are now experiencing in their restaurants, the vast majority of the time. When I hear some of the concerns on Burger King out there, a number of them simply do not line up with the facts. So-called value wars and competitive pricing are not derailing our progress. Remodel uplifts, they are very real. Underlying franchisee economics, while they are not where we ultimately want them to be, they are materially stronger than they were a few years ago, and that's amid all-time high beef costs. And the major franchising issues that we had previously that held the system back are now behind us. Anyone who's lived through a turnaround knows that the early work, the in-restaurant operational work is often the least visible, the hardest for you all as investors to measure, maybe the least appreciated, but it's the most important, which is why Tom keeps telling his team to keep their heads down and stay focused. The first phase is about resetting standards, rebuilding trust and fixing the fundamentals. That takes time and progress is rarely perfectly linear. What matters is whether the right work is being done day after day. As Tom always says, progress, not success. We still have lots of work to do, but we're reaching the point where if you pay attention, you can see real progress in the Burger King brand. We're entering the phase where we can start building some really exciting things on the foundation that Tom and the team have put back in place. What we're seeing now is a system that's healthier, more aligned and more disciplined than it has been in a long time. Operations are improving. The asset base is getting better every year, and franchisees are leaning back in, reinvesting, upgrading restaurants and focusing on execution. We're bringing in dozens of new franchisees with incredible energy into the system as we refranchise restaurants. These are the behaviors that matter most in a franchise model. And when you look at our sales trajectory versus the industry, it is evident that it's starting to have that intended impact. This is how strong restaurant brands rebuild momentum. You fix the core 4 first. You improve operations, you improve marketing, you invest in food quality, you modernize your restaurants, you rebuild trust with the people who are actually running those restaurants and then you let that momentum build and then you fuel that momentum. I'm confident in where Burger King is headed, not because I expected instant results, but because I recognize the pattern. I have seen what works and what doesn't work. And what I see today is a team executing with discipline and staying focused amid the noise. You saw this with Tim Hortons as well. The Back to Basics plan was executed in the middle of the pandemic when Canadians stopped commuting to work. Given that almost 50% of the Tims business occurs in the morning daypart when people are commuting, it was difficult to see the immediate results. But Axel and his team kept their heads down and stayed focused on executing the plan. Today, Tims in Canada and the U.S. is a $7.6 billion system-wide sales business that drives over 40% of our adjusted operating income. Now despite its importance to RBI, you'll notice Tim Hortons didn't have a dedicated section today. That's intentional. Tims didn't require a deep dive because it is performing exactly as you expect a strong, well-run business to perform, delivering strong franchisee economics and consistent results across a range of consumer environments. While Tims remains a clear market share leader across its core categories, including coffee, baked goods and breakfast sandwiches, Axel and the team also continued to invest in growth categories like PM food and cold beverages. Those efforts have translated into nearly 5 straight years of positive quarterly same-store sales growth. Tims is firmly cemented as Canada's most loved brand, and we're confident the foundation is in place to ensure the brand thrives for a very long time. Now let me touch briefly on the unit growth that we were talking about before. From my perspective, this is pretty straightforward. For the last few years, China was the biggest drag on our consolidated unit growth, and we fixed that. And by the way, as I was talking about before, we didn't try to manage around it or paper over it. We just jumped in like owners and fixed it. And we know that was a little bit messy for all of you as we did that. But we're sitting here 1 year later after just closing a deal with an incredible operator. Johnson was on the video. He ran KFC China. He said, I used to work with another big brand. He ran KFC China, which is a pretty good business, right? He's an incredible operator. The team at CPE is fantastic. They honestly, they blew me away when we met with them and talked to them about their vision for the business and what they believe they could achieve in China and their excitement for the business. And by the way, for those of you doing the math, if you think about what the cost is of building a Burger King in China, the $350 million in capital that they injected into the business. That's what gives me an awful lot of confidence that we're going to be building a lot of stores. This is not just about the contract because the contract at the end of the day, right, that's an agreement between us and how we think about the business and what it can achieve. There is $350 million sitting in a bank account right now waiting to fuel growth for Burger King in China. That fully funds the next 1,250 Burger Kings to be built in China. That's why I'm confident, not because of a contract, but because the cash is in the bank. So like I said, we fixed the Burger King China situation. I'm going to be over there in about a month. I am really excited about what's going to happen and about the value that's going to be created for CPE and that team and for all of us as shareholders. That alone gets you above the 4% mark by 2028. From there, you just have to believe that Popeyes International and Firehouse U.S. and Canada and some other collection of markets is going to accelerate, and we're going to be back at that 5% plus by 2028. Of course, there are going to be puts and takes. It's never going to play out exactly the way we just laid it out, but there are so many different ways of getting there that that's what ultimately gives us the confidence. That's the advantage of running a business of our scale. Not everything needs to work all at once. I talked to Thiago about this often that when you're running over 200 brand country combinations, you don't have to and you can't be a perfectionist, right? Not everything is going to work all the time. You need the vast majority of it working, and Thiago and his team in international are doing that. So let me close with a few takeaways. We are a restaurant company, a really, really well-run one across each category that we compete in. We offer the best quality food and beverages that our guests genuinely love: coffee, breakfast and baked goods at Tims, flame grilled burgers at Burger King, incredible hand-battered fried chicken at Popeyes and craveable hot subs at Firehouse. All of that is delivered by committed hands-on franchisees who deeply care about running great restaurants, and it's supported by the ownership mindset we take to running RBI. We're willing to make tough decisions, and we don't ignore any component of our business. And we know how to do the basics right. We proved that with Tims. We're doing it again with Burger King. We have a business in Canada, our largest business that's been delivering positive quarterly comps for nearly 5 straight years and it is one of the most penetrated concepts in the world and yet is still growing units and generating a great return on those units for the people who own them. We have an awesome international growth business, generating double-digit system-wide sales growth that's well diversified across markets with Burger King China back on track and representing a ton of upside. This is a simpler business than it was a year ago, and it will be meaningfully simpler again a year from now. And through it all, we allocate capital well, and we keep franchisee profitability at the center of our decision-making. When you're looking to invest, you're looking for scarcity. And I say with confidence, RBI is one of the very few businesses that meets my threshold of being a great restaurant company, and I couldn't be more proud to be a part of RBI. With that, I would like to invite our business unit presidents to the stage to kick off our panel with Kendall and our Q&A.

Awesome. Well, thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining us again today. Hopefully, it has been a good session so far for you all. So I'm very excited to have all the business unit presidents here with me today. You already heard a lot from Tom earlier, but you haven't had the opportunity to hear from Axel, Thiago, Peter and Mike yet. So hopefully, we'll cover a few questions there. And then we're going to open it up for audience Q&A. I'll invite Josh, Patrick and Sami back to the stage to join them at that point. So I'm going to kick it off, starting with Axel. Axel, Tim Hortons is a very remarkable business in Canada. For those of you who are not from Canada, it's the most loved restaurant business in the country. And I think it's probably one of the most loved brands in the country. The Maple Leaf is literally the flag for Tim Hortons, so pretty synonymous with the pride that everyone has here. And it represents over 40% of RBI's adjusted operating income. So extremely important part of our business. You've been leading the team Axel since 2019, and you developed and executed a very successful Back to Basics plan. So for those less familiar with the brand and the plan, I just thought you could walk through a quick history and why you believe it's set the business up for success over the past few years.

Very happy to do. Thank you very much, Kendall, and hello, everyone. So when we go back 6, 7 years in our Canadian business, it was not a pretty time. So our sales were declining, our traffic was declining. Our franchise relationships were not very good. And so what did we do? As part of our analysis, we did a ton of research with Canadians and 2 things really stood out. Number one, exactly as you just mentioned, Kendall, Canadians had a lot of love for this brand. Even during this very difficult time in our history, Canadians were cheering for us, the most loved brand in the country, the most trusted brand in the country, the brand that is associated most with communities. This is how the brand grew community by community. So all of that was still very, very strong. So that gave us confidence. And then the second piece that we learned is that we had to do better. So we got feedback from Canadians, your coffee is good, not great. So your breakfast sandwich is good, not great and your baked goods, they are mostly great actually, but we had still opportunities to do better. So what does it mean? We had still brewing technology from the '60s, so the glass pot that was not what we should be doing. So we invented the fresh brewer and now we have modern brewing technology in our restaurants, which helped us to deliver consistently a great cup of coffee. So the second thing was we brought freshly cracked eggs to our restaurants. We had a, I call it an egg patty, a frozen egg patty before that was okay, but an egg should be an egg, I guess, right? So that's why we launched freshly cracked eggs. And then hope likes to say our CMO, we put the apple back in the Apple fitter. So it's one of our most iconic doughnuts. There were not too many apples in it. Now there's a lot of apples in there. And the same is true for our Boston Cream, my favorite doughnut, but we didn't do it because of that. So we put in 25% more Venetian cream. So those were all things that we did. We improved operations as well at the same time. And that set the foundation like my teammates were sharing earlier in their presentations for the turnaround. And yes, we set the foundation to deliver on the 5 years of -- almost 5 years, sorry for that, of same-store sales growth.

It is full 5 years and 19 consecutive positive quarters. So we'll get to that -- hopefully, we'll get to that actual 20 quarters consecutive very soon. So awesome. Well, as we've mentioned and as you just mentioned, you've had a very strong track record. And one of the questions I consistently get and Tara and I get a lot from investors is, is this sustainable? So can you walk through a little bit more on the confidence that you have in the sustainability of your positive same-store sales growth? What are the key drivers that you see going forward that should make us all kind of excited and confident in Tim's trajectory?

Super happy to do. So it's 5 things that come to mind. Number one, the team. So really the team that I have the pleasure to work with now for many years is hands down the best group of people I ever had the chance to work with. Many of them are here in the room, and you will have a chance to speak with them also during lunch. So that's number one. Number two is the brand strength in Canada. It's like we said a couple of times now, it continues to be the most loved restaurant brand in the country. And it's probably synonymous. Actually, I don't have that research point, but I would say Canadians love Tims as much as they love hockey. Still something to explore, but there's a lot, a lot of heart for this brand. Then the second piece is product innovation. So we still have a lot of opportunity to grow in our most important daypart, the AM. And we have a lot of opportunity to grow in the PM. So and PM means in food and beverages. So we see a lot of opportunity with espresso-based beverages, with cold beverages. So we're rolling out a new espresso machine. You have a chance next door to experience our new Suprema espresso machine. And on top of that, we are rolling out fountain equipment to all our restaurants to really make a big push in combos. So we are super excited about that. Just to name a couple of things. And then operations is very, very critical. Naira and her team have already been leading significant operational improvements. So that means guest satisfaction reached all-time highs, and we made significant steps forward in speed of service, and we see lots of opportunity with our owners to do even better. And then the next point is unit economics. So $2.95 is the number that we have per restaurant in terms of profits. There was a little bit of a step back for all the reasons that were mentioned, but we are very optimistic because so many things are in our control to do better. And so we are very optimistic that our owners have the financial capacity to invest into equipment and remodelings. And so that all gives me a ton of confidence that we are literally -- I think one of our franchisees in the video said it rah, I believe it was for India. It feels the same way in Canada. We are just getting started. So lots of opportunity, lots of confidence for our business in Canada.

Awesome. Thank you. Thiago, turning to you now. So we heard a lot about international unit growth today, which I will get there. But you also have delivered 5 years of positive same-store sales growth. And I'm often asked, what is going on in the international market that continues to help deliver such strong performance, especially for those of us based in North America, which I think almost all of us in this room are. We don't see that same level of detail and insight into what's happening in these international markets. So can you walk through a little bit what's the difference that you see in international versus U.S. markets? The U.S. consumer environment has been much tougher recently. Why do you think international has been so well positioned? And Just walk us through your thoughts.

Thank you, Kendall. Hi, everyone. I think there are many drivers, but I will focus on the 3 that I consider to be the main relevant ones. First, I think the market dynamics in international are very favorable. Second, our franchise model is a real strength for us. And third, what has been driving our growth are what I see as a sustainable long-term growing platforms that should continue to drive incremental sales in the future. So talking about the first one, the market dynamics, we see urbanization, improvements in infrastructure, growing middle class, all those things leading to an increase of penetration of Western QSR brands in the majority of the market. So it's really about the category growing and not just competing for market share. And on top of this, in the majority of the markets, there is really one large international player that owns 50% of the market. So all that together represents a big opportunity for us. So the second point about our franchise model, you heard today, we have a great network of very strong local partners that are highly aligned, well capitalized and fully committed to building our brands in their markets. So they are world-class operators that deeply understand their markets and really care about building our brands. You heard from some of them today, and hopefully, that gives you a flavor of the caliber of our partners. So this combination of local expertise and our global scale is what gives us a real competitive advantage. And the third point I mentioned was what has been driving our growth, right? So it's not about onetime big launch that -- or like a short-term fed. It's about a series of initiatives that we believe should continue to bring incremental sales in the future. We have a steady pipeline of innovation. We have developed together with our partners, very strong value platform tailored to their markets. Our partners have been investing a lot in their assets. So today, in international, we have 80% of the system with our modern image. And they are highly focused on investing in digital capabilities, which is a big driver of sales growth for us as well. So altogether gives me confidence that we can continue that pace.

And Josh talked about one of our advantages at RBI is our ability to bring brands globally. And I think the brand that we all know is going to drive the biggest growth for us outside of Burger King, of course, internationally is Popeyes. We have already taken that brand to pretty remarkable levels, 475 restaurants when we acquired it, over 1,800 today. What gives you the confidence that we're going to be able to continue pushing that brand forward?

Well, I'm very confident because if you look at the past 10 to 15 years, you see that our track record is pretty solid. And you saw that today in Josh's presentation, cases like Brazil, BK Brazil, for example, back in 2010, we had 100 restaurants. Now we have close to 1,000 and have passed $1 billion in system-wide sales. We also had Spain that back in 2012, we had about $700 million in sales, now over $1.7 billion in sales. And we talk a lot about France that you saw today back in 2013, it didn't exist. And now it's our largest market with over $2.3 billion in sales. And most recently, we have cases like Japan that in 2 years, doubled system-wide sales to nearly $400 million. And that's on the back of net restaurant growth and 2 consecutive years of 20% same-store sales growth. So just in the BK world, we have, what, 6 businesses that are selling over $1 billion in system-wide sales with one of them over $2 billion. So that's very impressive in my point of view. But turning to Popeyes, we already see very strong signs of success. So Popeyes International went from $300 million in system-wide sales back in 2016 to almost $1.8 billion in last year. So we grew system-wide sales last year about 40% on top of 50% the year before. And this is driven by cases like the ones you saw before with Tom Crowley from Popeyes U.K. U.K. is a market that we opened 4 years ago and now is generating $250 million of system-wide sales. We also have cases like Turkey, Turkey is impressive. We have nearly 500 restaurants with $400 million in system-wide sales. And Spain and many others, Spain is a great one as well. Right after COVID, we had 40 restaurants in 2021 and now getting close to 200. So all of that is the result of having fantastic partners, like you said, highly aligned, well capitalized and supported by our global infrastructure.

I'm going to throw one more at you, sorry. But when you look at the 1,400 units out of the 1,800 they're coming from the international business, where do you see the biggest risks to that? And where do you see the biggest opportunities?

I will refer back to what Patrick, Josh, Semi said before. I think the biggest swift we had was in China really because of the situation we had there. But that has been heavily mitigated with the partnership we just signed with CPE. So I'm a lot more comfortable with the plans we have. The second thing is something that Josh pointed out as well. There is always execution risk, but our plans have been risk-adjusted for that. And our system is very diversified. Our base of developers is pretty diverse. And if something happens in one side of the business, there's always other places that can compensate places like China or Japan that you just said or India, you heard from Raj, we really believe that we can over-deliver in places like that.

Awesome. Tom, we've heard a lot from you today, so I'm only asking you one question. Yes. So we are often asking, you've made really great progress at reclaim the lane. But I am often asked why is it not going even faster. So can you provide your thoughts on that question? Why aren't we even faster in those -- the results there?

Sure. I think the investments that we've made in Burger King were after years of erosion. And this is a huge system, and it takes time to turn around an aircraft carrier. We had to improve operations in the franchisee base. And I think the results are showing. We've improved franchisee profitability, and that's going to be the underpinning of many future years of success. And really, if you look at this relative to the industry, when we started we were 700 basis points behind the system in same-store sales. And at this point, we're now operating at about 300 basis points ahead of the industry. And I think that's an amazing amount of progress. And then as I think about the future, we've done all these fundamental things right. We've got a strong system that needs to get stronger. Let me be very clear. But all we need now is a nice little catalyst. And when I think about a catalyst, I think about something like the elevation campaign that we're embarking on this year and the elevation of the menu, and I think you can light a fire on this brand.

Peter, you came up under Tom, helped develop Reclaim the Flame and you're now leading Popeyes. And the Popeyes business, you made a lot of very important operational improvements in the BK business that Tom talked about today. The Popeyes business was very, very strong for a number of years, especially coming off of the launch of the chicken sandwich in 2019. But I think all of us in this room can say we've been a little disappointed in what we've seen over the past year or so. So what is your initial diagnosis? You're only 120 days in, so I just want to put that out there for everyone, like please just keep that in mind. But what's your initial diagnosis on what needs to be done and what are the key areas that you're going to be focused on in the next year or so?

Great. Thanks, Kendall, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you here. Well, look, obviously, as Kendall said, I've been getting up to speed on the business over the last few months, getting into the restaurants with our franchisees, with our restaurant teams and getting to know a lot of our guests as well. And what I'd say is I am increasingly encouraged about the foundations of Popeyes. Obviously, it's a brand rooted in deep Louisiana culinary heritage. As Patrick mentioned, we have some exceptional franchisees, great operators with the people-oriented mindset. And I think we have everything we need to be successful. Now I think what happened over the last year, 1.5 years, I think it's safe to say, ultimately, we focused on attracting new guests, and that came at the expense of the core. We tried to bring new guests in, which we did, but they didn't come back, and we had a lot of LTOs that frankly just didn't resonate with our core guests. And the complexity that, that added, right, our service began to fall further and further short. Thankfully, I think all of these problems are addressable. And I think I really have 3 main takeaways at this stage. So the first of which is our service. When our food, our bone-in chicken, our tenders, our incredible chicken sandwich are executed as they are intended to be, they are the best products in the industry. On our core, this is point number two, right? We just stay away from what makes Popeyes so great. Again, we have incredible deep Louisiana culinary heritage. Our food is absolutely amazing. I think we can celebrate and highlight that a little bit more. And I think doing that as well is going to help our restaurant teams focus on fewer, better things done daily. And I think we can deliver incredible service and food experience. And the last piece is on value. Because of the LTOs that we had introduced, it was at the expense of focusing on a little bit of everyday value, which, of course, is important in this consumer environment. We can do a little bit of that. We've already started to make some changes there and are starting to see some sequential success even since the fourth quarter. But addressing these 3 fundamental issues, service, our core and value and service, we've already started to do the work to expand our field team. We'll increase that team by about 75%. We are just about done with hiring. We are training all those folks in our company restaurants in New Orleans. So excited to get them out to the field into the markets that our franchise need the extra hands on deck to start to improve service. We're obviously working on the restaurant trainings, the hand-to-hand, shoulder to shoulder work with our franchisees. We started that in the fourth quarter as soon as I got in place. We're doing more of that this year. And I think importantly, you heard Tom talk a little bit earlier about the Royal Roundtables that we're working, which have been this incredible firepower for us to really engage with our restaurant managers who are the brand and the communities that we serve. So Popeyes, we are introducing for the first time in many, many years, maybe since the '80s, experience rallies which is going to bring our restaurant managers into our planning, help them understand, hey, what do we need from them? What are we going to focus on? What are we going to get right today, tomorrow and this year, which again, going back to the core, it's the execution of our incredible core products, our bone-in chicken, our chicken tenders and our sandwich. And I believe working closely with them is going to be the unlock that's going to get us back to the level of success that this brand can certainly deliver on. I think lastly, on value. Again, a lot of the LTOs just attracting new guests, they didn't come back and it was at the expense of our core guests. We haven't given them the service or the everyday value that they deserve. Again, we already started to put some value platforms in place, both for single leaders as well as family occasions. So we're excited about some of the sequential progress that we're already making. Ultimately, what I think all of this work lines up to is positive same-store sales in the back half of this year. Right now, we're paying a lot of attention to our seasonalized sales, which we just index our daily or weekly or monthly results versus some historic averages. So we're focused on that sequential improvement right now, what are these value platforms delivering. And certainly, as we create more tailwind with better service in our restaurants, we have a lot of comps to get back to positive same-store sales in the back half of this year.

Awesome. That is great. Great to hear. And when you kind of compare the starting point for Popeyes right now versus the starting point for Burger King with Reclaim the Flame, can you walk through some of the puts and takes there on how you see the starting positions for each of the systems?

Yes. I think it's -- look, it's a good question. I think first and foremost, Popeyes is ultimately starting from a really healthy base, right? Our average restaurants do about $235,000 in 4-wall EBITDA. Our A restaurants, which we certainly aspire to ensure more franchisees and more restaurants become A restaurants, deliver $270,000 in average 4-wall EBITDA. As well, if we think about the growth that Popeyes has experienced over the last 10 years, the last 20 years, the majority of our restaurants have actually been built within the last 10 to 20 years. So most of our asset base is quite new. It's healthy. Any work that we really need to do is fairly light in touch and scope. And I think I would add just for context as well, like our franchisees are fairly healthy from a leverage perspective. So I think we're in a very good position to do what needs to be done. It's not that expensive in nature. Really, the focus has to be on service around our core, which I know we have a history of actually delivering that really well. We took our eye off the ball on the core and our service around it. We're going to get back to it, and I'm confident that we can ultimately get back to success there. But as we think about like the capital that went into Burger King and why Popeyes is not Burger King, there are really 2 big buckets of capital that Tom walked through earlier today. The first of which was the acquisition of Carrols, right? It's a big franchisee that we know we needed to accelerate the pace of modernization. There's no Carrols at Popeyes. That's simply not an issue for us. And again, on the remodel front, which is another big portion, right, the long-term terminal reset program, which a lot of capital has been dedicated to. Again, I'll just go back to most of the Popeyes system has been built in the last 10 years. For Burger King, most of the restaurants were built by the mid-'90s. So just erosion that had happened over the course of decades that had to get addressed. We don't have the same dynamics of Popeyes. So it's just not as much of an issue. I think the last piece is there's a bit of a smaller investment into the Burger King ad fund to try to course correct and make sure that we had healthy messaging to compete with the big players in the market. For Popeyes, our ad fund is very healthy. We are now at a stage where we can afford a very healthy message 52 weeks out of the year. We consider ourselves we're now a mass brand, and we have an ad fund to compete that way. So nothing that I'm concerned about on that front and very confident we have everything that we need to be successful.

To put -- sorry, one more question, please. To put a finer point on that. Do you envision a need for incremental investment, though, corporate support from RBI to get your plans in place going forward?

Yes. Look, I think ultimately, we can accomplish our goals without significant corporate investment from RBI. And to the extent that there's any capital investment, it's already contemplated in some of the CapEx and the cash flow guidance that Sandy outlined earlier today.

Awesome. Okay. Moving on to you, Mike. So we acquired Firehouse Subs 4 years ago. And the intent really was to tap it into our global network, right, and try to accelerate the business in terms of growth, both in the U.S. and overseas. And you've done a pretty fantastic job now over the past 4 years. I think Josh showed the net restaurant growth chart there. We've increased NRG by 5x versus what it was in 2021. So I'd love to learn a little bit more like first, before we dig into the development side of things, when you come to market with the Firehouse Subs brand to a new market or to any potential new franchisee, how do you differentiate yourself? What really differentiates the Firehouse Subs brand from some of the other larger growth subcategories out there?

Thanks, Kendall. And I really love the question because it allows me the opportunity to talk about what makes Firehouse so special. I think we have incredible fundamentals. So first of all, we're #1 in our category in hot sandwiches, and we've led in that category for quite some time. And it all goes back to our founders, their culinary heritage. We're #1 actually in the sandwich segment as well in guest satisfaction. So we typically have OSAT in the mid- to high 70s, Google Stars, 4.4, 4.5. We actually were ranked last year by Nation's Restaurant News as the #1 fast casual concept in the country. And we're #1 in the entire restaurant space in supporting our community. So we've raised over $100 million for first responders through our Public Safety Foundation. And we're really proud of that. We're actually top 3 private donor in all the United States for life-saving equipment. And we've seen really rapid acceleration in our digital business. So since the acquisition, we've seen our first-party business grow almost 2x. We've seen our digital business grow close to 50%. And we actually were just ranked the #1 brand by Ipsos in terms of app functionality in all of restaurants. So very excited about the fundamentals, and now it's all about how do we unlock and grow this brand even faster.

So speaking of can you kind of walk through what has been the driver of success over the past few years, some of the foundational elements that you put in place to drive development and what gives you confidence in the unit growth targets that Josh laid out today because Firehouse is a very important contributor to our NRG going forward, and you've demonstrated a clear track record, but would love for everyone else in the room to hear directly from you on why you're confident going forward.

Yes, it's a great question. I think first off in the U.S., we started off being heavily focused on unit economics. So since the acquisition, we've seen 4-wall EBITDA to restaurant grow close to 30%. We passed over $100,000 this year. And then we've been very focused on maintaining best-in-class CapEx, which is going to result in better paybacks. So through improved supplier negotiations and also shrinking our footprint a bit, we were typically around 2,000 square feet. We came down to about 1,400, 1,500 square feet. Our business has evolved to be much more digital, much more takeout. So we don't need that same size we did before. Both those growing EBITDA and improving our build costs have gotten us in that 4-year payback right now, which we're really excited about, and we're looking forward to push even further. On the Canada side, we're super excited about the growth that we've seen there. So it's very different than the U.S. We have a ton of white space in Canada. We don't have the same level of competition. And this year, we were one of the fastest-growing brands in the entire country. And a lot of that comes from how we were able to leverage and cherry pick the best operators we have at Tims, and they're doing an exceptional job operationally and unlocking a ton of growth for us. So we're really excited about the pace of growth we're seeing in all of North America. And one thing folks don't realize just about the Firehouse business is even though we're growing quickly, even though our ARS is around $1 million, we have a take rate in the high single digits. So it's very accretive in terms of growth for RBI as we continue to build 150 to 200 restaurants over the next few years.

Awesome. So before we open it for live Q&A for everyone, I'm going to do a quick rapid fire here. We talk a lot about franchisee profitability. It's between 10% to 15% of all of our executives and the team's compensation here at RBI. So we are really, really focused on that. And I think one of the best ways to grow franchisee profitability, we're all aware, is to grow unit growth, AUVs. So I'd love for you all to kind of talk through very quickly in lightning round style, what do you think are the next top 3 things that are going to drive your AUVs another 25-plus percent in the years ahead? I'll start with you, Axel.

4 things. So, the first one is continuing to grow in the morning. So we are by far the market leader. And at the moment, we are rolling out a new English muffin, fluffier and even tastier in Canada, and we are testing new toasters to toast it even better. So super excited about that. Then it's the PM daypart, of course, with beverages and food innovation. I talked about some of the equipment that we are rolling out there, but expect more growth to come here over the next years. Operational improvements, we are obsessed about operations. So [ Naira James ], who leads our field together with our owners continuing to improve operational performance. And then, of course, the digital world. So we strongly believe that we can improve our business through even stronger digital engagement, which means partnerships. So we announced our partnership that we'll have with Canadian Tire, another very strong Canadian iconic company. And we believe that we can further improve the experience in our digital channels. So those are some of the things that we are super excited about.

Thiago?

I think number one would be continue to consolidate our position as the best beef burger in all markets and leveraging -- doing that, leveraging our flame taste. The second one would be continue to grow in fast-growing categories like chicken, where we just launched our crisper platform and it's doing really well and other categories like beverages and snacking. The third one, I'd say, is continue digitizing our business, rolling out kiosks, table service, table ordering, those things are really important to improve guest experience, but they also drive a lot of sales. If I could squeeze the fourth one would be for Popeyes, Firehouse and Tims International, it's really about opening more restaurants and growing brand awareness.

Tom?

Yes. I think for us, there's got to be a continuation of the building on this foundation that allows what we do in marketing to really stick and to work. And I've seen the best example of this most recently with the amazing work that Joel and the team did on SpongeBob. Yes, we were high 5 in all through December, but what I was thinking about the entire time is what happens when this is over. And just the foundational strength that we've seen in the business since the end of SpongeBob has told me that that's what's important because in the past, we would do promotions and then we just get right back. I think seeing us be able to build our business over time through great marketing initiatives and know that it's going -- that we're going to keep some of those guests over time is what's going to really build this business long term. So as we think about that and what we do in 2026, I think in 2026, I'm very excited that we can now get to that important work of elevating the menu, and we announced the Whopper improvements today and what better place to start than with the Whopper. And that's just the first chapter of this elevation story that we can tell around all of the improvements that we've been making at the brand over the course of the last few years and acknowledging at the same time that we have a lot of work still to do. And then finally, just once again, having that firm foundation allows us to now attract back kids and families into our restaurants and it can be a place that you're excited to bring your family, not scared to bring your family. And it's just been great to see that improvement on the tail end of the last couple of quarters in the kids and family business.

Tom has been doing many, many calls with a ton of Burger King guests. So feel free to ask him for some of the feedback that's been getting. I think it's been pretty amazing to hear. So Peter?

Yes. So what I would say first is I have 2 little daughters, 5 and 3. My oldest still want to do a Burger King every weekend, trying to get to up with Popeyes. It's a work in progress. I'm excited, but she likes to see Burger King. Let's keep it that way. Yes. But at least at Popeyes, what's the focus, what's going to drive the growth. Fairly simple here. It's service first execution at the restaurants. a little bit of everyday value and once again, service execution at the restaurants. It's that simple.

Mike?

Kids love Firehouse as well. I think, first off, it's growing in the right category. So we're really focusing in 2026 on high-growth categories like chicken and steak, which have been really impactful in our space. We're also rolling out French fries as side, which is a real differentiator for us. We have half the system at the moment already with French fries. By the end of 2026, every restaurant will have them.

You guys get to try some today.

Yes. Very good. We are also continuing to expand our digital business and leveraging first party. We're rolling out targeted offers this year, which we think could be a big tailwind for our business. And then three, being a bit more targeted in how we spend our media dollars this year. We're really ramping up our sports partnerships in 2026. We saw really strong momentum from that in 2025, and we're looking to expand them in 2026.

Amazing. Thank you, guys. You're all staying put. Patrick, Josh, Sami, if you can come up and join them. And for anyone following online, please feel free to submit questions to [email protected]. If we have time for questions from the online people, we'll take them. But in the meantime, I'll be walking around with microphones. So please wait until you have a microphone until you ask your question just to make sure everyone can hear. Thank you. Yes, we're going to just -- here you go, guys.

I always try to save as far as I can away from Mike and Patrick. It's not flattering. But we're getting close to lunch, too, the number of product references keeps going up. So we'll take questions until everybody gets too hungry to ask anymore.

Dennis Geiger, UBS. Thanks for putting this great event together for us today. Very helpful to hear about the key drivers of the AUV growth by segment there at the very end. Can you talk a little bit more about that 3% plus average annual same-store sales target? I don't know if kind of breaking it down by segment or sort of -- obviously, the last few years, the macro certainly has been a pressure there, creating some of that gap. Anything more on the go forward and delivering against that average annual number?

Yes. I think you kind of -- you heard the plans. I think they're more focused within the business units. And I think the big part of getting probably over that 3% is one of the things that I referenced a little bit earlier, which I think is getting all the business units delivering together. The average, if you look at it, it was around 2.4%. And I think a little bit of that was some ups and downs. So I think as we get things like Popeyes back on track, we're going to be there pretty quick. Anything that anybody want to add there?

Jacob Aiken-Phillips, Melius Research. Great presentation, everyone. I have 2 questions on technology. One with Patty and the Burger King, how is it actually affecting the hourly level employees? Is it reducing turnover, increasing satisfaction? And then more broadly, how do we think about technology across all the other brands and internationally?

Tom, do you want to start with the team impact?

I'll take the BK Assistant one. I see it in our -- we have so many -- a bunch of restaurants ourselves. So I see the impact of it every day and the satisfaction of the team members, how much they enjoy using it. And certainly, turnover has improved in our company restaurants. But I think where I'm most excited and where I'm sure you'll be most excited is just seeing the improvement in EBITDA. So if you look at EBITDA net of control, we're looking at around a $3,000 uplift so far. So that's exciting. And I think in restaurants, and this gets back a little bit to the operational side of this in restaurants that we've deployed BK Assistant and Patty into that are not performing well operationally, where a franchisee or one of our company restaurants has said, Hey, we need some help over here, and we've deployed it in there. I mean we've seen up to an $8,000 change in EBITDA in those restaurants net of control. That's exciting for the franchisee.

And if I can add maybe 1 or 2 other points. I think one of the fantastic things about the way that Thibault and Tom and the rest of the team built Patty is they built it together with our franchisees and our restaurant general managers. So it wasn't something that we built here in the office and tried to push out to the system. But I think it was much more asking the franchisees and the restaurant teams, what would be helpful to you, like what would make your lives easier. And then we went back and put that together. So I think the approach that you all took really made the product a lot better and also got a lot of the franchisees and the restaurant teams really invested in it and excited to have it in their restaurants. And I think that's characteristic of Tom's approach across everything in the business, but was a really important feature of this one. As I step back and just to your broader question about how do we think about technology, I'd say we've evolved a bit there over the last 3 to 5 years. And our focus, I would say, on some of like the core systems in the restaurants. So things like your point of sale and your network and your back of house, we've really focused on having standardization within each of the businesses, but relying on some of the experts in the industry who have -- already have great software platforms there. And I think we've sort of made tremendous progress. Tom referenced it a little bit in his presentation, behind the scenes and standardizing those systems and vastly elevating the level of service and the consistency of availability of those systems. That's some of the underlying fabric of some of the operational improvements that you've seen across our businesses. And we decided -- we actually -- when I was involved in technology, we started down the road of building some of those systems ourselves. And I think what we realized is that those are enormously resource-intensive undertakings, hundreds or thousands of folks, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and platforms that, frankly, third parties are doing a better job than we could do building and we didn't need to replicate. I think as we look forward, I think some of the work that's happening in AI is going to radically change how that software is developed and deployed. So I think trying to do that ourselves, I think a lot of that would risk being obsolete and being too expensive. So I think we're on the right track there, and it's working for our businesses. What we are building in-house is some of what you saw with Patty, stuff like what TiVo is working on. And the nature of that development is radically different. So instead of hundreds or thousands of folks required to build it, we're doing it with handfuls. So the number of resources it requires to build on top of some of those third-party tools and build the AI stuff like what you see with Patty is just wildly different. So we're talking handfuls of people, single -- like single dollar millions of resource investment, which is really different and it allows us to build tools that are having a huge impact on our business. And you saw we're at 500 restaurants. We're going to go to the whole system. I think we're still early in seeing the widespread impact. And as you think about how that goes across the company, we don't centralize at all, but you can trust everybody is watching. And because of the nature of the tools, we're able to replicate them across some of the other businesses pretty quickly and pretty easily. Patrick, anything else you want to add on technology?

I think it's going to revolutionize how restaurants are run and we're going to hopefully be first, but every scale player is going to wind up figuring this out over time. It's going to be an advantage for scale players. But I think the gains on profitability that we talked about here, my prediction, way bigger, like way bigger than that. It makes it easier to train people to onboard them. It makes it a cool place to work because you're using great technology, which younger workforce expects that you're going to have access to that. If you just think about it as a coach for the team members and for the restaurant on how to operate better and eventually, it's going to be operating in every part of the business, I think it's absolutely huge, absolutely huge. And I said before, I've seen what technology can do to a restaurant business, and it's going to have to take effect.

Jeff Bernstein from Barclays. Patrick, I think many of us were inspired 3 years ago by your investment and your message. And I think many came today with a similar inspirational hope, and I think you didn't disappoint and the talk about the valuation differential between RBI and the industry, I think, is apparent. I, you got to fix that -- we're working on it. With that said, I'm just curious, I mean, 3 years ago, you were very inspiring and you had a very strong management team at the time. I'm just wondering, what do you think surprised you the most over the past 3 years? I mean there's always going to be bumps along the way. It sounds like you took a step back and now you're confident again. But you've always had a great leadership team. Like what are the greatest risks from here that in 3 years, if things did play out, which, again, I think we're confident that they will. But what could surprise you over the next 3 years versus what surprised you over the past 3?

Yes. I mean I think there are kind of 2 questions in there. What was a surprise? We had a couple of things, a couple of businesses that were going to require real resets. And Burger King in the U.S. and Burger King in China are 2 pretty big ones. There is nothing else like that out there. I mean, Peter was just talking about Popeyes. Popeyes, the assets are fine and the cash flow is good. We had one franchisee that I'm sure you saw they were in a completely different leverage situation than everybody else out there. We just -- we were in a very, very, very different place than what we had at Burger King. Getting Burger King U.S. fixed, and we are well on the way there and getting Burger King China into the hands of a committed local partner who's really excited about growing that business. Those are really the 2 biggest things we can do. Tims, as you recall, I said then, I get questions about Tims. I don't get why people are asking questions because it's an amazing business. It has no need to be fixed. It's just going to keep improving. I think that's played out pretty much the way we saw it playing out. So look, there are always things that can happen geopolitically that are going to cause things to go off the rails a little bit, those sorts of things. But the overall environment, employment levels are good. I mean those are the things you look for, for the health of a business. The biggest things as you look at what do you need to do to get to 5%, the 3%, we'll get the 3%. That part is not hard. The 5%, we laid out the building blocks for getting our NRG there as well and logically as we could. And we've got great visibility on -- as Josh pointed out, I mean, you've got the U.S. and Canada, you've got 10 markets in international. You've got China, okay, you got 400 left that please believe us on international, it's a lot of markets, so we're not going to go through every one of those. Those are going to happen. I feel great about that. So what can derail it? I feel like we put the building blocks in place now that are critical and fundamental and some of those took some time, but as Peter was saying, Popeyes, that's quarters, not years, right? Burger King was years, and it required capital and it required energy and investment from us and a lot of work with the franchisees, very, very, very different situation for us. And so we've just got to execute. We do have the right team in place. These are restaurant people up here. Everybody on this stage has well over a decade of experience in the restaurant industry, some of us many decades in the restaurant industry, and we know how to do this. Those fundamentals are in place. And now you look at BK, I mean, we're starting to do some really cool stuff, whereas the last 3, 4 years, even before I got here, it was really foundational. That stuff takes time. But now it's getting there, and I feel like we can start doing some really great things on top of that foundation that will accelerate things.

All right. Dave Palmer, Evercore ISI. Maybe more of a financial question, just doing the mental math about unit growth and the contribution to profit growth as a company, 3% going to 5%. How many percentage points of operating profit comes from each of those 2? Where are we starting now? You talked about leveraging G&A. So I would assume 3% gets you more than that in terms of contribution theoretically today. And then when I think about the mix of units, I think about 2 different things, the weighted average fee rate is going up, but some of the units are going to be added to this are going to be more like the China or Firehouse might have a lower AUV. So does this mean 2 points more profit growth is basically what I'm getting at?

Yes. I can take it and feel free to jump in, Josh. But -- so first off, as you kind of think about the build to 1,800 net new units that Josh put out there, not like a huge chunk is coming from China when you think about sort of the percentage on a total basis. If more comes, that's fantastic, right? That's a good thing. It means unit economics are working. The business is doing really well. I think when you think about the AUVs in China, obviously, there'll be more -- a little bit more of a drag relative to the overall AUV of the system. But there's a lot of offsets in that 1,800. When you think about Axel growing with his business in Canada, right, that's well above the average. A lot of the top 10 markets that Thiago was talking about, France, for example, huge AUVs that are very accretive to it. But the thing I think when you think about flow-through, and this is the way I think about it is the incremental cost to opening new units, I mean, the marginal margin, if you want to think about it that way, like it's basically like 100% flow-through when you think about the bottom line. And then we talked about royalty rate and kind of how that royalty rate changes over time. When you look at where some of the growth is coming from, if you think about our average royalty rate today, the international growth actually becomes accretive. The royalty rate becomes accretive. And Mike mentioned a little bit about the dynamics there, and that's also accretive. So as you open more Firehouse units, you actually see that bring up the weighted average rate. So I think we feel pretty good. I think you may see -- Josh had referenced, I think, in his prepared remarks around sort of the difference or sort of how system-wide sales relates to NRG plus same-store sales, you may see a little bit of divergence over time as China becomes a bigger part of the mix, but that will be more than offset by the royalty rate and the G&A.

Yes. I was thinking about -- I was thinking back to your bridge where you showed there's -- when you get from 3% to 5%, there's a part of it which is BK China, which will be a little bit lower contribution per unit. But a big part of that is also things -- it's the Firehouse ramp-up. There's some Tims in there, and there's Popeyes International. And those tend to be higher contribution units. So I think those 2 things will kind of offset each other to some extent and give you a reasonable balance across the incremental growth as we ramp up restaurant growth.

I should also add, like as you think about China, right, the same-store sales, I think we're double digits through the back half of last year, right? The AUVs are coming up in that market, thanks in large part to the work that Thiago and Rafa and his team are doing that.

If I can go back -- just like, Dennis, I didn't go far enough into your question. I just want to add a little bit more to it. I had a chance to think about a little more. Maybe if I were trying to frame it to you a little bit, I think we need Axel and the Tim's team to keep doing the amazing work that they've been doing. They've been killing it and delivering great same-store sales and Axel walk through how. The international business has already been comping over 3%. So we've got to continue that, and you heard all the fundamental reasons why Thiago thinks that will happen. I think Tom and the team have been outperforming the burger QSR industry. Now we need to get those absolute same-store sales going. And you heard about the elevation work that we're doing. That's what we're really excited about. We've been building the foundations. Now we're going to go very front-footed, elevating the menu, and I think that's what can drive some tremendous same-store sales. Peter talked about getting Popeyes back to positive, and we talked about we think we'll do that by the back half of this year. And I think Firehouse, which has had good comps, I think can have much better. And that's -- we've got a big lineup of some cool innovations coming that Mike talked about in the chicken and the steak space in particular. And I think if we put those things together, that's sort of your path to some really compelling same-store sales across the aggregate business.

John Ivankoe with JPMorgan. So the question is about staying ahead of the investment curve. We spent the last couple of years increasing G&A, increasing CapEx. And I'm going to ask this in the question of every company that I think I've ever heard said it was going to be capital-light. The capital intensity is always higher than what was previously guided. So the question that I'm going to ask you that I'm going to challenge you with is whether G&A 2% dollar growth per year in that $300 million out-year CapEx number, you know I love to talk about that out your CapEx number is the correct number. And $150 million, excluding Tims in Canada, Tims Canada being a contractual number, $150 million of CapEx across 4 global businesses is just not a high number. I mean you could certainly argue on a piece of paper, it's a very low number. So with $150 million over 4 businesses, are we sure that we're staying ahead of the future investment curve as we sit here today at an Analyst Day that $300 million is the right number going forward to allow you to stay competitive in what various businesses are spending many multiples of to make their own businesses correct. Hopefully, that question lands.

Yes, I'll take it and guys, feel free to jump in. A couple of dots there. I think, first off, if you kind of look at the last couple of years, which have been the most capital intensive, I think we probably -- you can probably remember since you've been covering the stock, and we've been slightly over $300 million, right? We finished kind of in the mid-$300 million, and we're at $330 million. And that's why we were making some of the biggest investments we've ever made behind Burger King Reclaim the Flame and some other things. So I think even in those investing years, we were still kind of around that run rate that we pointed out. I will -- a couple of other thoughts is the $150 million at Tims, it's not all contractual, actually, right? A lot of that is going towards accelerating development, which we think is a really good high ROI decision to go out and accelerate development in Canada. So we are making investments there. We're making investments across the business. And I think that $50 million bucket that we talked about, which is sort of what we have to play with as other things come up, things do come up from time to time, but I think a lot of the big opportunities have been addressed. And I think as we think long term about the business, this is a really healthy level of CapEx to support the business. On the G&A side, I think similarly, right, you look at sort of the G&A step-up that we have had over the last 5 or 6 years, a lot of that G&A has rightfully gone into building brand and franchisee support, restaurant support. I think from a corporate perspective, we've actually been pretty disciplined. And I think you're going to continue to see that dynamic, particularly with kind of a lot of the tools that we're seeing. Everyone in this building, right, is using AI every single day. We're seeing a lot of efficiencies come through in sort of the way we support our restaurants from this building. We don't anticipate a ton of growth as we think about this building. Any growth that does come is going to -- should come from these guys right up here.

Yes. John, the other thing I'd add on to it is you look traditionally at where restaurant companies have spent money and capital, a lot of it has also gone into technology. And we just -- we don't have to do that, right? I mean the old days, as I said, of 500 people in a room coding in Ann Arbor, those are behind us, right? We're using off-the-shelf stuff for the POS system and what we're doing with BK Assistant and Patty, and that's going to be in all of these businesses quickly. That's very low investment stuff that has a terrific ROI on it. And so that's not going to be there. So you've got a big chunk on Tims, which has a very high ROI on it. You want us doing that. You had some catch-up on BK, right, that we had to get those assets back on track. The rest of it is kind of steady as you go. And so I'm very comfortable with it.

Jake Bartlett, Truist Securities. My question was for Tom. It was about the franchise cash flow per store and the growth to $230,000 by 2027. It seems like a pretty high CAGR from where you stand now. And that's including the beef headwind. I think it's about 11%, 12% CAGR from just where you are now. And if you assume that beef is going to come down to historical levels, it's still a pretty high bar. It's about a 6% CAGR. So the question is what that implies for maybe your expectations on the sales growth per store at Burger King, but also if there's any other profit drivers, margin drivers that you think are going to get you to that level?

Yes. I just truly believe that there are the catalysts in place that will enable us to get to 230,000 a unit. A lot of it comes from the herd rebuilding that's going to start to occur. We've seen a little bit come off in beef prices even recently. And then once again, as we continue to do that foundational work and we get that halo or that fortressing effect of all of the parks looking a lot better with the restaurants and all of the parks operating much better. That also is a catalyst for improved same-store sales and also profitability. I think those things all coming together and plus the work that we're doing this year on the menu, this elevation campaign, really making some big news in our core menu. I mean you start to add up all those things together, and it's pretty easy to see how we get to 230 in 2027. By the way, I personally don't have any intent for us to ever go back to a 4% ad fund rate and our franchisees with the way they supported this agree with us that this is the right thing to do. There's a growth mindset in this business now, especially as we've watched some of our peers, that's not going away. And so I think -- I know our franchisees are going to continue to support that. And there's very little in the way. There's far more upside opportunities with the things that I just went through than there are downside risks in us getting to 230,000 in 2027.

And look, I'd say broadly, Jay, there is more divergence in the performance of restaurant chains over the course of the last year or 2 than I've ever seen in my career. And there are restaurants that are leaning into growth and improving and reinvesting and they're getting results. And there are people that are on their heels and they're trying to save their way to greatness and it isn't going to work. And I'm proud of where all 5 of these businesses are because we are leaning in to generate growth, and we're seeing outperformance across these businesses. And hopefully, it's going to continue to even get stronger.

Danilo Gargiulo with Bernstein. A question for Tom. When you started at Domino's, the brand was nowhere near being #1 in the pizza category, and then it turned out to be #1. You had some proof points in France, where the brand has already almost $4 billion AUV for Burger King. So I'm wondering over what time frame do you think is feasible to reach the same aspiration of becoming the #1 player in the burger category in the United States? And which equities do you think you will need to lean in more in order for you to be on the category?

It takes a lot to try to triangulate when we become #1. It's the right aspirational objective for the system. And to be #1, you have to do everything better than everybody else. And you have to -- your assets need to be best-in-class and your menu needs to be best-in-class. And once again, we have not stepped into the menu to this point, even though I think, and I think many in this room believe that Burger King has a differentiated menu with flame grilling and all the things that we do to other QSR burger competitors. We haven't brought attention to that. We're going to lean into that more, and that's going to accelerate our progress over time. And what happens to Patrick's point is I think that brands start to move very quickly in a direction as they get that inertia, and I saw it at Domino's. He led into Domino's. He could speak to it better than I can. But just living that and watching that has been knowing in the tough times that we've been doing the right things, and it's just a matter of time. The velocity at which it happened was remarkable and shocking. Nobody believed it when he said it. So I'm like, I believe it, and I'm going to say it, too. We are going to be the #1 burger brand. But it was shocking at Domino's how fast that actually eventually occurred. And I think I want to sit on the stage a few years from now and talk about how shocking it is differentiate -- how fast we're moving versus our competitors.

And it's going to happen a lot faster in a number of international markets than it will happen in the U.S. I mean McDonald's is their terrific competitor. I have enormous respect for them and particularly their franchisees. I mean, they do a really good job of running their restaurants. We had some foundational catching up that we needed to do in the U.S. That foundational catching up for the most part, doesn't exist in international, which is why the progress is faster. And if you look at the growth of our Burger King business in international and in specific markets, you're going to see us competing very well with McDonald's outside of the U.S. We can't even think about how we're going to pass McDonald's in the U.S. if we've got restaurants that were built 60 years ago and it had a light refresh along the way, right? We have to get that done. We've got to be operating at a higher level. But ultimately, how we win is with food. And we've got amazing food and ours is flame grilled and nobody in this room has ever invited a person over to your home to host them for the evening and fed a hamburger for them. You grill great hamburgers. And except John Ivankoe up here, he lives in a condo building it requires electricity, not gas. But we've got foundational work to do here. And by the way, when we set out that goal at Domino's, Pizza Hut was 50%, 60% bigger than Domino's. McDonald's is like 4x in the U.S., so maybe 5. So we've got a long way to go. The great news is just the journey of trying to get there creates a ton of shareholder value. And we do see in Thiago's world, how we can compete very effectively where we've got the right operators and the right assets, beautiful restaurants. The food carries the day, but we've got to get to the point where we're executing as well in the U.S. But progress creates a ton of value for shareholders.

Sara Senatore from BofA. I have a question, actually, one for Tom and maybe one for Sami. Tom, I wanted to sort of go back to the Sizzle prototype and you're seeing, I think, $2.1 million, I think you said AUVs from that. It's a big...

$2.2 million.

$2.2 million. Okay, even better. So that's a big difference from your average volume, I think, which is maybe closer to 1.6 million. If I think through the flow-through on that, the payback is quite good or at least kind of 4 years. Are you anticipating that maybe you'll see an acceleration in remodels based on this through franchisees. I think the extent to which you talked about you have to get to sort of a critical mass and even just from a contribution to the comp, you probably need a faster rate of remodels to really see that. So does that ROI change how you think about the pace of remodels?

Yes. A couple of things there. I think the pace of remodels is very often going to be a function of the franchise unit level P&L. And so to the extent that we have moved that in the right direction. And to the extent that, that should move much quicker in the right direction this year, that will dictate an acceleration in the P&L because -- an acceleration in remodels because the conviction is there. The conviction is there and the belief is there in our franchise system. These Sizzle remodels, which do get good flow-through and good returns, that also can contribute to the capacity of the franchisee to go back and reinvest in some of the ones that needed to get work that were lower on the curve. And we have to work on cost engineering there as well. We need to remodel this entire system. And we needed to put the money to work where it would get the greatest return first and we've done that. And it's giving those franchisees the capacity and the ability to go back and invest in the ones that, frankly, sometimes needed it more, but didn't -- a percentage uplift there wouldn't get you as much absolute flow-through. So I think the way we play this out is the right way. And certainly, as we move up the ARS curve, those returns continue to get better.

And then, Sami, just on the investment grade targets. Why is that important? I guess, as you refranchise, you'll be very asset-light. So I guess, as I think about like kind of the optimal capital structure, it feels like you could carry more debt. Is the idea that there's going to be a halo for your franchisees and therefore, they get the benefit of that? Or maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

Sure. Sorry, I'm going to stand because this stool is getting uncomfortable. So as you think about it, you're absolutely right and you're thinking about it the right way. I think this business has historically supported higher levels of leverage. We look at the balance sheet today at kind of being low 4x net leverage, and we feel very, very good about where we're at. I think investment grade has 3 tangible benefits, which I sort of mentioned, but I'll sort of expand on. I think number one, when you just think about the size of the investment-grade market, and I think you may have seen it on a slide, it's more than 5x bigger than the high-yield market. So it is a deep market. When you think about the sort of the cost of capital of the investment-grade market, I'd say today, actually, spreads in investment grade and high yield are actually tighter than they've ever been. It's about a 50 basis point advantage today. But when you look over long periods of time historically, the pricing benefit is actually a lot greater, like probably around 150 basis point advantage of being investment grade over long periods of time. And then you just think about kind of the duration of that debt, a good chunk of the investment-grade market has 20-plus year maturity. So there's a lot of tangible reasons to be an investment-grade company. I think fundamentally, when we just kind of think about the business and kind of going to your question, there is an advantage of being corporate investment grade as you think about us as a company and you think about our franchisees who we work in close partnership with a lower cost of capital is good for everybody. It's good for systems. That is why some of the named brands, best-in-class folks who Patrick may have just referenced, they're also -- they're investment grade, and I think there is that benefit. I think for me, as I look at it broadly, and I go back to the ownership point is we think about the business in decades. And when you think about the business in decades, I think no matter what's happening in the world, you're always good being investment grade.

It's Christine from Goldman. I want to take a step back. So one of the key constant debates, I think, is whether a multi-brand, multi-market platform can generate a meaningful synergy in development and store operations. So I think your earlier example on restaurant brand Europe was very helpful. But can you help us further bring to life with a few other examples on the key advantages of your franchisees when operating multi-brand and country combinations?

Thanks, Christine. And maybe I'll start, and Thiago, if you want to give any like of your favorite examples, please feel free to do so. When I walked through kind of the key advantages of our platform, the first one I started with was the ability to take brands global because I think that's the clearest, most valuable, most tangible one -- and I think you've seen that with us where we've acquired new brands that didn't have much of a global footprint, and we've been able to take them global at scale and build really remarkable growth. I go back -- if I go back to Popeyes when we acquired it, I mentioned we were in 20-some-odd markets, but we were very thin in those markets. We didn't have any infrastructure. We didn't have really like structured or well-capitalized franchisees. So it was sort of a 300 restaurant, like pretty stagnant business that wasn't going anywhere. And I think what we were able to bring to the table is a team all around the world. Thiago has hundreds of people stationed all over the world who have lived the restaurant business in those markets. And then we've got this network of partners who we can talk to, not just the ones we're working with, but we know everybody else in these markets. And it's allowed us to take Popeyes and our other brands around the world in ways that they would never have been able to do on their own. I think you can see it in the brands that we've acquired, but I think you could see it in other brands that like it's been very hard for anybody else to really build like a scaled global business after the first few brands built them. And so I think that's a really unique characteristic of RBI, and it's something that allows us to create a lot of value with the brands that have joined the family. I don't know if you want to add any like any specific examples of ways we were able to do that?

Yes. I think you covered the main points. I think just to give a bit more color to the infrastructure that you said, right? So launching any of the new brands internationally requires a lot of work from our quality assurance teams or procurement teams or our few teams, it would be really hard to do that from scratch. We already have that for Burger King plus the network of vendors that we have. So -- and our few teams, they have deep understanding of their regions, which helps a lot every time we need to introduce a new brand, not only to introduce, but also to navigate the different challenges that they will face because we can understand the market from different angles.

Yes. I think just an example of we were -- when we took Popeyes to India, that would have been an awfully challenging thing to do if you didn't already have a big international structure out in Asia. So we have folks that have worked in the India QSR market over a number of years from our Burger King experience who could go and like work with the local partner, figure out how to adapt the concept. They have an understanding of how much you need to change. They know the whole supplier network. They know how to find local suppliers in India that can meet our criteria. We have quality assurance folks who know how that part of the world operates. They live in that market all day long. So our ability to support a local partner to launch one of these brands and then support it to become successful, and it's very hard and it takes a long amount of time. I think that's a very unique benefit of our structure.

I'd add one more thing, which is Paul Lacey Smith, who's in the back corner there. He and his team have done an amazing job of leveraging our scale across the brands for purchasing power. We buy a lot of chicken. We were serving with our great friends and partners at Coca-Cola, a lot of Coca-Cola products, but we didn't have a single contract in the U.S. We had multiple contracts. We buy a lot of paper products. We buy -- I mean, you think through our businesses, there are a lot of things that we buy that our scale is and leveraging that scale. And the number that we put out this morning, I mean, Paul and his team have found $700 million of synergies for our franchisees, right, that's increased their cash flow by that much a year that they can then reinvest into the business. It's powerful. It's really powerful. And that team has been unleashed the last few years, and they're doing a remarkable job of creating value for our franchisees and master franchisees to give them competitive advantage where they're competing.

This is Lauren Silberman from Deutsche Bank. I wanted to ask about Restaurant Holdings. So 2-part question. One, you're planning to refranchise, I want to say, 500 to 700 BK units over the next couple of years. Big number. What visibility do you have into the pipeline of operators that will take over these units and the due diligence that you're doing around them to make sure they are the right operators, given how much work you've done to strengthen the system? And then the second part is Popeyes China, Firehouse Brazil. Is that -- are those businesses ready to be moved to a partner? Or is there still work to be done at the corporate level?

I can start, and then Tom, feel free to jump in. So on the first part of your question, Lauren, and thank you for the question. When you think about the amount of visibility we have into kind of refranchising pipelines, actually, that's precisely why we did pull up the time line is actually we have a ton of visibility into sort of great operators who are out there who want to acquire restaurants. Actually, I think Tom, Josh and I sit in a weekly meeting where we go through the operators. Tom meets every operator. We often sometimes meet operators as well. So we are -- this is sort of a cadence and structure that we're looking at pretty regularly. And we have a ton of confidence because I think some of the video showed it, Chris Johnson up there talking about how there's so much enthusiasm right now to become part of this brand who's on the precipice of doing something really, really cool in the industry. So we feel pretty good about the pipelines. I think on the time line, and I do want to be clear about this, sort of the idea of kind of collapsing or winding down restaurant holdings out of your model, that is a modeling sort of guidance type of thing. If we have a few more restaurants in sort of what were formerly Carrols restaurants, we'll pull them into the P&L. We want to make sure that the restaurants get into the hands of the right long-term local operators. That is the most important thing. We're not going to sacrifice anything on that. We want to do this once and we want to do it right. comment on...

I won't opine on Brazil, but I will say just to add to what Sami said and why you might hear a little bit more optimism on that refranchising side is where I've seen the most -- the outsized surprise for me has been on the internal people, the people that are in Burger King and in RBI that are raising their hands and saying, hey, I'd really love to get involved in this story. And frankly, what better testament to what we're doing than that. These are people who see how this work goes every day. They see what this management team is focused on. They see the underlying strength of the brand starting to grow, and they want to push all their chips into the middle of the table and get involved. Maybe that creates a little bit more work for the HR team. But we got some hiring to do.

Happy to. I'll add on Popeyes China. I think Firehouse Brazil is relatively smaller. Popeyes China is the bigger one of the 2. And Rafa, who's here in the room, runs our Asia Pacific business, him and his team have made a lot of progress in the last year or so since we took over Popeyes in China. Already, we're building units that are delivering good sales and much better paybacks and unit economics. We've got much more attractive rents. So I think the stores we're opening now are much better than the ones we were opening before. And I think we've got -- we've built in some time here, 1.5 years, 2 years is an awful long time in China for us to make some more progress and then work on finding a new partner there.

Zach Fadem, Wells Fargo. I'm going to ask the GLP-1 question. Just thoughts on industry impact. Is it a drag? Is it an opportunity? And maybe talk about how each segment is positioned.

Yes, I'll start and anybody else feel free to add here. I think our point of view so far is that the adoption is not high enough. There's not enough people on it right now that we can really see it in our -- manifesting itself in our business. So hard to say that it's impacting us today, always possible that it will in the future. And the way I thought about it, at least, is we're always evolving our products. So if consumer preferences move, just like people move from -- we move from hot coffee at Tims to cold coffee, we're always going to pay attention and figure out how we adapt. I always say -- I always like to make a plug for my favorite product, the Double Cheeseburger at Burger King. It's a very protein-forward product. So you can adjust kind of the things you focus on and the products that matter most to our consumer preferences adapt. So anybody else want to add anything there? Maybe less relevant to some of our businesses than others. I think like the Tims business, heavily beverage focused, probably a little bit less relevant.

We also have Tim bits.

Yes. I would just put some numbers around it, right? I mean if you think about kind of collective operating income represented on this page, you think about Tims in Canada, right, coffee, generally coffee forward occasion, generally less impacted if you look at the data and read all the reports. And you think about the international business, right, which -- where you haven't seen GLP-1 adoption really kind of take off yet. So that's like 70% of our AOI that I think is relatively well insulated. Of course, we always have to adapt and figure out the right menu options to Josh's point. But I think we feel -- it always comes back to what Josh opened with, which is the diversification, the breadth of this business is unparalleled. It's what makes us a world-class company.

I think -- tell me if I'm wrong. I think we're going to try to wrap up Q&A.

We have one more. Just one more question, and then we're going to wrap up Q&A because we've got food upstairs and we don't want it to get cold.

I would say we're in the business of serving hot fresh food, and we do not want to do that wrong today.

All right. Brian Mullan, Piper Sandler. Just a question about Tims in Canada. The system got back to net unit growth last year from today's presentation, it sounds like that's going to continue. Can you just elaborate a little bit on the opportunity? Is there demand from existing franchisees? Is this about recruiting new franchisees? And then -- in addition to the slides, you showed some geographies where you might be underpenetrated. Anything else you'd point out that helps unlock this? Is it new formats or anything else that gives you confidence?

Very good question. Happy to go a little bit into that. So region-wise, we have less density in the West and in Quebec, for example, than we have in Ontario or the Atlantic. So -- that has to do a bit with our history. So founded in '64, we only really in '78 went into the western parts of the country. So we are just less dense there, and that creates a nice opportunity. And then we like to grow with existing owners that we have in the system or second generation or restaurant managers of current restaurants. So really, a lot of people earn the right to grow in the business. And so that is a nice opportunity. And the density that we have today, you've seen on the slide earlier, 10,500 Canadians per restaurant. We believe that this can be denser through different types of formats. Our preferred format is the standard drive-thru restaurant. So this will be the majority. But then we also -- yes, like in some parts of the country, we have we need pressure relief valves kind of. So those will be done with smaller formats as well. And yes, it's a combination, but mostly our preferred model is to standard drive-thru, which we see quite a bit of opportunity for.

And Brian, I'd add to you, right. I think the real estate model is a little bit different in Canada than it is kind of for our other home markets. So we put a lot of the capital into these. And so ultimately, we control a little bit more sort of how the growth works. But ultimately, the paybacks are what drive everything, right? So the paybacks are less than 3 years for our franchisees. So as long as...

There's demand.

Exactly, there's demand. And as long as we have the right franchisee in the right area, there's opportunity.

Great. Well, thank you, everybody. I want to say one last thank you very much for joining us today. We try to do our best in this session to paint as clear of a picture as possible about what we're working on and where we think the company is going in the future. We think it's a pretty compelling vision of the future. And we all, as a team, everyone in the room and around the world are really excited to work on it. We appreciate your feedback and your questions throughout, and we especially appreciate the support of all of our shareholders who are here and on the line. And so thank you very much for joining us. We're all going to go upstairs to the fourth floor for lunch, and we look forward to answering any other questions you have and continuing to update everyone as we progress in our plan over the coming years. Have a great day.