Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp's Earnings Call for the Second Quarter of 2025. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the remarks, there will be a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded on August 7th, 2025. At the same time, all lines will be in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference over to Christine D'Sylva, CFO. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp.'s earnings call for the second quarter ended June 30th, 2025. Joining me on the call today is Pizza Pizza Limited's Chief Executive Officer, Paul Goddard. Just a quick note, our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements that may involve risks relating to future events. Actual events may differ materially from the projections discussed today. All forward-looking statements should be considered in conjunction with cautionary language in our earnings release and the risk section included in our annual information documents. Please refer to our earnings release and the MD&A in the Investor Relations section of our website for reconciliation and other disclosures related to non-IFRS measures mentioned on this call. As a reminder, analysts are welcome to ask questions after the prepared remarks. Portfolio managers, media, and shareholders can contact us after the call.
With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Paul Goddard to provide a business update.
Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us on today's call, especially on a good summer night evening. I'm pleased to report that our brand delivered another strong quarter of growth, underscoring the continued momentum of our business and the strength of our brand in a highly competitive QSR landscape. Our second quarter performance reflects solid execution, strong customer demand, and strategic revenue innovation that all translated into sales. For the quarter, our brand reported a combined in-store sales growth of 2.1%, with Pizza Pizza restaurants reporting 2.1% growth, Pizza 73 restaurants reporting growth of slightly less at 2.0%. At both brands, growth this quarter was driven by increases in both cash traffic and the average customer check frequency.
Impactful and timely marketing initiatives and new product launches resulted in an increase in traffic, and we're happy to see another quarter growth in our organic delivery channel as well, which helped increase the average check. This quarter, we continued our focus on building brand engagement through innovative promotions, products, and partnerships, delivering great value and celebrating key moments. Speaking a little about our brand-building promotions and partnerships, we continued to build off our Score a Slice and hockey game box campaigns as we created custom social content to tap into Spanish culture during NHL playoff, leveraging our partnerships with the Leafs, Caps, Jets, Flames, and Oilers.
Between digital discount codes and special offers, such as the large White Out Pizza for CAD 12.99 in Winnipeg at Pizza Pizza and the Skinner Dinner at Pizza 73 in Edmonton, we were actively in the game-day conversations exactly when viewership and engagement were at their peak. Additionally, we identified the opportunity to deepen our connection in Winnipeg. This quarter, we became the official pizza of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and launched several high-visibility concession stands in stadiums, broadcast assets, and our [much-envied], coveted [Score Quite] program to drive app downloads and usage in that market. We also continued to build our brand engagement through exciting menu innovation. With the immediate success of our Stuffed Crust Pizza launch last year, this quarter we introduced two new stuffed crust cheese flavors, Dill Pickle and Spicy Habanero, and expanded availability to include XL and XXL sizes for those as well.
This evolution reinforces our commitment to innovation, elevating flavor options and positioning ourselves as leaders in crust varieties. Meanwhile, at Pizza 73, to launch our new signature wraps, we introduced a secret menu item revealed by 10 influencers, generating hundreds of thousands of organic impressions and engagement, while driving demand for the new category. These crispy chicken wraps, offered in four flavors, add variety to our menu and are a great addition to our expanding lunch save mark. Beyond our innovative marketing messages and promotions, we have our core of always-on value offerings. Our job is to ensure that our customers constantly see us offering the best food at the best price.
We continued to lean into our value offerings as we promoted our XXL pizza and our pizza and chicken combo, and we did a re-hit on our 25% reverse tariff offer as well, lining up for [personal favorites] Canada Day. As mentioned earlier, Pizza Pizza has always celebrated special occasions, and this quarter was no different. Pizza Pizza dominated the QSR share of voice during the 4/20 Canada festivities with the return of the Pizza Free Rolls, exclusively on the menu during the week, and a catch-collector vinyl album, Pizza Pizza Dope Jams, featuring six psychedelic tracks inspired by the six-piece jingle. I will mention we specifically targeted that particular demographic, not our family demographic, so we are careful where we promote that, but we were very happy with the relevant social media demographic there in response.
Meanwhile, at Pizza 73, where we are celebrating that brand's 40th anniversary, we offered a buy-one-get-one campaign for customers and even celebrated Oilers Country with free heart pizzas for fans during the Edmonton Oilers playoff run. Select Edmonton's three closed locations there joined in, showcasing the brand's strong community reshare. Our plans for the second half of 2025 will see us continuing to leverage our brand assets and strengths as we implement new promotions backed by our core product proposition, ongoing menu innovation, conveniently located restaurants, and an award-winning tech platform. All of these fundamental pillars ensure a superb customer experience each and every time. That is something that we continually iterate upon as well. Our customers need to evolve and pseudo our capabilities as well, so it's a dynamic situation. We never rest on [a roll].
We are continuing to enhance our web and app experiences through iterative data-driven improvements, including not just new menu items, but enhancements to various parts of the functionality and ordering process and to the speed and simplicity of ordering on our digital channels. We will continue to leverage our competitive tech advantage with more customer-focused capabilities as time goes on. Stay tuned for future updates and future quarters. Before I turn the call over to Christine D'Sylva, I just also wanted to briefly discuss our restaurant network growth. We ended the second quarter with a total of 800 locations in Canada, a really exciting milestone, 696 for Pizza Pizza sites, and 104 for Pizza 73. We opened three traditional and five non-traditional Pizza Pizza locations during the quarter. I will just add that we are also adding some more non-traditionals as well this year.
[audio distortion] the non-traditionals as well. We have a solid, price expansion plan, and we have a lot of pipeline in the pipeline as well, so we feel good about that. We expect the pace to pick up in our main quarter. Meanwhile, at Pizza 73, we opened one traditional location, and we closed one traditional and four non-traditional Pizza Pizza sites, and one traditional Pizza 73 location closed. We did receive opportunities right across Canada, but also in Ontario, where we have the highest concentration of restaurants. In Mexico, our existing four stores have had good sales growth and continue to generate buzz, traffic, and continuing momentum in Guadalajara. Our Mexican partners have created several more locations and have commenced the construction process on previous sites in Guadalajara.
We continue to believe there is significant potential to really scale up there in Mexico, especially given the cooperation of [3X] Canada in the coming years. We do think it might take a little longer than is expected to reach our target of approximately 10 new restaurants per year, but we do feel that we've got great initial traction and the sales of existing stores are excellent. We are pushing hard to get even more momentum there. As we head into the second half of 2025, we expect to see restaurant network expansion of roughly 2% - 3% traditional restaurant growth. Now, some closing remarks. While we're pleased with the positive growth we achieved this quarter at both brands, the Canadian economy in general does appear to be showing signs of continued softening. That's probably the strong CFS, for instance, [inflationary]. Perhaps we'll see increased softening in consumer spending continually.
It's a little unsure when you look at the macro-economic environment. Generally, the trend is it's affecting, you know, much of the QSR issue, not just in Canada, but also in the United States. Since you can't control the macro-economic environment, we're staying proactive. We're sharpening our value messaging, optimizing promotions, and continuing to invest in digital and loyalty to drive customer frequency and retention. We're confident these actions will help us maintain our momentum even as the macro environment appears poised with a more complex and potentially less favorable to us. Finally, I'd like to close by thanking our entire team, both our corporate employees and restaurant owner-operators alike, for bringing their passion, professionalism, and ambition each and every day for our customers, our communities, and for each other.
We're pleased with our performance in this highly competitive market environment and feel we are really just getting started when it comes to realizing the potential of our iconic brand. Thank you for lifting hands on this warm summer night, and I'll now hand things back over to our CFO, Christine D'Sylva, to wrap up the call.
As a reminder, Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp is a top-line restaurant royalty corp that owns a monthly royalty through the license agreement with Pizza Pizza Limited. In exchange for the use of the brand, Pizza Pizza Limited pays the partnership a monthly royalty taxed by the percentage of royalty pool sales. The growth in the corp is derived from increasing the same-store sales of the restaurants in the pool, but also by adding new restaurants to the pool each year. As announced in Q1, we added 20 net new restaurants to the royalty pool on January 1st, 2025. For fiscal 2025, there will be 794 restaurants in the pool, comprised of 694 Pizza Pizza locations and 100 Pizza 73 .
Turning to the financial results, the combination of the 20 net new restaurants added to the pool on January 1st and the same-store sales growth resulted in an increase to royalty pool system sales and the corresponding royalty income. Royalty pool system sales for the quarter increased 3.9% to CAD 161.4 million from CAD 155.4 million in the same quarter of last year. By brand, sales from the Pizza Pizza restaurants in the pool increased 4.1% to CAD 139.3 million, and sales from the 100 Pizza 73 restaurants in the pool increased 2.4% to CAD 22 million for the quarter. The partnership's royalty income earned as a percentage of royalty pool sales increased 3.8% to CAD 10.3 million for the quarter. Beyond royalty income, the partnership also earns interest income on its cash and short-term investments. For the quarter, the partnership earned CAD 61,000.
Adding to the partnership expenses, administrative expenses, including listing costs, as well as director, legal, auditor fees, and other professional fees, totaled CAD 283,000 for the quarter, compared to CAD 194,000 for the prior quarter. The increase reflects non-recurring one-time professional fees and hiring director fees, which were associated with the onboarding of two new directors as part of the overall succession plan. In addition to administrative expenses, the partnership is making interest-only payments on its CAD 47 million credit facility. Interest paid in the quarter was CAD 392,000. As a reminder, in March 2025, the company renewed the facility for three years, with maturity set now for April 2028. The balance of the facility remains unchanged. However, the credit spread table increased slightly, with the lowest tier increasing from 0.875% to 1%. Additionally, this quarter, in April 2025, the partnership entered into a new three-year forward swap.
The new three-year swap commenced when the existing one expired at the end of April, and the new lock-in rate is 2.51%, which is an increase from the maturing rate of 1.81%. Overall, the all-in rate for the credit facility for the next three years will be 3.51% compared to the maturing rate of 2.685%. Now, after the partnership receives its royalty and interest income, pays its administrative and interest expense, the net resulting cash is available for distribution to its two partners based on their ownership percentages. After the lend-in and the true up on January 1st, 2025, Pizza Pizza Limited's ownership increased to 26.2%. Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp shares in the remaining 73.8% of the partnership distribution. It pays taxes on its share of partnership earnings, and the residual cash is available for dividends to the company's shareholders.
Now, turning to shareholder dividends and working capital, the company declared shareholder dividends of CAD 5.7 million for the current quarter, or CAD 0.2325 per share, which was consistent with the prior year's quarter. The payout rate was 108%, resulting in working capital reserves being used between CAD 400,000 in the quarter, and the ending risk at June 30th was CAD 4.8 million in the working capital reserve. This reserve is available to stabilize dividends and fund any expenditures in the event of short to medium-term variability in sales. The company has historically targeted a payout ratio of or near 100% on an annualized basis, and any future dividend changes will be evaluated in respect to that. That concludes our financial overview. I'd like to turn the call back to the operators to poll for questions.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We will now begin the question and answer. If you're using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment for your first question. Your first question comes from Cheryl Zhang from TD. Go ahead.
Hi, good evening, Paul and Christine. Hope you're all doing well, and thanks for taking our questions.
All right, thanks for getting through.
Hi. Our first question is on the same-store sales. Congrats on the very strong trends, especially under this macro-economic environment. When we're seeing many of the shares still reporting negative figures, I'm just curious about what you think helped you to outperform your peers or helped you stand out?
I think it's multiple factors. I kind of touched on that a little bit in my initial comments, Cheryl, but I think, you know, value is probably the primary one, right? I mean, we really try and emphasize value, and I think our business model is really set up for that. I think that's one. I think the tech advantage is another one. I think the convenience is the fact there's scale that we have, you know, just once you speak to, you know, a combined network, over 800 locations, we're just very convenient. Whether you want it by delivery or pickup, we have that big footprint that, you know, many others don't. I think it's that.
The other thing I'd like to say is I think just the sort of brand aura, if you like, the sort of innovative nature of our marketing and some of the offerings we have are just a little more unique, whether different types of crust, different types of pizza, more often it's on stuffed crust, things like that that are just not, you know, they're definitely distinguished from a lot of other competitors. Those things all bundled together are some examples, right? People say, "Look, you know, I'm getting really good value here. It's convenient. It's super easy to get it on the app or whatever." I like it. You know, as long as we do a great job on the qualities, then people will keep coming back.
That's great, Paul. Thank you. I know that it's probably still early, but just curious, considering, you know, your strong Q2, but also keep in mind the soft macro backup. What are you seeing in terms of momentum so far in Q3 compared to Q2?
It is early, right? In the summer, it's going to have different weather patterns through the summer. I would say it's a little early. It's kind of mixed in terms of our non-traditional sites and things like that. I think generally what we've been doing has really been resonating. Things like the XXL , which is really unique in the market. No one has a pizza that size, and no one certainly has a stuffed crust like we do in that size, just as one example. I think some of our pizza and wing combos have really resonated as well. I think people are starting to recognize and see that we are allocating ever more of our marketing towards targeted digital channels, social media. That seems to bear greater fruit than in the past too.
Perhaps some of our leading competitors can kind of come close to us on that, but many others can't. I think that's helping us sort of hang in there. We don't want to get ahead of ourselves to Q3, but we generally feel we're doing the right things. We can adapt quickly if we do fall. Let's say we didn't see traffic growing to the extent we liked or we didn't see stats as strong, then we can really quickly pivot. We obviously want to stay ahead, and we want to be positive every quarter. That macro-economic uncertainty is concerning. There are some consumer uncertainties, and people are being very deliberate in how they spend. We just sort of think, we sort of plan for because we're being very, very value-oriented. So far, that's been a good bet.
You got it. I think you're preparing remarks. You mentioned that the organic delivery channels are showing growth again. Just curious if you could provide any color on any of the indicators that you put in place to drive that growth. Are you seeing any changes in maybe a trend in consumer demand for delivery?
Yeah, so I'm glad you highlighted that because that is something that I think we are very excited about, in particular this quarter. We always are pushing organic delivery, but it is proving to be quite a hard channel to grow. To get that positive for both brands, we're really excited about that. One example would be our game day promotions, for instance. In the heat of playoff, we had so much attention, so much media spend there at both brands, as I tried to indicate on my prepared remarks. Basically, you had game day specials. You had things like no delivery if you come through our app. That really generated a lot of incremental orders, especially when people are looking to order the same release game in the latter stages of the playoffs. Once people trialed that channel, they realized, oh, this is quite good. You know what?
It's actually a lot cheaper. Pizza Pizza even has the time guarantee. There really are some advantages. It's faster. You get a uniform driver. It's often a trusted Pizza Pizza driver they might even recognize. Things like that, it's kind of a nice snowball effect. It's more sometimes a trick to just get in to try our app. We have many customers that, for instance, use our adaptive web, our mobile website on mobile devices, but not all of them even have our app. We've got to make it really clear and really easy, which is why we have a QR code to download our app on our packaging. We're really trying to get people to do that. We'll be pushing that even harder in the future.
Right now, if someone orders, even if they do order on a third-party delivery platform, if you look at our packaging, we've got QR codes all over our boxes and packaging to incent them to then next time to come organic to the table. We'll even throw in a freebie or something to get them to go to that particular channel and stay there. It isn't easy, I will say it. A lot of people, especially our younger demographics, Gen Z and whatnot, they often use third-party channels. They don't really like having 20 restaurant apps on their phones, for instance. We are showing some indications of winning some people back into organic channels. We're going to keep really pushing for that more and more.
That is awesome to hear and very helpful color. Just in terms of consumer behavior, other than the growth in delivery channel, are you seeing any other changes in the behavior in terms of whether it's the demographics, groups, or income cohorts?
I would say it's probably, you know, it does vary. I think one of some of the trends you see aside from the organic delivery growth is, and I just commented on a prior call for this, and the trend has continued, is pickups. Just in terms of consumer behavior, and this is across different consumer demographics, people are picking up a lot more. That includes, you know, Gen Z. It includes people, you know, in the sort of boomer segment. People are just seeing, especially on third-party platforms, very high network charges and things like that. They may not get it if they practiced it otherwise, unless they're very close to where they're ordering from. Pickups continue to really, really grow. We're not the only ones seeing that.
I do think that, you know, our business model has always really been designed to take the customer no matter whether it's delivery or pickup. Some others out there in the market, there might have been more things they do for delivery, and they may not have as, let's say, as prime locations as us. For instance, in, you know, the urban cities, downtown Toronto, downtown Edmonton, downtown Calgary, Vancouver, etc. I think that that is something that we feel happy to do. You know, we get those pickup orders. We'll take them however people want it and want us. We'll be there. Obviously, delivery is really exciting because we can do very well with delivery and organic delivery, especially.
You got it. In terms of the competitive environment, are there any changes in the trend or the intensity of Q3? How do you feel about the promotional intensity?
I would say we do see certain competitors that almost, if they have almost a habit of extreme discounting in a certain window, often towards the end of calendar periods and things like that. We try and avoid doing that. We want to have a sustainable model for our franchisees. Obviously, we want sales, but we want our stores to do well and be profitable. We see a little bit of that. That's not entirely new. I would say that the predominance of things like BOGO offers on third-party platforms continues, and we also participate in that from time to time. We noticed that some people will really almost overly chase sales, but paying too expensive fees to third-party aggregators to get primary ad placement. That's also quite an expensive endeavor to keep that always on those platforms that are expensive.
We see a little more of that going on, I would say, than we have in the past. It's not new, but we noticed a little more of that, which just speaks to, I think, how everyone in the market generally is struggling to get things fulfilled.
You got it. Maybe just one last one for me. Is there any changes to our expectations? I think prior, probably you said that it's around 3% network expansion in 2025.
Yes, we did sort of tamper that a little bit. I think just, we're staying, you know, we can go now. We look really good for the next quarter or so on development. We just had some development review today, and there's a lot in the pipeline for sensitive event sites across the country. One of the things where we thought we will temper that potentially a little bit is because that is an area where the tariffs and uncertainty around that are a headwind for us, construction costs for things like ovens if they're coming from the U.S. We're looking at alternative supply chains, but that is something that can really, with the uncertainty right now, especially at the minute, you know, the 30% - 40% type tariff makes us pause a little, for sure.
We can sort of turn that tap on pretty quickly as well and accelerate, which we can see now in the end of the year. We're certainly still on offense, I would say, and we're motivated to just get as many great sites as we can get across the country. You know, 2% would be nice, but we just thought 3% might be more realistic, and I think we're going to try and get there and hopefully be there. We still do expect some good net for growth on traditional and non-traditional sources here, regardless of us, you know, that tariff uncertainty causing us a little more hesitation.
That's very helpful. Thanks. Steph, thanks so much for taking our questions and congrats again on the current quarter.
Thanks very much, Cheryl. Appreciate the good questions.
Okay. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call over to Christine D'Sylva. Please continue.
Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us on the call today. If you have any questions after this call, please feel free to contact us. Our contact information is available online and on the phone. Have a good one.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.