Sweetgreen, Inc. (SG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. Thank you, everyone, for coming to our day 2 of GS Retail Conference, and we're very excited to have Sweetgreen CFO, Mitch Reback with us today. I'm Christine Cho. I'm the restaurant analyst here at Goldman Sachs. As you know, Sweetgreen is a fast casual restaurant concept that serves healthful, holistic sourced bowls, salads and plates in more than 230 stores across 20 states in Washington, D.C. The company has been expanding TAM through new markets and also product innovation. Some very early exciting results from the innovative digital only client, which is the Infinite Kitchen, I am sure we will dig really deep into. But yes, let's kick off the discussion. Welcome Mitch?

Thank you very much for having us today.

Great. I just want to touch upon quickly your recent quarter and also just kind of the second half implied guidance. I know there was a lot to like about the quarter. You had same-store sales acceleration, margin expansion, you had a big inflection in EBITDA as well as operating cash flow. But your guidance, you've raised it, but still implies a bit of a deceleration in the second half. So we wanted to understand kind of the key assumptions that went into that revision and whether there's any dynamics that we need to be aware of.

Well, thank you for the question. Thank you for the key question. We are very pleased with the second quarter results. We're pleased with kind of the response we're getting from our customers with many of our initiatives. We really set out for a while to broaden our menu, to broaden our marketing, to broaden our footprint, to open up more new markets, more stores in suburbs, and we're starting to see really a lot of traction in those areas, and we're very pleased with that. We did raise our guidance. That guidance was raised off of the strength of the first half results. And when we look out on the second half of the year, we feel very confident with the things we control. We're again very happy with the menu, very happy with our marketing, happy with the improvements we're seeing in our throughput and our execution in the stores and extremely happy with our new store performance. So very happy with the 2 stores we opened in Seattle. We had a very, very strong opening yesterday in Columbus, Ohio for a new market. So feeling very comfortable with that. However, when we look at the world around us, we read the same newspapers everybody in the room reads, and we just see a lot of choppiness in the external environment. We see choppiness coming. We have an election in November coming up, and we have absolutely no idea what that does to the business for how long. We see an uncertain economic climate, see a lot of summer travel, a lot of cross wins, had some kind of record-breaking disruptions from weather in the past. And when we give our guidance, one of the things we're not able to do is give our guidance and say, this is assuming a perfect outside environment. And if anything changes, we'll revise our guidance and analysts like you say, no problem, doesn't usually work that way. The way it works is, here's the guidance and take the world as it comes. So I don't want to necessarily say there's a degree of caution in it. I would say what it really represents is our best view looking out at the outside world and how we're executing against that.

Great. I know in the last few years, you seem to have garnered an advantage in pricing because a lot of your peers have taken more pricing than you. But we are seeing a slew of $5 meals and whatnot, and a lot of value narrative kicking in across the industry. So how does that change your relative value perception, if at all?

Well, I think I'd start off with where you started off and say, when you look at the company for the past several years, we were in a fortunate position where our cost structure did not move up nearly as rapidly as many people in the industry. And that gave us the luxury of taking a lot less price than the industry and the price gap between Sweetgreen and other people has narrowed considerably. So actually, even -- we don't necessarily see ourselves as a direct competitor with the people with the $5 value mills, but even that company's price value has gotten closer to ours than it's been historically. So we watch our price, but I would say it's an area that we try to be very judicious in terms of our price moves.

Great. Let's talk a little bit about unit growth. I know you're looking to accelerate the unit growth in the next few years in the range of 15% to 20%. So can you talk about what drives your confidence in achieving that type of growth?

Yes. What we said is next year, we see our growth algorithm around 15%, moving up to closer to 20% in 2026. And if you look back historically, we were opening to somewhere in the mid- to high 30 stores. So I think the growth rate to those type of numbers is something well within our site. We believe that by making kind of a few kind of deeper investments in the development side, we can kind of open up stores at a faster pace in more markets. When you look at where we're at as a company, we opened a number of new markets in the past few years that have very, very few stores in them. I think Texas has around 15 stores for us, Florida, 5 to 10, handful in Denver. We have two very strong stores in Seattle with a third one opening. We opened one store yesterday in Ohio. So we just see plenty of TAM in our existing markets, look to open up no more than, call it, 2 to 3 new markets a year for the next few years.

Great. And I know your sales performance in your new stores has been really outpacing your expectation. I want to talk a little bit about that. Can you walk us through kind of the key drivers of that improvement? And if you can give us a quick overview of the new store strategy, yes, that would be good.

The new store opening strategy could best be thought of as almost to return to our pre-pandemic strategy, which is we used -- we like to go look at the real estate before we sign a lease something that was very, very complicated to do in 2020 and 2021. And we like to open up new stores, particularly in new markets with on-the-ground marketing. We think that, that helps build a lot of brand awareness and helps build traffic earlier on. And we've moved into a format where we do post our advertising over a longer period of time in new markets. This has helped the new markets that have opened in the past year considerably, and it's helped to move up faster in their metrics. And we have had a series of stores that have opened it, let's call it, near record level volumes and it's very encouraging for us. What we're finding in the stores that opened in kind of that pandemic overhang. Think of Texas, Florida and Atlanta being kind of the big 3 in that area. That kind of opened up into a void of people. And what I mean is the store opened up and the neighbor wasn't quite what we thought it was going to be. One of the key attributes of the Sweetgreen is we sell a product that you can eat frequently and that has a habitual nature to it. And that's reinforced with our app and some of the technology. And what we found is that's how the flywheel begins to pick up. But if you open up a store where there are no people, it's very hard to get the flywheel to start to spin. So what's happened in a lot of these markets as the world has kind of normalized to whatever degree we come back. The flywheel has begun the spin. And it's been very encouraging for us. The results we're seeing, particularly, as I said, in Florida, Texas, Atlanta and very strong results in the Upper Midwest.

Okay. Great, excellent. And just in terms of -- as we think about accelerating the unit growth right. Could you share some thoughts on expanding new formats. So I know you have four IKs. You have one sweetlane store, one pickup kitchen currently. And all of these formats have actually shown pretty encouraging early results. So how are you thinking about kind of picking and choosing the right format? And how do you scale up in these formats in a more meaningful way?

We believe having if you roll back a few years, we just had one format, the classic store. We think having a bunch of formats kind of like having like more tools in the toolkit. It allows us to fit more stores into different neighborhoods to meet our customers where they're at and to kind of serve the customer in a better way. So we have a digital-only pickup store in a crowded area of Washington, D.C. It's doing very well, looking to expand that format into more dense urban locations. We have the one pull-through in Schaumburg that we are very -- Illinois, very, very happy with and continue to look to see more -- build out more pull-throughs and drive-throughs. Everyone in the industry knows that they generally have better and higher metrics. We do look to one day open one up with an IK, which should give us the advantage of having complete customization and a drive-through. So that would be a big change. So looking to continue to do the format work and to fit the right format into the right trade zone to meet our customer.

Okay. Great. I think at IPO, I think you set your ambitions to get to 1,000 stores by around 2030. I know COVID held you back a little bit. But is that still a valid kind of midterm target to kind of anchor to? And specifically, you've seen a lot of success with IKs and the new products, et cetera. How is that impacting your thinking around the long-term potential for you?

We've always kind of saw ourselves as having a brand bigger than our footprint. And we think that's really important because that allows us to continue to expand. And we're very pleased with the reception we have and really almost taking -- in virtually every market that we're in. And they all kind of move up to the same type of metrics that we kind of strive for. So we think that we have this massive TAM. You're correct. I think the COVID year has kind of put an overhang for a few years. We're now looking to reaccelerate growth, very happy with where we're at. And I think over the next few years, you'll see the IK as an accelerator to the growth. When you look at the rate-limiting factor on growth in the industry, a lot of its labor. You have to hire people, train people, you have your highest turnover in your first 90 days and you usually have to rehire people and retrain people, and it just takes a lot of energy. And the IK stores, you basically hire about 1/3 fewer people. So we think that the IK will be an accelerator to the TAM development.

I think you've already answered my next question. That was the main benefit of the IK that you're looking for and opportunities there. So can you talk a little bit just on that point, how does the margin and cash-on-cash returns for IKs look like versus a non-IK?

Will the key financial metrics we use in the business is return on capital. And going into it, our view is that an IK store has to have a return on capital year 2, at least equal to a classic store. And our internal view is though, if you're happy with the year 2, you're probably going to love it and you get to the out years because for a new store, a typical Sweetgreen would be a 10-year lease with two 5-year options. The highest part of your cost structure in the industry is labor. And if you look back, the fastest increasing cost component has largely been labor. We do not see the labor environment in this country getting better over the next really foreseeable future. So as labor rates go up, the margin benefit from an IK only increases. So we believe that over time, that return on capital will just continue to increase with an IK versus a classic. So again, if you like the returns here too, probably going to love them when you get to the out years.

Great. And I know those all eyes on the first retrofit kitchen here in New York City. I don't know if you guys have actually been to the Penn Plaza store yet. But I think it was quite important in contemplating on the portability of the Infinite Kitchen. So you just opened another one, I think, in Newport Beach, California a few weeks ago. So could you actually discuss some of your key learnings and surprises if there were any in the last 2 months, although it's quite early.

So we have 4 infinite kitchens running today. The first one is in Naperville, the second one is in Huntington Beach, California. Both new stores and really remote suburban locations intentionally selected to be a little bit isolated and kind of away from the typical Sweetgreen brand. And those first two machines were built by hand in the lab by the Spyce team. The first retrofit was our third store, which is Penn Plaza in New York. Penn Plaza is interesting for a number of reasons. One, it's a retrofit; two, it's our first square IK. The IK comes in a linear version and a square version, Penn Plaza is a square version. And I think the kind of the fourth store was Fashion Island in Newport Beach, which opened 2 weeks ago. So the Penn Plaza and Newport Beach are the first two machines built by the contract manufacturer. Now think about what was the biggest surprise at the IK, probably the biggest surprise and particularly given the fact that I'm the CFO was how precise it was in the modeling. something we don't often see. I always kid the Spyce team that they're kind of a testimonial for higher education, but it's exactly as modeled. The margin is as modeled. Every deadline has been met. The contract manufacturer showed up at the two units right on time. There's been very little that has surprised us, nothing on the negative. The area that we continue to work on. We always wanted an IK store to look and feel like a Sweetgreen. The objective was never to make it a robotic store or a mechanical store. It was to keep the look brand and the vibe of Sweetgreen alive with the benefits of the IK. We're pleased with where we're at, but we continue to work on that.

Okay. Great. So can you elaborate a little bit on the adjustments that you have to make between the different stores. And I think I'm trying to understand how much customization for each of the stores is required, right, for different locations and whether there could be some cost spend over time?

In a renovation?

Yes.

Yes. Well, every Sweetgreen is different. We're not like a QSR that has a standard format and builds ground-up leases. So every one of our stores is a little bit different and a little bit unique. In terms of what we look for in terms of renovations at this stage or one, where is the store in its lease, right? I want to be sure we have a lot of term left and lease typical Sweetgreen is a 10-year lease for two 5-year options, but I want to be sure there's at least a 10-year life in it. I want to know where the store is in terms of its kind of build-out renovation cycle. For example, we opened two stores this year in Seattle. Part of the reason we slowed down the pipeline this year was to align the IK timing to match it. We knew when we -- when we opened up Seattle that we really wanted IKs in them, but we didn't have any available. So the question is, would you go back to Seattle? Answer is, no the plan is not to go back to a store that's been open 6 months and rip it apart and put in an IK. So it's where you're at in the lease, how much term, how close are you are to your renovation cycle. And I think near term, for the next couple of years, what's the volume of the IK store. I really would like to attack the higher-volume stores first to capture a, we believe, benefit from faster throughput. And certainly, if say an IK store benefits 7 to 10 margin, 7 to 10 margin points is worth a lot more in a $5 million or $6 million box than a $2 million box.

Do you think, ultimately, in a longer term, would IK be in every single store? Or do you think it makes sense to do part of it? I think it probably goes by stage, but does it make sense in the long run.

I don't think you'll see them in every single store. The reason for that is, I think we have a lot of older, smaller stores in the footprint, certainly in the DC area of Philadelphia, where we probably would not go back and retrofit them. We've disclosed in the back half of 2024 that we're in right now that just around 50% of the new stores will have IKs. I think that as you look out over the next few years, that's probably a very good floor that we'll begin to build off of. We plan to do at least two retrofits this year. We did the Penn Plaza. We've previously said that we are retrofitting Willis Tower in Chicago, which is a very, very large store for us. And I think what you'll see is more retrofits in addition to kind of that 50% plus building in new stores.

Okay. Perfect. So lots still like about IK, faster food and perfectly portioned food, better guest service. But how does the staff feel about working in IKs versus a non-IK.

It's a very important question. And I should say, when we first were looking into acquiring Spyce 3 years ago, we went out and did a survey of our head coaches and said, if we had this, who would want it. I think every store came back and said, we'll take it tonight. I think what you find is that working in the stores is a much better experience. One of the harder jobs at Sweetgreen is working the frontline. Particularly working in the frontline during a busy lunch hour. So what we're finding is that the staff, the team members really prefer the IK store, they're cleaner, they're quieter. They're easier to operate, and it gives them more time to engage with the guests, which, frankly, is a little bit more enjoyable of a job than working the frontline. And I think that some -- part of the reason I think we said in the second quarter call that Naperville which has been open 1 year that we're seeing approximately just a little bit less than 50% less turnover in that store than a similar store at that same phase of its evolution. So I think the team members have been very happy with it.

Very good. Very impressive. Yes, let's talk a little bit about protein plates now. Moving on the topic a little bit. So you mentioned in the last call the dinner now represents about 40% of the sales and weekend same-store sales growth has been accelerating. and the portion of mail new guests actually is also increasing. So does the success of protein plates change the way you're thinking about product innovation as well as marketing.

I should say, we have always seen Sweet win broadly. I think the way we would define Sweetgreen is that we source our product farmers, we know and partners we trust. And by sourcing like that, we can deliver a product where a customer can taste a superior product, and that brings the customer back. We never defined ourselves as a salad place. I think we did get defined by a lot of outsiders as a salad place. And what we set out to do is broaden that definition. We wanted to broaden that definition by broadening the menu and broadening the marketing more out of home to bring in different types of customers. So as we broaden the menu, broaden the marketing we wanted to see greater success in daypart, greater -- more males coming in and frankly, strengthening in the suburbs where we've been opening up a lot of new stores. We're very, very pleased with the response that we're seeing. I think you'll see continuing innovation around the menu and more marketing to continue to reinforce that.

Yes. Just a follow-up to that. How do you see kind of the daypart evolving over time with these new menu innovation? And what can be done to drive more kind of dinner weekend traffic into your stores?

We think the dinner lunch mix can get to 50-50. We think the weekends can continue to strengthen. And as I said, we're seeing a lot of that happening right now as we've grown outside of deep urban environments have broadened the menu. And we think that will continue to happen over the next few years.

Great. I know the advertising around the caramelized garlic steak has been very successful, obviously, and you mentioned that this would now be part of the go-forward strategy. Could you elaborate a little bit on the new approach? And also how you think about quantifying maybe the returns on those advertising dollars.

I think if you look historically, a lot of our marketing was digital marketing and a lot of that marketing was digital marketing via our own app. And that was done to speak to our customers, our loyal customers and to drive frequency. As we broaden the menu, we wanted to broaden the marketing to bring in new customers. So we're moving more of the marketing out of home, more billboard. And what we're seeing is that's driving more traffic through the stores. You'll continue to see that. But the marketing kind of goes hand-in-hand with the menu. The menu innovates, the marketing picks up, picks up out-of-home, brings in more customers, drives more comp.

Great. And just about your kind of farm-to-table strategy a bit. We're partnering with farmers and suppliers, you know and trust that's been big part of core part of your brand and the success and has really helped you stand out from other peers. But in an expansion perspective, does that slow down the growth at all? And so could you walk us through some of the initiatives or any kind of opportunities going forward on the supply chain side that can really continue to support this idea of intimacy at scale.

I should back up and say I was asked for a long time, I just did private so long. We were a private company for many, many years. And part of the reason we stay private for so long was to build the core infrastructure of the company out while we were private. Part of that was technology. A big part of that was building the supply chain and we built the supply chain into kind of many regional modes that can support each kind of zone. But in addition to which have a lot of national contracts on larger items. So what we actually are finding is that our supply chain gives us greater resiliency. So it's actually built in a way that the customer gets the benefit of fresher product, he gets the benefit of knowing where the product came from. It's all now sourced to our specifications, not to a distributor specifications. And at the same time, there's a lot of resiliency built in because we're able to kind of borrow from each other's nodes if there's ever a type of an interference, let's say, through weather or something like that. So we actually feel like it's a very resilient supply chain. And if you look at the footprint of the company to a certain extent, we kind of hit the 4 corners of the country and the middle of the country. That was intentional to kind of like utilize and kind of build out that supply chain and have it there. Once we do that, the easiest thing to do was to leverage it with more stores.

To densify in those markets, collaborate. Great. And I know Rossann came in as COO in February. I know you made the announcement over the weekend, naming Chris Tarrant as the Chief Development Officer. I know it's quite early, but what are some of the key areas that they're focused on? And where do you see kind of the biggest opportunities in optimizing stores as well as enhancing the overall guest experience.

In the loyalty program?

Just generally, in terms of the operating efficiency as well as the loyalty, if you'd like to elaborate on that as well.

Well, I think on the operational side of the business, we continue to push on the throughput. We know we have -- we know we have a lot of throughput opportunity, particularly in our large urban stores. Many people have always -- not many people -- many analysts have written up are the lines your friend or your enemy. And some people have gone into Penn Plaza and they kind of commented that the store seems like much fewer people in the store, and it's because the people are in and out of the store in a few minutes as opposed to 15 minutes. So we think we have a lot of opportunity to continue to push throughput we see that happening with better labor scheduling, labor deployment. We made a lot of progress in that area in the past few years, and you see that in the financial statements. But have a long way to go in that area. And I think as other people in the industry have demonstrated, that's really a continuous voyage. In terms of loyalty, looking to kind of launch that in the first half of '25.

Great. How will it differ? Without giving away too much with your existing feedback.

We think our program -- let me first say that -- when you look at loyalty programs, the successful programs have a few attributes. One, they have a high digital connection with their customer, and we have one of the highest in the industry; two, they have a lot of customer love, which allows the customer to engage with the brand we have a lot of customer love; And I think the third one is they have a product with a high frequency so that the customers kind of engage with them digitally all the time, and we have that. So we kind of have all the attributes. I think what we had was a program that was really hard to understand. Then what we're looking to do with our relaunch is have a simpler program that customers understand in which the customer can get things they value faster. And that will hopefully bring them back quicker and more often. And those are the goals of the program.

Looking forward to that.

I'm looking to roll it out in the first half of 2025. The good news is the technology is built, the tech works, it's really the question of the program design.

Okay. Great. I know you get this a lot, but at a high level, I think how should we think about the long-term margins because you're seeing a lot of efficiency, you're seeing a lot of operating leverage. And if you pulled in potential benefit from the IKs and part of that gets reinvested, maybe priced for other things. But how do you -- how should we think about the path of margins in the long term?

I think what I'd say is the margin in the second quarter was around 22%, margin through the first half is 20.5%. And I think the guide we gave for the full year is 19 to 20. So for argument's sake, if you start off in that type of range, you should see the margins build each year for the next several years. A number of factors will lead to that. But -- and the easiest and biggest too is continuing to improve labor scheduling and deployment, driving up AUVs, launching a more aggressive drink and attachment program, which is generally higher margin in the industry and an area where we really don't have a lot of offerings today. And last one is really mathematical. If you look at our numbers, our occupancy runs high, our occupancy runs high because it's a deep urban footprint. As the company continues to broaden our store base outside of areas like Manhattan, the occupancy falls. And I think these things will propel the margins up probably not linear, probably not every quarter, but over each period of time, you'll probably see the margins go up annually. That is without the IK. The IK generates between 7 and 10 margin points depending upon the store we think. That seems to be pretty consistent at this point. The question then becomes how fast we deploy IKs, how fast do we renovate stores, how large are the stores that we renovate. And I think that the IK piece will be additive to it.

Okay. Great. I just want to come back a little bit to the customer profile. So I know you've naturally skewed to a little bit more high-end, high-income consumers versus the typical QSR or even your best casual peers. But as the brand continues to scale and grow, how should we think about the brand's appeal to a kind of a more broader general QSR audience?

Well, we think the brand has that appeal, right? We think the brand has that appeal, and we think the success we've had in all the markets we're in kind of demonstrates that appeal. I think when you linked it a little bit to price value, I think the question is, do we believe the price point limits the market? And I think our price points have narrowed considerably versus the competitive set. And I think you'll probably see that continue on in the future. I think the IK is something that also gives the company a lot of pricing flexibility particularly as we go forward and maybe go forward into lower, let's call it, more see lower volume markets.

I think we have time for one last question. Let's squeeze this in. Obviously, there's a long runway in the U.S. in terms of extension. But do you think about international opportunities at all? Is that in the time line?

We do think about international. We've -- to be fair, we've thought about international for many, many years. We do have some very good copycats internationally who actually do very well. So we're pretty convinced we have a pretty good market there. I think one of the things I would say about international is now that we have the IK and it allows us to have much greater standardization of the product that I think we feel more comfortable that it does open up that pathway. Not working on it at this point in time, but certainly in the next several years, I think you'll see it.

Great.

Thank you.

That's great. Thank you so much, Mitch, for joining us today and thank you, everyone.

Thank you, Christine.