Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp Third Quarter Earnings Call conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Monday, November 7, 2022. I would now like to turn the conference over to Alexander Sewrattan, Director of Finance. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp earnings call for the third quarter ended September 30, 2022. Joining me on the call today are Pizza Pizza Limited's Chief Executive Officer, Paul Goddard, and Chief Financial Officer, Christine D'Sylva. 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 the cautionary language in our earnings press release and the risk factors included in our annual information form. Please refer to our earnings press release and MD&A in the investor relations section of our website for a reconciliation and other disclosures related to our non-IFRS financial measures mentioned on this call. As a reminder, analysts are welcome to ask questions after the prepared remarks.
Portfolio managers and media can contact us after the call. Before turning the call over to Paul for the business update, I wanted to spend a few moments reviewing the structure of the Corp for our new investors. Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp indirectly owns the Pizza Pizza and Pizza 73 brands and trademarks through its subsidiary, Pizza Pizza Royalty Limited Partnership. This partnership has two partners, Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp, the public company, which owns 76.5%, and the other partner, Pizza Pizza Limited, the private operating company, which owns the remaining 23.5%. The Royalty Corp is a top-line restaurant royalty corp that earns a monthly royalty through a lease agreement with Pizza Pizza Limited. In exchange for the use of the Pizza Pizza and Pizza 73 trademarks in its restaurant operations, Pizza Pizza pays the partnership a monthly royalty, calculated as a percentage of royalty pool sales.
Growth in the Corp is derived from increasing the same-store sales of the restaurants in the royalty pool and by adding new restaurants to the pool each year. The royalty pool is adjusted at the beginning of each year by adding new restaurants opened in the previous year, less any restaurants that have been permanently closed. For the fiscal year 2022, the royalty pool was adjusted on January 1st, 2022, to include 624 Pizza Pizza restaurants and 103 Pizza 73 restaurants. With that review, I'll turn the call over to Paul Goddard to provide a business update.
Thanks, Alex, and welcome, everyone, to Pizza Pizza's third quarter investor conference call. Today, I will discuss our third quarter results, and then Christine, our CFO, will summarize our key financial highlights before the Q&A at the end. Before I get into our results, I'd be remiss if I didn't start with a big thank you to all of our franchisees, partners, and our corporate teams who have been working tirelessly to support and grow our business by taking care of satisfying our customers each and every time. We are very excited to report another robust quarter with strong sales. Our results were driven by 14% same-store sales growth, the key driver of shareholder value. The positive results for the quarter were due to the increase in guest traffic, as well as an increase in the average check.
As a result, our board was pleased to announce the third dividend increase in 2022, a 3.7% increase in the shareholder dividend effective November 2022. Our positive momentum has continued in the third quarter and was driven by a few key factors. Building on our previous quarters this year, we have seen further growth in our walk-in and non-traditional channels. Our pickup channel continues to excel. As mentioned on our last call, our non-traditional sales, which typically account for about 10% of our total sales pre-COVID, it has been great to see universities and colleges reopen, as well as numerous other key venues such as NHL arenas across the country, and also the Raptors, of course, where we have high-profile sponsorships and marketing activations and sell our delicious product.
We continue to focus on our core competitive advantages of convenience, innovation, high-quality menu offerings, top-of-mind brand visibility, and our ongoing restaurant network expansion. Let's talk restaurant operations. Our delivery business is our highest-producing sales channel, and we continue to improve the delivery customer experience. During 2022, we have rolled out our new order tracking system to over 50% of our restaurants, providing a new level of convenience and transparency to customers ordering via our app or website. Customers are now able to see their pizza order making its way all the way to their delivery address on a live map right from within our app. Based on the success of our rollout to date, we anticipate full deployment of this helpful new feature to the remaining 50% of our restaurant network in the coming months.
In addition, our two customer contact centers provide our customers with another level of convenience in placing their orders. We've also partnered with a Canadian e-bike manufacturer for a pilot in both Toronto and Vancouver. These e-bikes are helping with speed of service in urban areas, and they also support our numerous sustainability efforts. While our in-store operations ensure our customers are receiving quality product, our marketing and product development teams are busy showcasing our brands and building customer loyalty. Our strategic areas of focus for marketing continue to be building the brand, innovating our menu, driving organic orders, and driving sales and profits for our franchisees across Canada. On the brand front, we made significant progress in Q3 with the launch of our new Q3 campaign positioning. Sorry, it's our new campaign positioning, not just Q3.
This new platform represents a strategic shift from more tactical deal-based messaging of the past, to find common ground between the brand and our everyday lives. The marketing team worked with a leading marketing agency partner to uncover the insight that our brand and our food are uniquely credible in bringing Canadians from all corners of the country together, enjoying pizza being common ground for all of us. That insight led us to the idea that Everyone Deserves Pizza, and our new strategic positioning is centered around inclusivity and togetherness. Early creative expressions of the campaign idea were a series of ad placements in key markets across Canada, leveraging local insights related to different groups of people, with Pizza Pizza being a common ground we can all agree on.
These ads were featured on high impact media such as streetcars, train wraps in major markets, Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto, paid social media, web display ads, television, billboards, buses, and other highly visible public places right across the country. To further bring this campaign idea to life for Canadians, this July, Pizza Pizza was first to market with a promotion that spoke to the pressures Canadians are beginning to feel related to rising rates and price inflation. With the idea in mind that in this uncertain economic environment, everybody deserves pizza, we developed the concept of a Fixed-Rate Pizza. Canadians were offered the opportunity to lock in a pizza deal at a fixed price, so they don't have to worry about getting priced out of pizza. The offer is based on an extra large, four-topping pizza deal, locked in at CAD 16.99 for 1 year.
A fun website was developed with a mock-up sign-up form to get pre-approved, and guess what? Everyone qualifies. That program was very well received. It was also supported with an integrated media plan, billboards, video, paid social, web, et cetera, and a significant PR push as well. The idea immediately resonated with Canadians and beyond. We even got some kudos and mention in The Wall Street Journal, and Pizza Pizza received massive exposure, totaling over 85 million impressions through 118 earned media stories published, including Financial Post, Toronto Star, CNN, Bloomberg, and internationally in The Wall Street Journal, as I said, and others as well. So in addition to a media win, the deal itself proved popular with customers and surged to becoming a top seller across all our various specials.
Moving on to menu innovation, this summer we built upon the success of last year's chicken sandwich product launch, via new flavor and format innovations. We offered customers a new option to double up the chicken filet and created a new line of big sandwiches led by the Big Buffalo sandwich. Buffalo and spicy flavors in general remain a leading flavor trend. The innovations and supporting marketing campaign reinvigorated and grew the category by 50% throughout the campaign period. Moving on to local and regional focus, we continue to see the Pizza Pizza brand come alive in communities across Canada, via our best-in-class sponsorship and special events programs. This summer saw the welcome return of critical sponsor events such as the Honda Indy, Boots and Hearts, the CNE, Fan Expo, and more.
This is in addition to record sales at critical entertainment venues such as Budweiser Stage, Canada's Wonderland, and many more. These events generate significant brand equity for Pizza Pizza in communities, as well as critical concession sales at the events themselves. It's sort of a real double win for us. We also continue to optimize our high profile, long-standing sports sponsorship programs, and this summer expanded our famous Score a Slice program to the Toronto FC, Toronto Argos, and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Fans at these events now receive a free slice when the team hits select winning milestones, such as the first goal or touchdown. This program continues to add energy to the games themselves, really gets fans going, and it associates Pizza Pizza with the team and winning moments, and drives app downloads, customer acquisition, and traffic to our restaurants.
As we celebrate our success in driving brand equity and sales via food innovations, we continue to push to drive more orders through our owned digital channels, customer contact centers as well, and into our restaurants. While sales via third-party platforms remain a helpful additional sales channel for us, our focus continues to be leveraging our best-in-class technology and our unique relevant offers and messaging to continually driving customers to use of our own organic sales channels. In support of our Pizza 73 brand, operating largely in Alberta, our marketing team is leveraging a series of proprietary consumer research studies to refocus messaging and spend in key areas of opportunity for the brand. We are also investing in incremental resources to support the brand, now with a strong Alberta-based marketing team. Critical to our success is a enhanced food innovation strategy, growing existing categories and pushing into new ones.
Similar to Pizza Pizza, we built upon last year's successful chicken sandwich launch with Pizza 73. Pizza 73 also benefited greatly from a return to sponsored marquee summer events such as the Calgary Stampede, Country Thunder, Big Valley Jamboree, and more. These events drive brand exposure across demographics, as well as contributing significant concession sales revenue. We look forward to continued sales improvement at Pizza 73 throughout Q4, as we focus messaging on key menu categories, namely pizza and wings, further strategic value offerings, and a new app and website currently in the final stages of development. At both brands, our strategy remains the same really, and we continue to mitigate the seemingly ever-increasing input costs due to record high inflation with modest menu price increases taken more often than prior to the pandemic. Customers are looking for continued value as well as quality.
We have to find the right balance of perceived value for money. We need to keep those customers happy and willing to purchase and coming back for more, but while simultaneously doing all we can, not just to drive sales growth, but also profitability for our restaurant owner operators and our private operating company, Pizza Pizza Limited. I should mention though, for those that are newer to the Corp potentially, I've mentioned this in the past, that the Royalty Corp investors are of course insulated from that operational risk since our key drivers for investors are limited to same-store sales growth, top line, and net restaurant network growth. Turning to restaurant network growth, we continue to have a large pipeline of franchise leads that are eager to join the team, and we also have many of our current franchisees looking to expand, too.
That's always a good barometer for the health of our entire network, by the way. During the quarter, we continued our national expansion program by opening six traditional and three non-traditional Pizza Pizza restaurants. Meanwhile, one traditional and nine non-traditional Pizza Pizza restaurants were closed. At the Pizza 73 brand, we opened one new traditional restaurant and closed one traditional and three non-traditional restaurants. The new restaurants were opened outside of our core markets as we continue to expand our footprint across Canada. This quarter, we opened in Alberta, PEI, and added four more in BC. We also added some more new ones in the non-traditional sites, such as Winnipeg Airport, by the way, and another one in Manitoba, as I think about it. Overall, Pizza Pizza Limited management expects to continue its restaurant network expansion to hit our 3% traditional restaurant growth target.
Despite the slower start to building so far for 2022, and that was mainly due to supply chain issues really more than anything, we've got a good pipeline of locations on our charts and our growth plans. We'll continue to see further growth throughout the rest of 2022 and beyond. Really our cadence really is aggressive and we're really aiming for that 3%, if not more in future. That puts us around about three dozen or so locations a year that we think we can sustain. To date, we're proud to say that 84% of our restaurants feature our hot and fresh new look and/or a refresh on the interior and exterior. Significant upgrades continue to be made in regards to restaurant equipment as well, such as new and more efficient energy-efficient ovens, digital menu boards, and in-store technology.
Customers, we can feel, and we hear it from them on the surveys that we conduct as well, that they notice that we're reinvesting. They notice that we're making a big effort to renew ourselves continually, and that's paying off in the results, as you can see. We remain focused on growing our business right across Canada, and it's safe to say we are known and respected as a major homegrown national brand and the leading pizza chain in the country. Lastly, I just wanted to mention, we are currently working with our Mexican partners with a view to opening up our first locations late in Q4 or possibly early in Q1 of 2023. We're excited about the long-term potential of this high pizza consuming market of Mexico, but we are going to be very careful and purposeful in how and when we expand our new footprint there.
That's about all we have to say about Mexico right now, but we'll certainly have more to talk about in the future with Mexico. Thank you for listening, and I'll now ask Christine, our CFO, to provide a brief financial update.
Thanks, Paul. Same-store sales growth, a key driver yield for shareholders, increased 14% for the quarter. By brand, Pizza Pizza reported same-store sales of 16%, and Pizza 73 reported growth of 1.8%. Gross sales reported by the restaurants in the royalty pool for the quarter were CAD 149.7 million, a 15.4% increase as compared to the same quarter of 2021. By brand, sales from the 624 Pizza Pizza restaurants in the pool increased 17.5% to CAD 130.8 million, and sales from the 103 Pizza 73 restaurants increased 2.6% to CAD 18.9 million for the quarter. For the nine-month period, sales increased 16.6% to CAD 415.1 million, from CAD 355.9 million in the prior year's comparative period. The partnership's royalty income, earned as a percentage of royalty pool sales, increased 14.5% to CAD 9.5 million for the quarter, and 15.5% to CAD 26.6 million for the nine-month period.
The increase in the royalty pool sales and royalty income was largely driven by the lifting of COVID-19 related restrictions, the reopening of non-traditional locations, and the many marketing initiatives Paul mentioned, all of which led to increased customer traffic. Additionally, both brands passed along price increases to manage industry-wide inflation and labor cost increases. Turning to the partnership expenses, administrative expenses, which include director, legal, auditor fees, as well as public company listing costs, were CAD 119,000 for the quarter and CAD 399,000 for the nine-month period. In addition to administrative expenses, the partnership pays interest expense on its CAD 47 million credit facility. Interest paid in the quarter was CAD 322,000, and CAD 1 million for the nine-month period. The partnership is currently making interest-only payments on the non-revolving credit facility.
The interest rate is locked through April 2025 using swap agreements that fix the rate at a banker's acceptance rate of 1.81% plus a credit spread. The credit spread ranges based on the level of debt to EBITDA. In April of 2022, due to the increase in the partnership earnings, the credit spread on the facility decreased by 25 basis points for a combined interest rate of 2.685%, compared to the same period last year when the combined rate was 2.935%. After the partnership has received royalty income, paid administrative and interest expenses, the resulting net cash is available for distribution to its two partners based on their ownership. Pizza Pizza Royalty Corp then pays taxes on its share of the partnership earnings, and the residual cash is available for dividends to the company shareholders.
Turning to shareholder dividends, as Paul announced, to date, the board of directors increased the monthly dividend for the third time this year. The 3.7% increase brings the monthly dividend to CAD 0.07 per share and will begin with the November dividend, which is payable in December. During the third quarter, the company declared shareholder dividends of CAD 5 million or CAD 0.2025 per share, compared to CAD 4.3 million or CAD 0.175 per share in the prior comparable quarter. The resulting payout ratio is 91% for the quarter. For the nine-month period, the company declared dividends of CAD 14.5 million or CAD 0.59 per share, compared to CAD 12.4 million or CAD 0.505 per share in 2021. The payout ratio for the nine-month period is 97%. As a result of the payout ratio being 91%, the company's working capital reserve increased CAD 500,000 during the quarter, and at September 30, was CAD 7 million.
With the increase in the monthly dividend in February, June, and November of 2022, the company believes that there is sufficient cash flow to service the company's obligations as they fall due, and the company will continue to closely monitor sales and royalty income to determine when additional dividend adjustments may be warranted. That concludes the financial overview. I'd like to turn the call back to our operator to poll for questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touch tone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request, and your questions will be polled in the order they are received. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment please for your first question. Your first question comes from Derek Lessard with TD Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good evening, everybody, and congratulations on another good quarter.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Just maybe curious about another strong performance on same-store sales. Curious as to what was the bigger driver? Was it check and pricing, or was it traffic and the rebound in your non-traditional sites?
Good question, Derek. It was really, I think, the biggest part was traffic. Obviously, we want to get order growth, above all, and certainly, as we mentioned, we did take some price as well, but tried to find the balance there, and we prefer to drive traffic and guest count. That's what we were able to do.
Okay.
Traffic being not just our non-traditional, even at our traditional restaurants, with all of the initiatives in our marketing this quarter, it really drove traffic to our stores.
Okay. No, that's fair. If I'm nitpicking here, there was a small decline, I guess, at Pizza 73. Just maybe, what was the differences between the two regions there?
I think that with 73, we obviously have had a more challenging backdrop overall, but I think as we've touched on last quarter, we've really taken some action there. We sort of feel that it's turning around. We've got more resources based in Alberta. We think that our enhanced product innovation suite and what we're doing is just ever more tailored to that market. Certainly, we see to some extent, the competitive set also, very strong there in that market, even though we are a leader, but it's a very tight race with some of our best competitors there.
Okay. I guess, that we can extend the question to the rest of the business as well. Has that competitive environment changed materially in any way over the last three to six months, and as there's a little bit more pressure on the economic backdrop?
Just with respect to Alberta general?
Yeah, across the country as well.
I don't think so. I think obviously everyone is feeling these incredible knock-on effects from inflation no matter where you go. Whether it's input costs for items such as cheese, packaging, input ingredients, labor, doing construction side of things, and that slowed us down a little bit, just our supply chain waiting for things like ovens, and things like that. I think it's more that aspect that's kind of got our attention right now and where we're really trying to reduce any friction in the supply chain. Competitively, I think we're really holding our own. I think we're really actually outpacing most, and all due respect to some very strong competitors, I think that we've shown some real acceleration, especially with our market innovation, our tech innovation, and just really pushing quality.
We've got more menu choices, for instance, like our Gourmet Thins, for instance, which are selling incredibly well, in addition to our chicken offerings and pizza offerings. Just to talk about Gourmet Thins as an example, that's a product that is really to a less price-sensitive customer that's all about quality and choice and a really light gourmet pizza topping that really our competitors aren't able to offer. We have a lot of those sort of examples where I think we offer something that's a little unique to the sort of typical pizza chain, and I think we're realizing that some of those core competitive advantages we have can really be pushed, and we can really do some real volume on some of those items.
Okay. Maybe still along, because it's obviously topical today, the labor challenges that we're seeing out there, whether it's in store, maybe at your call center, maybe it's lack of drivers or what have you. Has there been any impact on the consumer? In terms of late deliveries or orders taking longer?
Yeah. I see what you're saying, Derek. Yeah. No, we stand behind our guarantee, and there's times where we have extended our guarantee, and we're famous for a 40-minute or free guarantee. There are occasions where we will extend that to be longer in certain markets or certain times, or often it's if there's really severe weather is really typically when we've done that. There are times, due to labor shortages, where we will extend the time to be a little longer than we'd like, but we'll still deliver it on time or free, even if it's a little bit longer, in some cases, let's say 50 minutes. I would say that overall, we've managed the various types of labor shortages quite well.
We have seen some markets and some stores where, yeah, it's hard to get as many drivers as we want when we're busy, and it's something that's frustrating in some cases because we know we have the demand, we want to make sure it gets there. We do believe that we're very nimble in that regard. For instance, in the urban centers, we might even, as I think all companies, and whether it's a pizza chain or a third-party delivery company, are having trouble getting enough drivers to deliver their food.
We have been able to leverage the fact that we have such proximity with this density of our store network that, for instance, if there's a store that may be constrained on delivery, for instance, at an important time, we can actually redirect or reallocate seamlessly to the customer some orders, and we can sort of increasingly share some of our driver resources amongst stores so they're not just 100% allocated to a given location. There's things like that I think we have flexibility that others don't. If you're a restaurant that needs one of the well-known third-party delivery platforms to deliver, if you don't have a driver, you just don't have a driver. You have no organic fleet, and you have no other partner restaurant to help you, whereas we do, and that's something unique to us. It certainly is still causing us some issues.
I don't want to make it sound like everything's running along tickety-boo. It is a frustration. We think it will sort of mitigate over time, but we're doing all we can to stay as nimble as we can and make sure we don't impact customers.
No, that's really good color, Paul, obviously understandable with what's going on in the world today. Maybe I got this wrong, correct me if I'm wrong, the campaign around the Everyone Deserves Pizza, like the CAD 16.99 that was locked in for the year. I guess, how are you balancing that with the inflationary period that we're in? Is that going to affect your margin?
No, not really. I think we maybe even touched on it last time we spoke, that was really a tactical marketing campaign to really drive some attention, which really worked within the Everyone Deserves Pizza umbrella, really, or underneath it. Basically that is one special. It's a four-topping special. It's actually a pretty decent item for our franchisees as well, so it doesn't hurt them. It is mixing well. It's one of our most popular specials. To be honest with you, it's doing even more volume than we thought it would. We thought it would be successful, it's been very successful. If you look at our entire slate of offerings, it's just one, even that special does quite well. It's really not impacting our stores. There's not a lot of people that necessarily want to have four toppings.
A lot of people want two or three toppings, they don't always want four. If they get the four, well, they're paying CAD 16.99. That's a good price point for us. It's a good price point for our franchisees, we have all the other mix of specials and also à la carte, create your own Gourmet Thins, chicken wings, plant-based offerings, et cetera. When you look at the entire slate, we're looking good, even the CAD 16.99 itself looks good.
Okay. Maybe switching gears a little bit onto the network growth, still looking for 3% traditional or about 36 new openings a year. Just curious, where do you see the opportunity for growth?
I think we've been primarily focusing on BC and Quebec. We're now as far east as Quebec City. We've got two there, I believe, or one or two. In-filling in other regions as well, but Quebec and BC are the biggest. We also see, even within our core markets, opportunity to expand further as well. We've kind of moved towards having a lot of nontraditional locations in some markets that do offer delivery. In a way, they're more of a super-duper nontraditional or a mini traditional that has more capability to get more volume. For instance, we have some high-traffic gas stations that might be sort of seen as almost in the middle of nowhere if you're not from that region.
If we are able to do some delivery there, if there's a reasonable amount of nearby township or something, which we've found does work quite well, then we can actually get delivery and just random walk-in traffic. We're sort of trying to optimize where we think we can get enough volume to justify a small location. Then the traditionals, obviously, we want to get as many of those as we can, as long as we can do that growth profitably. That does slow us down sometimes where we say, "Look, we could expand faster. We could grow even more," but we want to make sure that we're judicious about where those locations are.
We'd rather almost be slightly lacking in terms of our actual growth rate, if it means that those locations are really keepers, that we know we're going to make it or have a much greater chance, if you know what I mean. I think we've been slowed down a little bit on supply chain, permitting, procurement, but I think it's not for lack of sites that we want to go to, and it's not for lack of franchisees. We've got a really healthy franchisee pipeline at both brands, and I think as we've commented on, we've got people that even want to expand to multiple locations, that's a really good indication as well that the pipeline's healthy.
Paul, has the interest rate environment sort of opened up more real estate opportunities?
We've seen some evidence of that. It really depends where. I would say not everywhere. I actually would have thought we might have seen a little more of that by now, but I tend to think we will. See things that'll be more favorable for us to opportunistically pick up some more real estate. We haven't necessarily seen that price signal sort of across the board for reduced costs. We have a really strong in-house real estate team that has been making sure that our economic formula of what we need in terms of rent as a percent of sales and other aspects are sort of within a range, and they've done a good job of that. I think we've had some that we've been fortunate to say, yes, we've benefited, but I wouldn't say it's sort of right across the country.
I don't think I could confidently generalize it that far, I tend to think it will help us more as we go ahead.
Okay. One final one for me. Obviously, three dividend increases this year. Is this speaking to the board's confidence in the outlook?
Yeah, I think so. I think we always want to grow that network, grow same-store sales, and have a stable and increasing dividend. We're saying we can do it. We feel like we have real momentum here, and I think the board agrees. We regularly look at this, right, as a group and try and strike that balance right. We certainly think if we continue that momentum, there's no reason why we can't see future dividend increases as well on a hopefully higher frequency. Obviously, we got to prove it, and we got to earn those results. We like where we are right now.
Yeah, absolutely. Congratulations again. Thanks for answering my questions.
Okay. Thanks very much, Derek. Great questions. Appreciate it.
There are no further questions at this time. Please proceed.
Thank you all for joining the earnings call. If you have any further questions, you can contact myself, Alexander Sewrattan, Director of Finance, or Christine D'Sylva, Chief Financial Officer, after this call. Our information can be found on the earnings release. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.