Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Bloomin' Brands 2019 Investor Day. We're very excited to be here today to give you an update on our business, our strategy, and our growth expectations for the coming years. Today, you'll hear from a number of members of our management team, including our presidents today. We also ask that you stick around for lunch, where you'll be treated to some of the exceptional food that highlights some of the favorites from each of our brands today. Before I introduce Liz, I want to remind everyone that our presentation contains forward-looking statements. I direct your attention to the safe harbor and disclaimer language, as future projections are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties. A copy of our presentation is also available online and at the SEC website at sec.gov. With that, I'd now like to introduce Liz Smith to come up.
Thank you, Mark, and thank you, all of you, for coming today. We are really excited to share with you our sustainable growth plan going forward. You'll get a chance to meet what I consider to be the best team in the business and have a chance to interact and ask questions with them, which I'm really excited about, because you're going to see the growth initiatives and why I believe and feel so strongly that we are in incredible point of takeoff with these brands, with the right team and the right leadership. We're going to share all that with you.
We did share a bit of news with you on Friday, which is that after 10 challenging, extraordinary, always rewarding years, I have made the decision to transition from CEO to Executive Chairman, which was a tough decision, but I have never felt better about where the brands are and where the team is. Most importantly, we made the announcement that Dave Deno is taking over as CEO of Bloomin' Brands. Dave, as you guys know, and those of you know him, is an extraordinary leader and has been an incredible partner to me, and he is absolutely the right leader to usher in this next era of sales and margin growth. I couldn't be more excited. We have a fulsome agenda and a lot to share with you guys today.
I'm going to take you through a strategic review, because I think it's really important to set the groundwork for where our long-term strategies have come in and what they're rooted in. They're rooted in the customer environment and consumer behavior. Dave is going to take you through, so what does that mean for the company, and where are we going over the next three to five years? You're going to hear from each of the brand presidents. Jeff Carcara, who joined our company three and a half weeks ago from Barteca and Del Frisco's, is not with us today. He is on a well-deserved and long-planned family vacation. We're blessed to have Dave Schmidt, who so capably ran the Bonefish business over the last two years and is now our CFO of Outback, and Dave will be talking you through that section.
We'll then go back and talk about broad-scale portfolio growth initiatives that benefit the entire brand. We'll have time for management Q&A. You really are in for a treat. You're going to hear from our head Chef, Cliff Pleau, who's amazing, has won kind of every award in the business. He's going to talk to you about what food you're going to be having and what new things and then our tried and true. Why don't we go ahead and get started? Our key messages for today, the one-page leave behind, if you will, okay, is that great brands in casual dining are alive and well. We talk a lot about, gosh, it's been a 13, 14-year decline in traffic for casual dining. Great brands are alive and well and thriving.
The lines are blurring, though, between CDR and other dining options, and this presents a true growth opportunity for Bloomin' Brands. Our strategy is to win within casual dining through an elevated, differentiated experience and extend beyond to bring our food to customers where they want it, how they want it, and when they want it. We've made the big investments in the portfolio to drive growth. Those are primarily behind us. What you see is a step change in our consumer scale. The last time we were before you, Dave and I, as we talked about scale, we really focused on value chain scale. That's all still there. Dave will take you through that. Now we've built proprietary assets for customer scale to leverage across the portfolio.
That means that we are right now at an inflection point of both growth and top line and margin. Most importantly, I go back to where I started, which is that we have the right team to keep the momentum going and the right leader for this next era of growth. Let's take a step back and ground ourselves in the world that we're talking about. We think of casual dining in its broadest context. It's about an $86 billion category. Out of total out-of-home dining, it's about 10% of an $870 billion category, dining out of home. Now, roughly $750 billion more happens for a total food expenditures of $1.6 trillion. That's kind of the universe of all EV expenditures domestically in the U.S. Within CDR, we know it's very competitive.
We have a lot of brands. One of the bigger challenges is that you have an ongoing supply and demand imbalance that challenges the installed base comps. When you look at it, you see over the last 10 years, CDR traffic has declined about 2%-2.5% a year, as measured by the established indices. While supply has grown roughly 1%-1.5%. What that does is that pressures the installed base. You've had this traffic decline. That's not going to change because we are going to continue to see more and more supply coming in with more retail space opening up and a lot of investment dollars flowing into the restaurant business. That's just the dynamic there. You also have changing customer preferences that are impacting our traditional notion and how we think about CDR.
On-demand convenience, where I want it and when I want it. That's what the consumer is looking for. I found this statistic amazing. 28% of consumers stay at home more today versus two years ago. We're not talking 10 years ago, we're talking two years ago. That's incredible change. Among 18- 34 year olds, 30% are replacing carryout with delivery. Again, meet me with what I want, when I want, and how I want it. The biggest interface is digital interaction and engagement. This is another kind of shocking statistic because the last time I checked, it was nine hours. The most recent measure is estimated that we spend 11 hours of screen time per day. 11 hours. If you add up the amount of time the average individual spends on social media, it's 34 days out of the year.
Over two billion digital restaurant orders occurred in 2018, that number is going to keep growing and growing. If you're not reaching them on the screen and where they want you're not engaging with them. Food, as we all know, has really grown from an occasion, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, to an immersive experience. There were 300 million food-related Instagram posts in 2018. I think one million of them were on my page. If you're not giving them an Instagram-worthy experience and a fully immersive experience, you're not engaging them. You see these influences coming to bear on the casual dining industry. As a result, new and exciting and interesting formats have emerged to meet customer needs.
You see a lot of empty retail spaces and food halls are coming into play, where I can walk among artisanal and taste and experience different food stalls. Food trucks will come right up to where I am and give me what cuisine I want when I want it. If you're a retailer and you want to drive traffic, increasingly an option that you're looking at is opening a cafe, whether it's the Polo Lounge or being able to get something in Target. That's driving traffic into retail. You have the advent also of these spaces opening up for entertainment. It's no longer that you go and all you can get is a hot dog and some maybe sale popcorn. You can go have these totally immersive experiences and have a prepared meal at the same time, of quality.
All of these formats are emerging because food is becoming this immersive experiential thing. That means that brands have got to use new ways to connect and interact with consumers. You just have to. That means as you follow them throughout the connection and engagement cycle, you need to be engaging with them every step of the way, the way they engage now. That's changed dramatically, even in two years. To get into their consideration set, you have to reach them with targeted marketing. You have to speak to them, understand them better than anybody, know their preferences. Once they decide to do a purchase and to engage, you've got to allow them ease of purchase to buy anywhere, to be anywhere. Remember those orders online, even in the restaurant industry? If waiting is involved, you've got to be completely transparent about the wait. We pioneered call-ahead seating.
It was four years ago now. I think the ultimate example of that is obviously the pizza tracker, with the transportation, with Uber and Lyft, "Where's my car? Where is it?" You've got to demystify the wait for me and tell me exactly what that involves. When you get me in and I'm eating and I'm enjoying, it better be Instagram-worthy. I want a total experience. When you leave the restaurant, it's really important to keep your customers engaged. How do you engage and retain them? Third-party assessments, friends referrals, the most important thing you can do. You've got to be there and provide the experience that gets you the positive reviews.
When they leave, you've got to include them in your circle and not lose contact with them and make sure they know that we recognize you're a loyal customer and you're part of our loyalty ecosystem. You have got to be talking to the customer throughout the customer connection journey if you want to make an engagement in this new customer environment. The good news is some things haven't changed about out-of-home dining, in-restaurant execution is critical. It's absolutely critical. You've got to be operating and executing the best 360-degree experience across every touch point that you can if you want to be in the consideration set. That means menu innovation, affordable value, ambiance, the right message at the right time, and service. That's how you win within the casual dining segment and the dine away from home segment.
Winning, though, continuing to take share in a crowded, dynamic environment requires a differentiated experience. This was information shared to us by Black Box, it's really interesting observations. What you see on the left is you see customer attribute ratings. What they've done is they've combined their database for Black Box, they've segmented the brands in the database by their comp sales quartile. In green is the top comp sales growth brands. The bottom comp sales quartile in Black Box are in the red. They've combined that with their social listening platform, okay, teased out exactly what the drivers of preference are when you look at those two things, it reveals some really interesting things. Not surprisingly, you would expect brands in the top comp quartile to rate superior across all the dimensions.
When you look at the top across value, beverage, and food, they're preferred versus the bottom quartile, that's not where the real differentiation is happening. It's almost table stakes and cost of entry to have great value food and beverage. The experience of food is morphing, that when you look at the more experiential evidence that people look at, the ambiance and the service, you can see that the spread between the bottom quartile and top quartile is much broader. You've got to be winning on the experience piece to win within. You've got to be investing. Having great food is simply table stakes. It's the points of differentiation around the experience that really matter. The second part of our core strategy, you're going to hear a lot about that today, is to extend beyond. What do we mean about that?
There is a growing opportunity to bring our food to our guests' tables at home. We no longer have a specific seating capacity issue during peak hours, that's exciting. If you look at this chart, it basically indexes over the last 20 years to 1997. What you see on top is the spending, inflation adjusted, for food at home spent. The blue line is dinners prepared at home. The opportunity is the gap that has emerged between those two things, it's the opportunity to bring our food that consumers want to them to enjoy in their home. The whole notion of in-home dining has really evolved away from this idea of homemade to what we think of as home consumed. It's a very important difference in the evolution of how customers think and consumers think about in-home dining.
If you look at this chart, which is a chart that NPD Crest did, the notion of convenience has really evolved. Continues to evolve. Remember, 28% more people are staying at home today than they were two years ago. Convenience was first defined as I can get drive goods groceries boxed in, now I can get fresh groceries brought to me, now I can get a meal kit with everything pre-measured, but I still have to prepare it. Then I can go to the grocery store and get a meal that's already prepared and picked up and plated for me. The ultimate expression of convenience, which is I can get exactly what I want, fully prepared and done, brought to me in my home. That's where you see the emergence, obviously, of the third-party delivery systems, but also the direct deliveries.
We are the only casual dining that has spent the last three to four years building our direct delivery capability, you're going to hear a lot about that. Delivery is simply the new normal for the young consumer. If you look at all restaurant occasions on the left, millennials account for 30%. I hate that it says older consumers at 35+ because I'm not sure what quartile that would put me in, but stick with me on this. Older consumers 35+ account for 70%. If you look at the delivery occasions, though, millennials account for 45% of the delivery occasions. For boomers, almost half experience a little less than one meal delivery per month. Look at the millennials. Almost 30% of millennials have a meal delivered at least once a week. Here's the thing, they don't suddenly turn 35 and change their behavior. Okay.
This is increasingly the new normal, right? We believe that these trends create a tremendous opportunity for Bloomin' Brands and for our brands. Our strategy is to win within our core by having an exceptional differentiated experience in the restaurant. We've built the capabilities in infrastructure, technology, and resources to extend beyond our traditional reach and bring our brands into that $750 billion dining at home category. One share is $750 million. I probably got that math wrong, but it's huge. Okay. That's the basis of our win within and extend beyond. Our priorities are clear, you're going to hear from the concept presidents today. We got to continue to invest in the core experience. We've got to be strong in restaurant. That's number one. We've got to reach our customers where they are through off-premise.
You're going to hear about loyalty, you're going to hear about digital. We have invested to fortify the core, you've seen the results. We invested $20 million in service, training, and labor, $400 million invested in remodels across our brands, $30 million invested in food quality, portions, and reducing complexity. At the same time, importantly, we've built an infrastructure to reach our customers the way they want to be reached now. For off-premise, we have over 500 units delivering profitable direct. 300 remodels over the next three years will continue to support the off-premise growth. On loyalty, we've built personalization capabilities that have been integrated into all four brands, we have a digital ordering platform that we can leverage and digital communication to continue to drive that consumer engagement. These investments are paying off. This is the last four years.
You can see in red is Outback, the blue is Bloomin' Brands total U.S. domestic, the lavender is Knapp. We told you all that we were on a journey to reinvest and elevate the core while pulling out discounting, that it would take approximately two years to make that transition because the average cycle in the category is about two times per year. We pulled out that discounting and invested back in the business, you saw how the business started to respond in 2017, 2018, now you're going to see our projections for the next three to five years. What that sets us up for now as we enter 2019 is a really exciting time because we have line of sight into our next era of sustainable, profitable growth.
We're going to win within our tightly edited portfolio by, number 1, always driving brand differentiation. You're going to hear about the exciting things that are going on in our restaurants from the concept presidents. The other thing is we're going to extend beyond and win by providing platforms for customer scale in the form of off-premise, CRM and loyalty, digital. This is our new construct for sustainable growth, today we're going to talk about each of these levers in more depth. What that means for the next three to five years, you're about to see. I could not be more excited about where we are right now, I'm going to turn it over to my amazing partner of the last seven years and our new CEO, Dave Deno.
Well, thank you very much, Liz, good morning, everybody. I really appreciate the kind remarks. I appreciate the confidence that Liz and the board is showing in me to be the CEO of the company. It's great to see a lot of familiar faces out there. Most of you have followed our company for quite some time, I think we've got some pretty interesting things to talk about today. Let me get started. What we're going to cover is a brief 2018 recap, then talk about our long-term growth framework, including our margin story. We're going to talk about capital allocation and what we plan to do with all that great free cash flow going forward and remind you of our 2019 guidance. Let's recap 2018. What did we try to accomplish, what was accomplished last year and in the years before it?
Number one, we wanted to focus on building healthy, sustainable traffic. Liz talked about taking the discounting out of the business and growing traffic through our brands and through our platforms that we are going to talk about today. Number two, we have built incremental sales layers that will provide details today on loyalty, digital, and off-premises. Number three, we have a robust margin expansion opportunity. I will walk through in slides in some detail over the roadmap we are going to follow to get there. Number four, we are positioned to leverage our scale. To really take advantage of the opportunities in our portfolio. Number five, we have significant free cash flow to invest in the business. Every single thing we will talk about today is funded through internal cash flow, and we will have funds left over to provide to shareholders. What did we achieve in 2018?
Comp sales of 2.5% above our initial guidance for the year. Margin expansion of 10 basis points with more to come. An adjusted EPS of $1.50, well above our initial range and up 25% year-over-year. Very, very, very good year. During that time, we have returned over $1 billion of cash to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends. We have that opportunity as we go forward. We also have an opportunity to continue to build a stronger and stronger balance sheet as well. Stepping back, what is our long-term growth framework? What are our goals? What are our three to five-year goals that we are looking at for our company? Number one, same-store sales growth in the U.S. of approximately a point and a half to two points. Total shareholder return of 10%-15%, and that includes an assumption of a 2% dividend yield.
Adjusted operating margin expansion of at least 50 basis points or, excuse me, approximately 50 basis points a year for the next few years. I will talk more about that in a minute. Capital expenditures of approximately $200 million. Commodity inflation around 2%, the number of new system-wide restaurants in the U.S. and overseas between 20 and 40. That is our framework. Those are our goals over the next three to five years. The financial goals have been updated to reflect what we are currently seeing in our environment. What has changed? Number one, off-premises represent a significant and incremental sales opportunity that is profitable today, and we have a chance to expand on that profitability going forward. A conservative pricing outlook to deliver value, our large upfront investments are complete. It is time to monetize those investments as we go forward. What has not changed?
We have a long productivity pipeline of at least $50 million a year. We will talk about how we are going to deliver that. We have significant margin opportunities. We have an improving capital structure that has been improving over the last few years that gives us even more flexibility. One of the last things I would like to add to this is we have the best team in the business. You will see a lot of those people today. I will talk about some of that as we go forward. I am privileged to lead an exceptionally strong team. Here is our margin opportunity. We closed 2018 at 4.6%. It is about 250 basis point gap versus our peers. How are we going to get there? I will talk about each of these in some detail. Sales momentum from healthy traffic growth and sales layers.
Nothing beats a 40% incremental flow-through on traffic. We will grow this business and grow the business in the box. We're going to monetize our investments that we've already made. I've talked about that earlier. We will have a disciplined cost management and disciplined cost structure going forward. Our long-term target is 7%. We will never sacrifice our quality fresh ingredients to achieve these targets. That is the key to our long-term sales success, along with many other things as well. We won't sacrifice those quality ingredients. We have multiple levers available to drive margin gains over the next few years. They will play different roles each year as we go forward, but we have multiple levers to make this happen. Number one, we've got operating leverage from high-quality traffic. Number two, we have $50 million a year in cost savings.
Number three, we've shifted our marketing from mass marketing to mass personalization with a higher ROI. We will have flat to down G&A dollar spend, not G&A as a percent of sales, G&A dollar spend as we go forward. Please don't forget about a very high margin and very strong international business. Pierre Berenstein today from Brazil is here, and he runs a fantastic business in Brazil, which I'll talk about in just a little bit. Let's dive into each one of these. At Outback and Carrabba's, our in-restaurant sales are 88% of sales. Off-premises is 12%, and at Outback, we have a $3.6 million AUV. As we've talked about in prior earnings calls, our off-premises business is growing very rapidly. We were the pioneer in takeout at Outback Steakhouse years ago. Our average ticket is $54 in-restaurant, $27 to go, $42 in delivery.
Flow-through in restaurants, very high. Off-premises, the flow-through is very good. Flow-through isn't quite as large because we're not selling drinks. At the same time, the flow-through is much higher than our current margins, and so off-premises is accretive to our margins. Long-term size of the prize, we think we have a great opportunity in our brand presence, we'll talk about that, in our restaurants, and we have a wonderful opportunity in off-premise. It's nice to be ahead of this trend, and we have made the investment to make this happen. I'll talk more about that later today. Off-premises is a huge and long-term growth potential. It's part of our AUV leverage. It's part of our omni-channel approach of dine-in, carryout, and delivery. We believe there's 25% mix in off-premises in the future state. We think we'll have 700 restaurants at Carrabba's and Outback delivering.
Liz talked about we have 500 today, and we'll complete the rollout in 2019. 80% of our restaurants do it direct. We do experiment with third parties, 80% of our restaurants do it direct. It's an incremental sales opportunity, it's an incremental profit opportunity, and we are making money on delivery today. Productivity. Let me step back and spend a few minutes on this chart, because this is an important chart as we show you what we're going to be doing over the next few years. Number one, Michael Healy, former CFO at Outback, is now running our supply chain. He's a very talented executive. We have a very talented supply chain organization. We have captured supplier and distribution opportunities in our company over time. We have more to come.
This will be a big part of our $50 million a year as we go forward, supplier efficiencies and distribution efficiencies. Number two, we've done a really good job in labor management. If you followed our quarterly reporting, our labor costs are in really good shape. We continue to optimize labor. But as Gregg Scarlett will talk about, we have some really terrific turnover numbers that really not only provide better guest service, but reduce the cost and training and everything else in labor to help us along the way. Number three, still a big opportunity for us. We've made progress, but this is still a big opportunity for us in managing food and liquor waste in our restaurants.
We rolled out, as you guys that have followed our company, we have rolled out our actual versus theoretical food management tool in our restaurants. We did that a couple of years ago. Our partners are getting better and better at it, but we still have a big opportunity here to manage our food waste. That's a big part of this going forward as well. Number four, process simplification in the restaurants. Mike Kappitt is going to talk about what they've done at Carrabba's Italian Grill. Through technology and equipment and process improvement, we can make our back of the house more efficient, more effective, and provide better service for our guests and flow more profits to the bottom line. Facilities management.
Sukh Singh and his team have done a fantastic job managing our energy costs and other facility costs, we will continue to pursue that as we go forward. Finally, Liz talked about the discount reduction, pulling discounting out. We end up with higher margin dollars now, better margins. We also have a very strong tool to measure any kind of fraud or issues in the restaurants. One thing I will mention later on, but I want to mention right now as part of this, is a very high-margin international business that helps contribute to our overall profitability and margin. That's something that investors need to pay a lot of attention to, and we've broken out our business into two segments, U.S. and international, so you can see that. This is the roadmap to get there on productivity over the next few years.
Each will play its own part at different levels over the next three to five years as we achieve our goal of 250 basis point gap to 7% operating margin. Why does productivity work so well? Pricing and productivity will more than offset inflation. It allows us to price below inflation to protect traffic, to provide more value. It allows us, Liz talked about the big investments behind us are done as far as investing in our brands, but we still will invest from time to time in our brands going forward, this formula will help make it work for us. We have been optimizing marketing across the portfolio. This is part of our margin improvements that we've made.
We will not necessarily just cut marketing going forward because we need to be thoughtful about investing in marketing like any other investment and making sure we have a good return on investment. Through media spend efficiencies and a higher ROI, that's how we've been able to achieve this. Marketing spending and marketing management and marketing optimization is going to be a part of this. That doesn't necessarily mean just make cuts, you take a really sharp edge look at your return on investment. Liz will talk more about the digital space later on in today's presentation. The changing in how we spend marketing and utilize marketing is a big part of our plans going forward. Overhead. We are down $14 million since 2014. Our goal is to continue to reduce G&A dollars.
You may be asking, "How are you going to do that when you're investing behind growth?" We will continue to invest behind our growth levers in delivery and other places. I must say, in the areas that I once managed, and Chris Meyer will now be managing, between technology and process improvement, for instance, in our accounting organization, they're doing it more cheaply, more efficiently, more effectively, with better information, and they're doing a fantastic job cutting costs and providing better service to our teams. That is just one way we are going to do this, it's a big part of our margin story going forward. International. We have about 11% of our business is international, and it's anchored in Latin America by Brazil. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about Brazil because it's an underappreciated asset in our company.
We have the opportunity to build new Outbacks in Brazil. Abraccio, which is our Carrabba's, is an opportunity for us. We're testing a smaller footprint, Brazil can be the franchise expansion in Latin America. That can be our base. We have a very strong franchise partner in Korea. They're doing really well. They have scale. They can be our base in Asia, along with our strong company restaurant and company ownership restaurants in Hong Kong. Sukh Singh and his team are developing smaller footprints, we can grow our franchise base going forward. Let's step back and just look at Brazil. In December of 2013, we bought our half of the joint venture-- the partner's half of the joint venture. The number of units since acquisition at Outback have doubled to 92. We think we can do at least 50 more.
Every one we build is with very attractive economics and doing very well. We're now at 92 restaurants. Revenues of $537 million in 2014 constant currency. We wanted to give you a sense of what it looked like when we bought it versus what it looks like today in constant currency, 15% CAGR. Profits at $52 million in constant currency, 10% CAGR. Still a very under-penetrated market with high margins. Outback Restaurants has among the best brand regard, not only in the restaurant business, for all brands in Brazil, all consumer brands. Outback routinely is named among the top one or two. We operate in two of the largest food sectors in steak and Italian, both at Outback and Abraccio. Abraccio, we now have 12 locations. We think we can have the potential for at least 50. Abraccio's volumes are similar to the new Outback locations.
We have a business here that's very interesting. We're capitalizing on an under-penetrated market for Italian, and most importantly, we have the capability under Pierre's leadership. We have a really strong management team down there that we've invested in and developed. This is really a great organization. Please come with us to Brazil sometime and see this business and meet the team. It's really, really good. We're starting with delivery in Brazil. We have 12 restaurant locations offering delivery, a very large sales opportunity. It's early days. I don't want to get into it yet, how large large is, but we're very excited about it. To there, we are utilizing third-party delivery with attractive economics because in Brazil, a lot of our restaurants are in malls, and we are working with the malls to help develop a delivery business for us.
Look at those customer feedback scores, 4.8 out of five. Another channel of growth for us in Brazil. We have Outback expansion opportunities, we have the Abbraccio business coming forward, and we've got delivery. What does the roadmap look like? We're at 4.6 today. We expect AUV leverage through the things I have talked about and we will be talking about today. We have productivity, the opportunities in supply chain, labor management, et cetera. We have our marketing shift, we have our G&A management, and we've got international. There is a multi-year roadmap here to 7%, our goal of 7%. Each one will play its own role going forward year to year to year. Our goal is to achieve that 7%, 50 basis points, in our original guidance, remember, for the next three to five years, 50 basis points a year.
If you look at Q4 was a really nice down payment. We had big margin expansion in Q4. Let's talk about our capital allocation philosophy. Our company is blessed with very strong free cash flow. Like I mentioned earlier, every single thing that we're talking about today is funded through internal cash flow. Our strategy is internally funded. Remods, relocations, and new store development. After that, we have money left over for share repurchases, dividends, and continued debt paid down. A very, very compelling story. Let's talk about our development opportunity. We have in our company, I think people capability is so important. He's going to get mad at me when I say this stuff, but Sukh Singh is among the finest real estate and development leaders in the whole industry in the United States and around the world.
Not only does he know a lot about international development, but he's very deeply involved in the U.S. development. Sukh, we're so happy to have you lead our team over the last few years. He and his team make these kind of things happen, working with the brand presidents. We've got 50 new Outback opportunities in the U.S. Outback's a great brand. We're going to talk more about it in a minute. 50 new opportunities for Abbraccio in Brazil. 50 new opportunities for Outback in Brazil. We can grow our franchise base as we develop our franchise business, and we're going to continue to test a smaller box footprint. Like I mentioned earlier, 50 new Outback locations in the U.S. We have 15- 20 new Fleming's locations.
I'll leave it to Beth Scott to talk about how some of those are doing, because she's going to be up here a little bit later on. Bonefish, we're going to take a look at what some new restaurant potential looks like there as we look at that business. Relocation opportunities. This is something we've been talking about for quite some time. We've developed 50 new relocated restaurants since 2012, 30% plus sales lift. We have the potential to do at least 50 more. We would go as fast as we can. We just need those quality sites, because this works. It works big time. I think Gregg Scarlett mentioned to me the other day that we've got three of these opening up over the next few weeks across the country.
This is a really large sales lift for us, and goes to say, once again, when we get to main-on-main locations at Outback Steakhouse, the volumes are extremely attractive. Our strong free cash flow provides a lot of capital allocation flexibility. This is a very nice place that Mr. Christopher Meyer gets to be as CFO of our company, because he, with our management team, can determine what we would like to do going forward. After all of our business reinvestments, let me remind you once again, we're not going into debt. All these investments are funded through internal cash flow. After spending that money, we can use it to either pay down debt, return more cash to shareholders, and as we continue to target towards investment grade.
After capital spending, we'll have over $100 million to spend, we are very comfortable to our ratio on the page here as we go forward. Stepping back, our go-forward growth model framework, our goals over the next three to five years. Sales growth of 1.5%-2%. We've talked about off-premises, digital and loyalty, we've talked about international expansion. Our margin levers, healthy traffic, ongoing productivity efforts, a very disciplined cost structure. Our long-term TSR target of 10%-15% assumes about a 2% dividend payout ratio. Let's just remind everybody of our 2019 guidance. Same-store sales growth of 2%-2.5% above our long-term targets. Adjusted earnings per share of 10%-15%, which is a TSR of 12%-17% above our long-term targets, on top of a 25% EPS growth last year.
Adjusted operating margin expansion, we had to make the adjustment for the new lease accounting standard in 2018 of 50 to 70 basis points as we make a very nice down payment on our targets. Capital expenditures between $175 million and $200 million, commodity of approximately 2%, number of system-wide restaurants of approximately 20. That's our guidance and our financial update as part of this presentation. We are extremely excited about the opportunities in front of us, have worked very hard to make this come to life. Now let me turn to our brand updates. Before I do that, I just would like to welcome Christopher Meyer as our CFO. He has been a remarkable partner to me over the last few years.
A lot of you know Chris very well and know his capabilities. He's going to be a terrific CFO for our company in the years ahead. Now we're going to talk about our brand experience, our 360-degree customer experience. Each brand president will come up and discuss their situations and their plans. We'll later talk about off-premises, loyalty, and digital on our scale and portfolio opportunities. We have four wonderful brands. Like Liz talked about earlier, strong brands are alive and well in casual dining. We have four strong brands. These are a part of our portfolio, and they have wonderful plans as we go forward. This is a reminder for everybody, International is about 11% of our business. Outback is our biggest business in the U.S.
Carrabba's, Bonefish, and Fleming's each have a strong position in the marketplace and a strong position in our company. Before I introduce Gregg Scarlett, just to remind everybody, Outback is now 30 years old and is in a very strong position. In 2009, the company had $2.9 million in AUV. It's now at $3.6 million as we end 2018. That's a 2.5% per year increase in same-store sales. In that time, 401 direct competitor units have opened, a 60% increase. To maintain and grow this position while this is going on, this competitive intrusion is going on, is really a strong testament to the brand under Elizabeth's leadership and Bloomin' Brands, and now the leadership of Gregg Scarlett at Outback Steakhouse.
It's my privilege now to introduce one of the finest leaders in the restaurant business that I know. I have a great partner and a great leader, Mr. Gregg Scarlett.
Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everyone. Certainly a pleasure to be here with you today, sharing the insights from the Outback journey. My name is Gregg Scarlett. I am the president of Outback. I have been with Bloomin' Brands for 24 years. I've spent the last 12, soon to be 13, in senior leadership positions. I've had the pleasure of leading operations in all three casual dining brands, and I spent some time leading the Bonefish brand, pre Dave Schmidt, and have since been leading the Outback brand for roughly 30 months. Liz asked me to rejoin the Outback brand about 30 days prior to the start of Q4 2016. I deeply immersed myself in the business over those first 100 days.
I spent the first 30 days listening and learning to our customers and our people. I spent the second 30 days planning and prioritizing based on those learnings, I spent the third 30 days organizing and aligning the team and getting the plan approved and implemented. I believe between the plan that we put in place, the actions that we've taken, and the decisions that we've made across that journey, we have been able to achieve eight consecutive quarters of same-store sales growth, positive traffic in 2017 and 2018, some really, really nice improved retention in the brand, and we continue to see noticeable improvement in our customer social metrics. The momentum in the brand has enabled us to stay above Knapp-Track, we see the improvement in our sales trends over the past 24 months.
I'd also share with you that our consumers continue to recognize the reinvestments that we've made in food and portions, and also the investments and re-engagement in the experience, and as a result, we've seen noticeable improvements as you see here on the screen. Yes, the journey. The journey began in Q4 2016. As I mentioned, I spent those first 100 days immersed. I also spent a tremendous amount of time traveling. We conducted focus groups throughout the U.S. I wanted to spend some time listening from our customers. I had been through 1,000 pages of research, I wanted to hear directly from consumers what they say, what they said, what they felt, what they experienced in our brands.
I traveled around the country doing these focus groups, sitting in research rooms behind the mirrored wall and listening to their feedback in a very unfiltered way. Now, for me, I believe asking the right questions is more important than the answers you receive, especially when you're trying to solve the right problem. What I heard from these consumers consistently and concisely over the course of these focus groups was that the reason for their decline in frequency was inconsistent dining experiences in Outback Steakhouse. When asked, "What does Outback need to do in order to rebuild your frequency?" consumers were very, very clear. They said, "Number one, you're a steakhouse, you gotta cook steaks accurately," i.e., execution. Go figure, right?
Two, they said, "You've got to rebalance your value proposition." They said, "The price I pay for the experience I get is a little bit out of balance." Experience. Three, they said, "Look, I'd like to get a deeper level of care and concern for the value of my dollar. I don't feel like your people are vested in my experience." That became engagement for us. When I went out and talked to our people, what I heard from our people was, Number 1, "The menu's too broad. I can't execute." Number two, I heard structural barriers in our service model prohibit us from engaging emotionally with consumers.
Number three, I heard, "Somewhere along the line, you stopped listening to us, and the numerous changes that you put in the business have not only distracted me, but are now starting to disengage me." With that information, off I went. I needed to see for myself. I am an operator. I ran these restaurants in the past, and I ran operations in the past. I knew what I was looking for. I went into a restaurant on a Friday night, and I stood at the end of the line. It embarrasses me to share this picture with you, but it is the truth. I stood on the end of the line for about three hours on a Friday night just watching. Time, motion, execution, listening to our people. At about 8:00 P.M., I came across this vision.
I snapped this photo on my cellphone, and it still exists today. In my business, there is no silver bullet, but this is the closest thing you will ever get to one. With this, it became very apparent that we had shifted the focus off of steak excellence and steak accuracy in the brand, and therefore, could not deliver these great experiences that these loyal consumers wanted. One of the most interesting things I heard in the focus groups, and again, I am behind a mirrored wall, was that these customers were willing to drive across town and go to a different Outback rather than leave us or lose us from their consideration set. I remember being in St. Louis, and I remember three or four of those customers talking about how they would be willing to drive to South County location because the experience was better.
30 years of rich, deep loyalty in this brand gets you that strength with a consumer, and if you can deliver on their expectations, you can rebuild their frequency. At the same time, let me share with you. For 25 years, this is our flat top grill. For 25 years, the only thing on this grill was steaks, burgers, and an occasional rack of lamb. What you see here is quesadillas, tacos, grilled cheese, burger buns, lobster, and tilapia. Right? You would be lucky to find a steak on this grill. With this, I also asked the team to do a complete 360-degree review of the business. This was as soon as I got into place. The team presented me with this information. I knew the menu had gotten broad, but I did not know how much work went into it.
If I draw your attention to 2015, that is 682 changes. As an operator, I observe any change that distracts our managing partner or our field team as a change in the business. If you take the 682 and you divide it by 12, you get roughly 57 changes a month. If you multiply that by the 18 months, which includes 2017, that is 1,000 changes in the business in 18 months' time. No silver bullet, but this was the second thing that I needed in the business. I would remind you, or I would tell you that of those 475 changes, roughly 450 had happened prior to my arrival. As soon as I saw this information, we put the brakes on the business and started to reshift our focus. With that information in hand, I got on an airplane. This was 90 days in.
I got on an airplane, I flew to do town hall meetings. We did 14 cities over the course of 35 days. We spent eight hours per session with our managing partners, I stood in front of them and I said, "Partners, I got great news. Our problems are solvable." I sent them off into breakout rooms with one question, one question only. I said, "If you were president for a day, only one day, what things would you change and why, what things would you never change and why?" The important piece, or one of the most important aspects of this journey, was to get our partners vested in the solution. I'm an operator. I've been running restaurants for 30 years. I could've sat in Tampa, wrote the plan, no problem. I got it.
What I needed was ownership, accountability, I needed our people to be vested in the solution. If these are our problems, what is it you want to do to solve them? I sent them off into breakout rooms. We had 100-plus hours of feedback. Very clear, very consistent, very concise. What you see on the screen is a high-level overview of the actions we've taken and the investments we've made to impact those three areas of opportunity that consumers said we needed to. Off we went. Roughly $50 million in investments over the last three years. January 2017, with the plan in place, approved by Liz and Dino on the board, with reinvestments, we began to reshift the focus. We spent the first 90 days of 2017 deeply immersed in steak excellence. I invited all of our above store leaders to Tampa.
I put them in vans, we took them to restaurants at 6:00 A.M. in the morning, we spent two and a half days immersed in steak accuracy and training. I wanted to see blood on their hands, steak juice, seasoning on their aprons, I wanted to see sweat on their forehead. We gave them the sweatbands, the picture up on the top right is our above store leaders, the one with the sweatband on. We took that training, we drove it down into the restaurants with a core focus on getting back to steak excellence. At the same time, I needed to send a message to the team that we were serious about what we were looking to do. With the approval from Dave and Liz, we took 18 items off of the menu.
In addition to that, our facilities team did an absolutely fabulous job traveling the country in 80 days time, recalibrating, repairing, where, if need be, replacing our grills, while at the same time, installing 462 small grills. We needed to move those items off of the grill so that we could get back to only having steaks on that grill. Some of these items had strong consumer appeal, strong mixes. We didn't want to take them off the menu, we needed another place in the restaurant, another station in the restaurant that could handle it. As an operator, I could stand and look at time and motion and assess where we could install these grills to best ensure we didn't create ourselves another problem.
With our focus back on steak accuracy, we came back, and I would tell you, 2017 was kind of a year of 100-day plans. We were working in 100-day increments as we went along rebuilding this journey. With the focus back on steak accuracy, we wanted to narrow it in even more so. We chose the items that our consumers order most often, and we followed them on a journey to check for quality, consistency, and accuracy, specifically steaks. In my business, I serve roughly 110 million customers a year. 53% of them, or roughly 60 million, get a steak. And of those 60 million, about 27% of them, 16 million, get one of two steaks, either a six-ounce sirloin or a six-ounce filet. In 2016, Outback had done a great job enhancing the six-ounce sirloin in the business to get to the center cut.
In 2018, our team has done a fabulous job enhancing the quality of the six-ounce filet. You're going to try that today at lunchtime, and I can assure you, it is absolutely fabulous. With steak focus back where it needed to be, it was now time to rebuild the engagement and the dining experience. One of the things I heard from customers in these focus groups was, one, steak accuracy is your cost of entry. You've got to get that right. Number two, emotional connections were the primary driver of future visitation. These customers, to Liz's earlier point, wanted emotional connections in the dining room. They wanted to feel valued and cared for and confident in the experience. Our service model had become so complicated that it made it difficult for our people to connect emotionally.
We began with our training outline, and we made a couple of changes here. One, we went from 35 pages in a paper workbook to digital modules where we could connect with Outbackers in the moment. Two, we shifted from telling our people what to do to empowering them to think on their own. Three, we went from study on your own to experiential modules in the restaurant where our people could taste the food and get an understanding of what hospitality really meant. At the same time, we knew we had some staffing opportunities in the brand, and we addressed those accordingly where we needed to. Lastly, I would tell you, as an operator, I spent a tremendous amount of time kind of playing undercover boss in the restaurants, having dinner experiences with my wife and my two kids.
I would tell you that I probably had 40- 50 dining experiences, and one of the things that I saw was that our servers, standing at a table, were spending more time looking over their shoulder, wondering who was going to clean that table, than they did emotionally connecting with consumers in front of them, eye contact. Their heads constantly were moving, and our customers recognized that. We did want to put bussers back into the system so that we could free our servers from responsibilities that kept them from emotionally connecting with consumers. I'll also tell you, these were tactics. These were tactics that supported a greater plan for us. We had spent a tremendous amount of time over the years developing a service model that really required a tremendous amount of input.
We would tell people what to do, what to say, where to be, when to be there, 30-second greets, two-minute drinks, four-minute apps, 12-minute food. What we wanted to do was to flip this service model upside down. We wanted to empower our people to think on their own with one focus and one focus only, and that was, "How can I make sure that when my customers leave here, their intent to return and recommend is through the roof?" So we flipped this service model upside down and empowered our people to strengthen engagement in the dining room by doing whatever it takes to create these memorable dining experiences that make a difference in our consumer's day. We also know the role ambiance and atmosphere plays in the experience. Liz talked about it earlier.
As we were completing our remodels in end of 2017, we were simultaneously beginning our interior remodels. We had leveraged the consumer insights that were validated from our new store openings, and we were pulling attributes that consumers wanted most in building the scope for interior remodels. We completed 35 of those in 2018, and we have roughly 225 scheduled over the next three years. In my business, I'm a believer that if you're not the one servicing the customer, you better make damn sure you're servicing the one who is. So getting out on the road, connecting with our people, listening to our people was a priority. I had done three rounds of town hall meetings with our managing partners and our field teams over the course of 27 months, beginning 90 days after I got in.
Each of the last three Novembers, I was on the road, 14 cities, meeting with our partners, eight-hour sessions. I would tell you that I have 585 electronic files on my computer, and I know a little something about each of those managing partners. The first year we were out there in 2016, besides learning their names, I asked them three questions. How long you been with Outback? How long you been a managing partner? Tell me something about you. One of the most astounding things for me in that journey was the number of 20-year employees that were in those rooms along the way. Absolutely amazing. I came back in year two, 2017, and I said to our partners, "Tell me one thing that's changed for you, either personally or professionally in the last 12 months." I kind of knew what I was going to hear.
They were so thrilled that they got the investments that they wanted at the end of 2016, therefore their compensation was going up, that they couldn't wait to tell me the story. I came back in 2018, just back in November, I stood in front of them and I said one question, "Why Outback?" Time, your most valuable commodity, you never get it back. You can spend it anywhere you want. Why you spend it with Outback? So I built these files, so every time I go out on the road and I visit these restaurants, I know who the partner is, I know their wife's name, I know if they're a dog lover, I know why they're with Outback. That type of emotional engagement plays into the retention that we have seen and experienced over the last two years.
I would tell you one of the things we're most proud of is to have hourly retention be 16% below industry, to be sub 100%. I'd also tell you that 4% on the size of our base amounts to some pretty serious cash. One of the other things that I'm most proud of is our managing partner retention. To be 50% lower than the industry. In this environment, you all know it's a war for talent. You have Amazon, Walmart, Target, FedEx, all paying $15 an hour, right? These people could go somewhere else, work less hard, and probably make similar money. For us, strengthening that emotional connection with our people has helped us improve the retention over the past two years, and we plan to continue on this journey. The link between retention and traffic growth couldn't be stronger, right?
This is no surprise for us. Your people stay, they get great at their jobs, they deliver best-in-class dining experiences, your customers feel it, their intent to return and recommend goes through the roof, and that translates into sales. You'll see us, we broke up our brand in five quintiles, and you'll see the correlation between traffic growth and retention there. I would tell you, the work we've done over the past 24 months has been very planful, very deliberate, and our results are a testament to that work. This team, my team, has the finger on the pulse of their business, and they know what it takes to rebuild the relationship with the customer, and they've done a fabulous job doing so. Core experience, as Liz said, win within will always remain a top priority for us.
So too is the capital reinvestment into our relocations and our new store openings. Dave brought this up. We will go as fast as we can. We're only interested in A sites. Sukh Singh and his team have done an absolutely fabulous job actively sourcing sites for us to relocate restaurants. We know every time we do, we see a 30%+ increase in AUVs, and we'll continue to relocate them as quickly as we can. Lastly, I would tell you that as Dino mentioned, 50 new Outback units. Again, Sukh and his team have done a fabulous job building the pipeline. In here, we're only interested in A sites, and we continue to scour in infill markets to find the right sites for our restaurants. In summary, I would tell you it's been a heck of a journey for the past 24 months, probably close to 30.
The results from this team have been absolutely outstanding. Those results come because we've been listening to our customers, and we've been engaging with our people, and we've been able to re-engage with consumers in the restaurant and deliver on those 30 years of history that they recognize and most admire about this brand. As we go forward, we will be ruthlessly focused on enhancing and fortifying that core experience. Nothing more important in our restaurants. In addition to that, we will spend our time building the loyalty through strength and engagement. We feel the work we've done on our service model, and with our servers, and the support for the servers have allowed us to reconnect emotionally with consumers and put us in a position for forward progress. We will also innovate and create on the menu where and when need be with value in mind.
We will never return to what you see in that bar graph slide with 682 changes. We will continuously invest the capital in our remodels, in our relocations, in our new store openings as we go forward. Lastly, I would say to you, our team has done an absolutely fabulous job with the off-premise opportunity. They see the core experience in the restaurant and the core experience in the consumer's home to be one and the same. No separation. They're very clear in growing their business and what this means for them and for us. With that, I close. I would tell you it is my privilege and my pleasure to introduce Michael Kappitt, President of Carrabba's Italian Grill. Thank you.
Good morning. Welcome to Carrabba's Italian Grill. I'm Mike Kappitt, and I'm the president of Carrabba's. I've been in the restaurant industry for nearly 17 years. Prior to joining Bloomin' Brands, I had the privilege to serve His Majesty, the Burger King, for nine years. In 2011, I was provided the opportunity to come and be the chief marketing officer of Outback Steakhouse. I did that for a few years, and then Liz asked me to be the chief marketing officer of Bloomin' Brands, where I did that for a couple of years. In early 2016, I had the opportunity of a lifetime to become the president of Carrabba's Italian Grill. Carrabba's is a brand that we love, but it's one that people don't know a whole lot about.
I thought I'd share with you a little bit of our story, if you humor me for a couple of minutes. In 1986, Johnny Carrabba and his uncle, Damian Mandola, opened up the first Carrabba's on Kirby Drive in Houston, Texas. In 1988, they opened up the second Carrabba's on Woodway and Voss, just about three miles away from the original. Johnny and Damian were loving life. They had two restaurants. They thought that was as good as it was going to get. They were serving their community, they were serving their family recipes, and they had become a great neighborhood Italian restaurant. In 1992, the founders of Outback approached Johnny and Damian and talked to them about a partnership. After several conversations, they formed this partnership.
In 1993, the first Carrabba's Italian Grill, as we know it today, was opened on Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas. Today, we now have 227 locations. We're in 32 states. We have revenue of approximately $650 million. In 2018, we achieved positive comp sales for Carrabba's. Much like our big brother, Outback, we're focused on three key pillars, execution, experience, and engagement. Let me dig a little deeper and tell you a bit about the Carrabba's story. As Dave mentioned, we've been maniacally focused on simplifying operations. Last year, we rolled the first major change to a Carrabba's kitchen since the brand was conceived 25 years ago. We affectionately called this Project Sandbox. Sandbox has been an incredible win for our company, both on a labor front, on a product front, and a waste front, but most importantly for the guest.
I thought I'd share with you an example. One of these dishes here, the one at the top, is our three cheese sausage stuffed mushroom small plate. Say that fast three times. That dish, prior to Sandbox, had a six-minute ticket time. It required four steps to prepare it, and it was a challenge for us. With Sandbox, that dish has one step. We cook it in two and a half minutes. It has a two-and-a-half-minute ticket time, and it's served piping hot each and every time, and we have virtually eliminated waste on that product. That kind of impact has been felt across our menu as a result of Sandbox. We've also been focused on simplifying our menus. Over the last three years, we've taken 30% of the items off of our menus, and we've removed 45% of the SKUs out of our restaurant.
This is giving our partners more time to be in the most important place that they can be. That's out in the dining room with our guests. It's also led to significant productivity for our brand. I'm really proud that we're reinvesting those dollars back into the business. We're reinvesting them in our people, and we're reinvesting them in our guests. Recently, as an example, we've added bussers back to our service model as well. That's freeing up our servers to have those genuine interactions with our guests, which they expect from Carrabba's Italian Grill. Let me share a little bit more about how we're reinvesting those dollars. Over the last three years, a big place that we've reinvested dollars is in increased portion sizes.
Over the last three years, we've put more wine in the glass, we've put more pasta in the bowl, and this week we're announcing that we're adding 50% more chicken to all of our sautéed pastas and our salads. I thought I'd share with you a television spot that we've had created for a test that we're going to run. The media landscape is evolving, as we all know. It's evolving even as it relates to TV. With this test, we're going to have the ability to deliver, at a ZIP code level, television to households around our restaurants. We can ring-fence a restaurant and deliver television to specific households. This is a test. We haven't done it yet, but we're really excited about it, and we're hopeful about it.
If you think about it, if the test works, we can efficiently deliver television to our markets, whether we have 19 restaurants in a market or one restaurant in a market. That's enough about that. We'll keep you posted on our progress with that test. Let me share this spot with you because we're really excited about it.
Now there's even more to love at Carrabba's. Our signature chicken prepared over a wood-burning grill has an unforgettable flavor. Basted with my family's signature recipe, you get that smoky flavor in every bite. Now at Carrabba's Italian Grill, there's even more to love. We've added 50% more chicken to your favorite sauteed pastas, so you can savor more of that signature wood-fired grill flavor in every bite. More chicken, same price. Hurry in to Carrabba's tonight to enjoy 50% more chicken.
I know what you're thinking. That food looks great. I think the same thing. The other area that we've been really focused on at Carrabba's Italian Grill is experiential dining. Those could be nebulous words, so let me take you a little deeper there. Experiential dining, as an example for us, is our wine dinner platform. Over the last four years, we've built this incredible business. The third Tuesday of every month at your local Carrabba's Italian Grill, we have a wine dinner. They're always themed. They're always engaging. It puts the partner on center stage in their restaurants, and they're the mayor of their communities, hopefully every night, but particularly on that night. On a regular basis, we have over 16,000 reservations every month for these wine dinners. We are just so proud of it. It's expanded.
We've taken that template, and we now have Dine Rewards exclusive member events in that same format, and people love it. We're just so excited by it. What we see is these dinners cost $40- $50 a head, depending on the time of year and the menu that we're offering. The engagement is unbelievable from our teams and our customers, our guests. What I really love is the value scores on these dinners are through the charts, and the repeat is over 95%. Over 95% of the customers who attend our wine dinners say they're coming to another one. It's experiences like that that give us the ability to become less reliant on discounting. I couldn't be more proud of the team for what they do each and every month with this wine dinner platform.
The other thing that I'm incredibly proud of is Johnny still owns the original two Carrabba's, owns and operates the original two Carrabba's in Houston, Texas. I'm incredibly proud that we still do a lot of what he does today. It's still our family recipes. At the end of the day, it's our roots as a great neighborhood Italian restaurant, it's our founders, it's our recipes and our food that differentiate us from our competitors. More and more recently, as you saw in that advertising, we're using these points of differentiation to drive that to our guests and stand out in a very crowded category. That was an old shot of Johnny, by the way, circa 1986. The other area that we've been reinvesting these dollars in that we've mined in productivity is in our people.
Through an enhanced compensation package, we've addressed compensation for our managing partners and our multi-unit managers. We've worked with our management teams to address one of their biggest issues historically as we were trying to understand turnover, which was work-life balance, and we've made great strides there. Over the last two years, we've reduced our management turnover by nearly 300 basis points. This picture on the bottom left is one of our partners, Jason Kash in St. Pete. He's one of our very best partners. It looks like he's maybe doing training there, talking to a bunch of people. Actually, what he's doing is he's being the mayor of his restaurant. He's hosting his monthly wine dinner. Jason regularly has 80-100 people attend his wine dinners every single month. I go to them.
It's the closest restaurant to my house, and I see a lot of the folks there over and over again. We've talked a lot about our opportunity with delivery and off-premise growth, and Dave's going to talk even more about that in a few minutes. But one of the areas that really stands out as an opportunity for Carrabba's in off-premise growth is our catering business, large party catering. Last year, we spent the time to rework our catering offerings to get the right packaging for our catering offerings. It's so important, particularly when we cater into an office environment. We also launched an online ordering platform in December, which was new for us. We're well-positioned to take advantage of this opportunity, and it is a growing opportunity. You can't grow businesses like this unless you have highly engaged partners.
It's no coincidence that Jason, who has these huge wine dinners every month, is also the restaurant with the highest percentage of off-premise sales in all of Carrabba's. He's highly engaged, and he's making it happen, and his team is highly engaged. That's just a little bit about the Carrabba's story, and I'm thrilled to share that with you, but not as thrilled as I am to introduce the President of Fleming's Prime Steak & Wine Bar, Beth Scott.
Hi, everybody. Really a pleasure to be here. Just a little bit about me to start off the session. Born and raised in this lovely city, so very happy to be here with you today. After a very short stint in the finance field, no offense, I shifted industries to the restaurant business, and I've spent the last 20+ years in restaurant operations, concept development, experience development, and a lot of different sort of avenues of the restaurant. I ran Sun in Hollywood for a while, so kind of national chains. I've worked for celebrity chef Todd English, building his business. Then I shifted over to the hospitality business, having worked for Loews Hotels up here on Madison Avenue and Hilton Hotels. Then I most recently came to Bloomin' Brands after a stint with Disney Parks and Resorts.
A real kind of eclectic view on the restaurant business. Happy to be here running the Fleming's brand now. Many of you may know, Fleming's is now 20 years old, founded in December of 1998 in Newport Beach, California, by Paul Fleming and Bill Allen. Over the last 20 years, they've taken that attitude about a modern, kind of contemporized steakhouse, and we've grown that brand to about 70 locations today with $300 million. I thank Dave for leaving the punchline to me, that we are growing and we plan on growing. Our last four restaurants, which we've opened in the past two years, are actually performing at about 35% over our regular fleet AUV. There's a lot of really good momentum for the Fleming's brand.
You also see that we've managed to win some awards along the way, and we're really proud of being top of mind for our consumers today. Like our sister brands, we focus on a couple of key themes. Execution, experience, and engagement. I'm going to share with you how the Fleming's brand has brought those things to life. One of the key themes you will find, because I too traveled the country when I joined the brand, talking to our partners, talking to our guests, hearing what they had to say. Of course, the key themes in the restaurant business, what are your challenges? War for talent, increasing competition, not only from our typical competitors like The Capital Grille and Del Frisco's Restaurant Group and such, but the local chef-driven brands that were competitively intruding on our business. Then our aging assets. We're a 20-year-old brand, right?
Some of these restaurants were kind of getting a little stale. In those travels from Fresno, you can imagine going to Fresno one day and West Des Moines, Iowa, the next, from Baltimore to, say, Boston. This aha moment that I had, maybe not a silver bullet, but certainly kind of a key moment for me, was why do we treat all these restaurants exactly the same? Can we have an opportunity to unlock value in our portfolio by segmenting the business based on the location they're in? Staying true to the core, definitely want to be a brand that everybody trusts, but allowing our local restaurants to implement solutions that are relevant for them. Right? This, to me, was a key way that we were going to differentiate our brand from our competitors. Let's just talk about some of the specifics.
Execution. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the steaks. We are a steakhouse, like our Outback sister. 70% of our guests actually order a steak, so a little bit higher than Outback. We know we have to get that right, and Chef Pleau and his team are working really hard on sourcing the right product and execution piece. Here's where we thought we can take that robust segmentation and apply it to our menus. We're calling this program The Chef's Table. For those of you who've been in a Fleming's in the past eight months, you may have seen this.
What this is a program that allows our local chefs to source regional, seasonal products and monthly change the menu of these products to drive not only intent to return, but also kind of interesting things for our service staff to talk to our guests about. What this has also done for us, by the way, it's mixing probably about 8% system-wide, which is really amazing for a new program. It's allowed us to retain and attract really great culinarians. We all know chefs want to be creative, so just handing them a menu saying, "Here, go execute this," versus allowing them to have a creative input into the menus has really helped us. Our chef and sous chef turnover rates have been dropping dramatically. Third thing this Chef's Table helps us with is allowing us to stratify our menus appropriately.
We know that some of the markets that we're in have maybe more price sensitivity than others. We can introduce lower-priced menu items, still meeting our margin requirements, but getting that point of entry in those markets, say like Madison, Wisconsin. Not picking on poor Madison, but there may be more price sensitivity in those markets. Conversely, a place like Newport Beach, California, we have an opportunity to sell $100 lobster tail, right? Because there's not as much price sensitivity in those markets. Stopping ourselves from implementing those kinds of programs because it's not all the same. We saw as just sort of a great opportunity to unlock value, and it's really working extremely well. It also allows us to compete with our local competitors, right?
We know we're losing business to local restaurants, we want to get that business back, giving people the reason to experience hard shell crabs in Baltimore is a great way to get the intents to return up in those markets. Same theory sort of applies with beverage, right? We can have great rum program in Miami and a great bourbon program in Kentucky, maybe those things don't work in each other's markets, but they work locally, and we should take advantage of that as best we can. Wines in Napa or California consumers, very price sensitive to wines, right? Making sure we have on-premise only selections in those markets that are priced appropriately versus having one core list that everybody has to serve, where we may have to take some pricing down in California versus other markets. Right. We don't want to do that.
We want to make sure we have the right offer at the right time in the right markets. Experience. There's a reason why I love the restaurant business and why I chose to leave Finance for the restaurant business. Liz talked about the amount of time we spend on our devices. The restaurant business and the restaurants themselves are the last chance we have or one of the few chances we have to disconnect from our day and reconnect with the people that we're with, right? Everybody loves to gather around a table, whether you're in someone's home or in a restaurant, and just share your experiences of what you're eating, what you're drinking, or just what happened to you that day.
We have multiple occasions to allow people to do that, whether you're celebrating an anniversary in our main dining room, whether you are just having a much-needed cocktail after work with some of your friends, or you are celebrating an event or attending a business meeting in one of our private dining rooms. We have all these ways to just sort of engage with you and bring your experience to life, and we take that really seriously. Private dining is just one thing that I want to focus on and to tell you about. It's a big part of our business, and we believe it can be even bigger. We're going to double down on that business this year. We grew it from 2017- 2018. We believe there's a growth opportunity moving forward.
We're doing some really innovative things to differentiate ourselves on a private dining perspective. Things like immersive experiences. We're testing a technology solution that literally 360 brings you into the farms of Humboldt cheese makers and the winemakers in Napa, and really kind of wakes up your senses and makes you feel like you're in a vineyard in Napa. It's really, really interesting. We're also working on some other solutions that take down the barrier to booking. Right now you've got to call the restaurant, someone calls you back. There's a lot of emails back and forth. We feel like there's an online booking opportunity that we want to make easy for our private dining guests.
The thing about private dining, which is so interesting, is we have to work really hard from a marketing and experience perspective to win one guest in our main dining room or our own bar. If we win one meeting planner's heart and mind for private dining, we've got 20- 25 guests who are coming in for that event. The multiple on that, it's just really, really amazing. Interior refreshes, like our sister brands, we have some aging assets. We touched about seven restaurants this year. We're going to do 10 more refreshes next year and the years after, we're excited about that. Signature promotions. We're doing things like Tomahawk Tuesday. You've heard time and time again, this intent to reduce discounting and provide more value-driven promotions.
Tomahawk Tuesday is just one example of what we're doing to really drive interest and intent to return in our locations. Elevating our happy hour. We moved again away from a discounting program, it's called five-six-seven, and we're moving now to a much more elevated happy hour experience, which is really resonating with our guests. I'll just leave you with the engagement piece too. We really believe that we have an opportunity to win the hearts and minds of our associates and our managers through education programs. We've committed to 100 wine certifications in 2018 and 2019, which we've started the program already. Partner autonomy. This goes along the lines of that segmentation piece of allowing our partners to make the right decisions at the right times in their markets.
Really, I just wanted to touch a little bit on engaging with our guests in different ways. Aside from personalized emails, we have our own loyalty program called the Magnum Club, which we've just reinvigorated, where we have a kind of speakeasy-like microsite that they have access to, where we can give them curated experiences, early access to wine dinners. We're actually, one of our best guests in Livonia, Michigan hit 500 visits. Hard to imagine. We flew them to Brickell for our opening, just as a thank you. Really finding great ways to engage with those best guests is something that we look forward to continuing. My time is up, but I'll be around for lunch and you'll taste some of the tomahawks. It's my pleasure to introduce Dave Schmidt to talk to you about Bonefish today.
Well, good morning, everybody. It's great to be here today to talk a little bit about Bonefish. Let me start by introducing myself. I am David Schmidt. I've been in the restaurant business for a little bit over 20 years.
The last 14 years of which have been with Bloomin' Brands. I've had the distinct pleasure of wearing many different hats within Bloomin' Brands. Had a lot of different support, a lot of different functions within finance, within operations. I had the opportunity to lead the Office of Productivity for a period of time when Liz joined the organization. Most recently, for the last two and a half years, I've been the president of Bonefish Grill. I am very, very excited about the new challenges and opportunities that await me in my new role with Outback Steakhouse. Let me tell you a little bit about Bonefish Grill. First opened in St. Petersburg, Florida, in the year 2000. Two young gentlemen by the name of Chris Parker and Tim Curci. Chris Parker grew up in the beaches of St. Pete.
He worked a lot of odd jobs in hotels and restaurants. He was very much a hospitality guy. People loved Chris, and Chris loved people. Tim Curci was a recent graduate of The Culinary Institute here up in Hyde Park. Two young gentlemen who got to know each other working at various restaurants. Chris loved people. Tim loved to cook. They both loved to fish. Every free moment they weren't working, they were out on the waters off the coast of St. Pete fishing. When they decided to join forces and open a restaurant, it was a no-brainer. They knew right away they wanted to feature fresh fish caught right there off the coast of Florida. That was going to be the anchor of their menu.
They also saw an opportunity to fill what they thought was a little bit of an underserved market, particularly in that area, and that was to create something that had a very polished feel about it, a very polished experience, yet comfortable and casual. They actually defined Bonefish that way when asked. They said Bonefish's goal is to deliver all the pleasures and details of a superb, polished experience with the comfort and price point of casual dining. We still use that today. That's sort of Bonefish's mantra, if you will. Internally, we like to refer to it often as delivering a $50 experience at a $25 price point. If we can do that with a differentiated menu, deliver a $50 experience at a $25 price point, we consider that success. Fast-forward 19 years later, we now have 197 restaurants in 32 states.
Last year, we hit $580 million in revenue. As Liz had mentioned, 2018 was a record proper year for Bonefish, on top of what was previously a record profit year in 2018. Very, very excited about the brand and the direction that it's going. Surprise, surprise, right? Here's the what. Here's the things that Bonefish is focused on doing. Success in anything in life often isn't what you do, it's how you do it. The what is consistent across the brands, right? Flawless execution in everything that we do. Creating differentiated guest experiences that our customers either, A, can't get somewhere else or certainly can't get somewhere else at the price point that we can deliver it. Thirdly, just having highly engaged management and staff that we rely on to deliver that great guest experience. I want to share just a couple things.
I'm going to pull out a couple bullet points from things we've done over the last couple of years. From a flawless execution standpoint, you've heard this from Cap a little bit about the menu simplification as well as Gregg. We underwent an effort in 2018 to say, "Let's not innovate in ways that is not resonating with the customer. Let's innovate in ways that is differentiating and resonating." What we did is we took a look at the menu in June of last year, and we identified 12 items that we agreed to pull off the menu. These were innovative items. They just weren't differentiating for Bonefish. After some testing, we made the call to take 12 items off of our menu. To put that in perspective, it was about a 20% reduction in our total menu. These were items that sold very low.
The mix was very low on these items. They required unique SKUs that we had to bring into the restaurant just for these items. They were generally labor-intensive, required a lot of prep to deliver these items. It was kind of a no-brainer when we said, "Let's test this." The test results were very positive. Consumer satisfaction scores did not go down. In fact, they went up because we were able to execute those core items, those differentiated items, even better. Obviously, there was some financial win for us as a result of streamlining that execution. The second thing we did is with those savings, so to speak, in terms of the hours that we were allocating, we said, "Now let's innovate in ways that are truly differentiating for the brand." We rolled out this thing called Neighborhood Catch.
In the opening clip, you may have seen Eric Neuwirth, the gentleman that we affectionately refer to as our fish whisperer. He's kind of the Bonefish Grill guru of all things fish. What we did with Neighborhood Catch is we actually gave our managing partners the ability to reach out directly to our network of fresh fish purveyors across the country. If they place an order by 6:00 today, by 6:00 A.M. tomorrow morning, that fish is going to be on their back dock ready for them to prepare the next day. That level of localization and innovation is something that hadn't existed at Bonefish before. By the way, it was exactly what Chris and Tim sought to deliver in that first Bonefish that they opened in St. Pete Beach. Let's talk about customized experiences.
Thinking about how do we deliver a $50 experience at a $25 price point. At Bloomin' Brands, we love to share best practices and great ideas. Mike Kappitt had talked a little bit about his wine dinners that he has. We actually do similar things. We have something called a Perfect Pairings Dinner. We use it a little bit differently than Carrabba's does. We actually use our Perfect Pairings Dinners as a way of introducing new species that aren't yet available on the menu. We reach out to our insiders, typically through social media, it is a preset menu at a preset price with a reservation only, it is a limited event, typically we'll have 50 to 60 people or slots available. We feature some of the upcoming dishes that aren't yet available.
It's a really nice way for insiders to get a first look at some of the things coming onto our menu. As I mentioned, the nice thing is we do this through social media, these types of events typically fill up within 24- 48 hours once we open them up. Sips & Sampling is a similar type event. We host those in the bar. It's a much more casual event. It's a sampling of our seasonal cocktails, along with some happy hour items and things like that. Again, those things fill up really, really quickly. The other beautiful thing about these types of events, they're not a discount at all. In fact, this is a premium type event. People want to be invited to special occasion dining, these types of social events. They've been very, very successful for us.
Also, trying to reach new guests and create new occasions. The other thing we rolled out last year was an entirely new weekend brunch platform. We had kind of dabbled in brunch. We actually on Sundays would serve our regular full menu, then we gave a brunch card that had a few brunchy items. We scratched that and we said, "We're going to do a whole new brunch platform. If we're going to do brunch, we're going to do it right." We did it on both Saturday and Sunday. When we tested the brunch in four markets, the most fascinating thing for me is that when we surveyed customers, 40% of the customers who came in during that test for brunch said they'd never been to Bonefish before. We knew we were reaching a new occasion, potentially a new client, new customer base.
We rolled that out in October of last year. The results have been fantastic. Happy to report we actually just recently found out that we won a 2019 MenuMasters award for Menu Innovation. Chef Justin, who you'll get to meet at lunch today, will be going to Chicago to receive that award in May. Very happy about that. Lastly, from a remodel perspective, Dave and Liz talked about the investments in the facilities that we're going to continue to do. We've got 39 interior remodels scheduled in 2019 for Bonefish. Through the test phase of the remodels, we're getting close to a 4% traffic lift with every remodel that we do. We expect that to continue. That's where the bulk of our investment is going to be today for Bonefish.
Again, getting great returns and trying to really fill out that entire 360-degree experience with innovation where it matters, investing in people, and investing in the facilities. Last, let's talk about engagement. We know we can't do any of this if we don't have highly engaged staff that delivers the great experience, and as Gregg articulated very well, really make that emotional connection with the customer. We're never going to have highly engaged staff if we don't have stable, quality management teams in place that provide clear direction, superb preparation, and create an environment of belonging for every one of our 13,000 Anglers across the country. I am really happy to share with you that based on our internal surveys we do with each of our staff and our management teams across the country, our engagement scores are very, very high.
Our managers are very excited about the direction that Bonefish is going. They love the fact that we've given them a little bit more autonomy over featuring certain special dishes. They love the fact that we're marketing more on a local level through social media and those venues. Let's be honest, they love making money. Our compensation program shares the profits with our managing partners, and they're very happy about making more money. It is shown in the retention scores that we have at Bonefish, both at the managing partner level as well as the manager level. In fact, even at the hourly level. We're well below the industry averages for turnover in all those categories, and we continue to see great retention scores. Bonefish is in a really, really strong place. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Dave Deno.
Before we talk about our portfolio growth opportunities, I think we could all use a little stretch, a little break. Please come back promptly at 11. I'm getting really hungry looking at all that food advertising. We can stay on schedule here. 11 o'clock, come back to your seat, and we'll talk about our portfolio growth opportunities. Thanks, everybody.
[Break]
Let's get going. Okay, there we go. Thank you. I will now be talking about off-premise and the opportunity that we have in front of us, and let me just go to a brief video.
[Presentation]
Let me first frame up the size of the prize, then I'll talk about how Bloomin' Brands, the history on delivery by the due over time. Off-premise is like we talked about today, both at the upfront section with our brand charge and incremental sales. It's $175 billion in sales in 2020, $5.5 billion in casual dining the same year. We believe on top of what we're already doing today, it's a $500 million opportunity, 70% of the traffic is incremental. I'm going to spend two minutes on this slide because I want to give you a sense of where we've come as a company and where we want to go as far as where we want to go in the future.
Where we've come as a company is about four years ago, Liz Smith came to me and the executive team and said, "Hey, this off-premises opportunity is huge, and we've got to be a part of it." This is where the customer is going. It's not necessarily where we are today as a company, but you've got to go, as a brand leader, where the customer is going. We wanted to capitalize on our strong 360 dine-in experience and our history of being a pioneer in takeout, where we're having 300 remodels in the next three years to support takeout and off-premise. We also wanted to build the capability and do delivery right. It would've been very easy to win the press conference, announce a third-party deal, move on, and go on with delivery. We decided to stand back and build the capability inside the company.
I've had the privilege in the 1990s to build out the delivery system, along with a bunch of other people at Pizza Hut. There were a few of us within the company that knew a fair amount about delivery. Under Liz's leadership, we started the journey a few years ago of building our internal capability in various test markets on delivery. This was not something that could happen overnight, and it's been tested and developed over time. We hired the people. We made the information technology investments. We put together the processes. Our brand leaders, especially Gregg and Mike at Outback and Carrabba's respectively, got on board and really made it happen. We built the capability within the company to make this happen. That is crucial. Having that internal capability to capture that is really a big part of our strategy.
We do 80% of our business is what we call direct delivery. Why is that important? 74% of the customers prefer direct delivery over a third-party system. Not only that, we get the customer information. We enjoy the profitability. Like I mentioned before, not only is delivery sales incremental, but we're also making money today on delivery. This is not a pipe dream. That's a bit of our journey, as we've developed a delivery platform over the last few years. We also will use third-party delivery because people want to use third-party. Some of our customers want to use third-party delivery, and we have the capability to do that, but that comes in concert with our direct delivery opportunity. That's where we stand today on delivery. We think we have the capability. We think we have the structure in place.
We have the technology investments in place, we see a very large incremental opportunity, and we're going to do that while continuing to provide a 360-degree terrific, differentiated dine-in experience in the company. How are we doing? What do our metrics look like? For average delivery quote time, our target is 40 minutes. When you call ahead, how long is it going to take for your food to get there? Our target's been 40 minutes. We've been delivering a 37-minute quote. Our average delivery time on that quote is 35 minutes. Our variance of quote is two minutes positive right now. There's progress on each and every metric that we have in our delivery business, and we watch this exceptionally carefully at the restaurant, each shift, each day, each week, and we are on track to continue and finish our rollout in 2019.
It remains a significant growth opportunity. $42 check average, 70% of the occasions are incremental. We have over 500 units today with the opportunity to build out up to 700 at our two concepts, and we believe that 25% of our mix can come from off-premise occasions. We have 50-plus delivery locations that have at least 20% of their business, and it comes off of off-premise. It's being done today. As Gregg Scarlett mentioned, it's being done in some of our highest volume restaurants. With that's a brief summary on delivery. It's a history of how we've built our capability and what we believe we have going forward. I'd now like to turn it over to Liz Smith to talk about loyalty and digital.
Okay, let's see. Is this working? Okay. Check. I'm delighted to talk about the other two consumer-centric scale that is benefiting our entire portfolio. First, I'm going to talk about the CRM loyalty platform, and then I'm going to talk about our digital evolution. Our personal engagement is what's going to drive the growth of our portfolio going forward, okay? When you think about it, you've heard from the concept presidents eloquently. I think you should take great confidence that we have the team in place to drive differentiation and excitement in the box. What's equally important as we opened up is to continue to find ways to engage and keep people in your ecosystem. We have spent a lot of time over the last four to five years developing proprietary assets to drive higher frequency and higher penetration and recruit new users.
I want to take you through a little bit of each of these. We've built multiple channels to meet all occasions. You've heard about that. I'm going to give you a little peek inside to how that has a multiplier effect. We're going to talk about the loyalty rewards program and where we're going with that. Also, our digital capabilities and how we are doubling down and expanding. What we're getting out of the patient building, mining of a data lake, data technology, IT investment for targeted communications and offers, okay? Because that's absolutely vital in today's environment on how customers want to be addressed and how you want to engage with them. What I want to drive home with this slide is that engaging customers across occasions significantly increases its overall frequency.
This page is about the multiplier effect. What we're seeing is one plus one plus one is equaling five. Here's what I mean by that. If you take this example from the Outback brand, if you look at the annual visits and you look at dine-in only, these are customers that only use us for dine-in, there you see your 1.6 average two-ish frequency that you're used to hearing about with casual dining. You take a second group who last year only used us for delivery. Also, their frequency is about 1.5. There's another cohort that only used us for to-go. You see the 1.9. When we get our consumers to use us in delivery and other occasion channels, we see their frequency pop to 6.7 annual visits a year. We have entered their ecosystem and have become part of their habit.
One plus one is equaling 6.7 when we get them in this ecosystem. It's a profound impact this multi-channel approach has on frequency and penetration when we get them in this ecosystem. Let's take a look at the different ways we're doing that from a scale basis. I want to talk about the loyalty program, which you guys have heard about for a couple of years. We spent two years in-market, quietly, with the Dine Rewards program, refining, figuring it out before we launched it nationally in mid-2016. Since that time, the growth in Dine Rewards has been extraordinary. Nothing short of extraordinary. From 1.5 two and a half years ago to 8.2 million folks in our Dine Rewards program. It's an award-winning, highly successful loyalty program. You all know the benefits of loyalty. When you see the numbers, it becomes quite stark.
This is just a simple contrast, okay, between non-member average behavior and Dine Rewards member average behavior. Annual visits for non-members, 1.5, typically one concept, their 12-month spend, $81. In the Dine Rewards universe, 5.3 average visits, 1.3 concepts. Our whole goal to cross-fertilize and introduce a Carrabba's users to an Outback user and then to a Fleming's user is working. The difference between 1 and 1.3 is a big deal on a portfolio basis. Then look at the 12-month spend, $270 almost, $269. You might be saying, "Well, sure, that makes sense. Your heavy users are part of your loyalty program, so it's just the same people." That's not what's happening. Our frequency increases are happening across customer segments. This is not just a heavy user program that we're subsidizing the 11-plus consumers.
If you take a look at the segmentation, on the left, we have segmented customers that visit us one time a year, two to three times per year, four to 10 times per year, and then 11+ times per year. In 2007, these Dine Rewards members, when they stayed engaged in 2018, we saw increases in every single sector. The one-time user increase, the two to four, the 4- 10, and the 11+. This is not a heavy user strategy. When they stay engaged in Dine Rewards, our light users become heavier users, or heavier users become super users. It also does another thing, which is really key, and you saw that in the margin walk with Dave. It allows us and fuels the personalized engine, that one-to-one.
No more mass offers that aren't really targeted and are usually too rich for half of the people because you're rewarding turn behavior anyway. Being able to talk directly to your customer and knowing everything about their behavior and what they buy and when they buy and how they want to see it, you're able to drive very profitable traffic growth. Here's an example of offers that we have sent over the past year to our Dine Rewards members as segmented by their behavior. There's not one size fit all. There's no one offer fits all. For the one times per year, the annual, we send them a time-based offer for a high-risk lapse cohort. Program works, visit three times, get 50% off your fourth visit in six months. Visit three times in six months.
If they're in that light user and they're right up against rolling off of that, we'll send a reminder and a way to get that other visit in there. We don't need to send that to the entire database. For the customers visiting us two to three times a year, we're sending them another suggestion of ways to use us and another occasion that they didn't know about. Remember Dave said the percentage of people, I think it was 40%, that went to Bonefish brunch hadn't been to Bonefish? We're sending our two to three times users, and by the way, there's no discount on this. There's no offer. There's only one points offer on this page or visit offer, and that's to the light users. Everything else is just telling them about what we have. It's not dropping an FSI coupon and getting that out there.
We're sending them that to remind us, "Hey, you can use us for brunch now." You're getting in your 4- 10 times users, they're very significant customers. We're telling them, our heaviest spend users across our CDR segments, about Thanksgiving at Fleming's for the higher spenders across our casual dining brands. We're seeing significant benefits to Fleming's from among our broad base of casual dining consumers, because when they want to celebrate something special or do that, we're keeping them in the family. With our heaviest user and our most loyal user, we're just reminding them. This isn't a discount. This is what is currently in the store. We're saying, "Hey, remember you ate this LTO last year and you loved it? It's back." It's simply a reminder.
This is the way we're getting significantly improved ROIs for the marketing that we're spending. As this database and capability evolves, so will the traffic and comps that follow that. I want to shift now away from loyalty and personalization to digital. You hear that word a lot, right? We've just talked about 11 hours on our phone or 11 hours of screen time. I want to take you through some of the investments that we've made in transition over the last four years. By the way, there's more to come because the one thing you know about the customer landscape, it's changing rapidly, and that our focus going forward is to always be where they are. We significantly improved the digital order experience. I hope you've had the opportunity to order online from Outback or Carrabba's.
All new site design, we significantly reduced the number of clicks to order from 14 to six. Not surprisingly, what this did was we saw a conversion increase, we made it easier to shop, add to the cart faster, checkout, and it also had upsell opportunities that worked. We are continuing to optimize our media and shift where it makes sense from TV to digital. TV will always be an important part of our mass awareness. You can see when you more surgically allocate your media dollars, you get a higher ROI relative to the money you're spending. In traditional TV, it's about a seven and a half annual inflation rate. Because consumption is declining, you see ROIs are typically declining in that area.
When you move over to the digital assets in the digital realm, more and more supply is becoming available, consumption continues to go up, and you can imagine the ROIs when you're talking directly to them in the environment they want to talk to you. This is going to be something we will continue to evolve because it's where the customer is going. That has enabled us to get much more efficient and effective with our advertising dollars. You can see from 2014 through 2018, we've increased our ROI while reducing our ad spending. We did not set out to actively reduce ad spending. We set out to optimize our spending and our ROI. We will continue when we find assets and strategies that have ROIs of 130 and 160. Those are all margin-accretive things, and we will continue this evolution.
You will see, as we get smarter, this will increasingly become an opportunity area for us to do, to get more with less. Where do we see this going forward? Our line of sight and our objective, very clearly, is from today, we see ourselves going to 2x the Dine Rewards as a percentage of volume. It's going to be through in-restaurant acquisitions, new benefits and curated experiences, and complete integration with our digital assets. We see our digital order volume growing at least 3x from new user experiences and platforms, marketing and merchandising, and new growth areas. Mike talked about the new catering site for Carrabba's. We're working on getting online ordering capability for Bonefish Grill because of customer demand. Here's the good news. When you order online versus phone, the order is higher, not surprisingly.
This has a virtuous effect and virtuous cycles. Again, two strong customer platforms that we have built that provide tailwinds for the entire portfolio. When you put it together, you have a construct for growth for the next three to five years that we feel is unique and sustainable. You have the differentiation that you're going to continue to put in because there's a lot of vibrance and experience that you can win within, and then you've built the assets to extend beyond and that provide the tailwind on a scale basis for the entire portfolio. It's going to be about, number one, though, core experience, right? I want to ensure you that we are not distracted. As you can imagine, as Gregg says, guess what? I know there's a lot of concern that when they execute off-premise, does that take away from the in-house, right?
Our top customer-rated off-premise restaurants are our top-rated dine-in restaurants, right? When something is working on all cylinders, it's working, and when they're getting behind it, okay? This is an incremental occasion. We haven't seen any degradation. In fact, we've seen the opposite. It's like the old adage, if you want something done right, give it to a busy person. We're seeing that exact thing happening. It's enhancing the overall dine-in and dine-out experience. We're going to continue to keep people in our ecosystem with loyalty, and we're going to be able to use that data to speak with them directly in a more efficient manner through our digital platform while they're enjoying us in the restaurant and off-premise.
This is what we mean when we say win within and extend beyond, and what is going to carry us for the next three to five years with the targets that Dave shared with you. We are really excited to move into the Q&A section, I want to leave you with some thoughts, it's where we started. Great brands are alive and well in casual dining and thriving. You give them great experiences, they come, traffic increases. The blurring of lines between CDR and other dining options is an opportunity. It presents significant growth opportunity. Our strategy is very simple. It's where we put our resources, our assets, and you've seen this management team. It is to win within casual dining and extend beyond to where the customer's going and wants us to go. We have made the portfolio investments to drive growth.
They are largely behind us. We have pulled out the discounting. Now it is time to monetize that activity. We have a step change in the customer platform. We are at an inflection point for growth and margin. As I hope you have seen today, we have, in my opinion, this is the right team. We have the best team in the business to continue this momentum. That is why, for me, after the incredible privilege of 10 years of leading this amazing organization, I made the difficult decision because I believe this company and there's nothing more fun than working with these people and these brands, to retire and become executive chairman. Because there's two things you want to do when you're a CEO. You want to leave a company better than you found it and in great place.
Hopefully, you got a sense of that today. Our sustainable growth plan is there. Most importantly, you want to make yourself replaceable and leave it with a world-class team with just the right leader, with the right skills to lead it to the next era of growth, that's what we've done. I want to welcome back to the stage one of my favorite people and an extraordinary leader and our new CEO, Dave Deno, to help lead us through Q&A.
Thank you, Liz.
We'll do the official overhand tag.
Thank you very much. Well, now, Liz and I and our leaders will be involved with Q&A, happy to take questions from the group.
Yes.
Brian.
Brian Vaccaro with Raymond James. Can you just clarify the long-term margin target that you said? The bar chart in your slide seem to suggest a fairly equal contribution from sort of each of the five opportunities. Is that the correct interpretation or perhaps there's a tighter way to think about that? Specifically on G&A, Dave, 6.7%, I think, in 2018 is where that settled out. Where do you see that over the next few years?
Yeah. On the margin target, we talked about 7%. We did not want to quantify piece by piece by piece by piece by piece because they'll play a varying role each year. I don't know, Brian, for sure if they will be equal. I do know on the supplier management and food management piece, that's a big opportunity for us. G&A dollars will come down. I don't want to get locked into today a G&A as a % of sales at the end of this journey, but I do know that G&A dollars will come down each year. That'll be part of our equation as well. What we wanted to do when we show the chart going from 4.6%-7% is to show you the levers to get there.
What I didn't want to do today was go like, "Okay, this much is $22 million, this much is $25 million." Each of those will be an important part of our process. Each of those have the processes and technology and people in place to help achieve those. They will be part of our journey to get from 4.6%-7%. Andrew?
Great. Thanks. I know in the past that you've been kind of hesitant to do this, can you talk about maybe gross versus net productivity savings, how much that actually falls to the bottom line? Secondarily, in the past, you've talked about the margin target as kind of a spread to the industry. Peers have had trouble maintaining their margins as is. How comfortable are you now with the 7%, even if the industry is going to have declining margin structure?
Well, I can't speak to the industry and speak to other companies. I can speak to what our plans are and the conviction that 7% margin goal has for our company. The pieces, getting back to Brian's question, the pieces that we're going to have to get there. We have come together as a team and identified those areas that I talked about today, and we feel that 7% is the appropriate target for us to achieve, and we will achieve 50 basis points a year in margins with a big down payment in Q4, as you saw that, but 50 basis points a year in margins. Now, how much of that will be reinvested in the business through productivity? Go back to that one chart I told you about. Productivity plus pricing will more than offset inflation. Okay?
Some of that productivity will be used to help us on the pricing side, along with traffic. Also, even though the large investments are behind us, we still want to invest in this business from time to time, right? That $50 million is not a net number. We will use some of it to offset inflation and also help us with some investments behind the business, but it will be a very big part of our productivity journey, excuse me, margin journey going forward in our algorithm.
Jeff Bernstein from Barclays. Two questions. Just one on the comp. You're talking about 1.5%-2% for the next number of years. Obviously, if you look back over the past few years, that wasn't necessarily easy to achieve. I know you achieved it in 2018, but it was tougher in the years prior. I'm just wondering how you think about the industry when you think about that 1.5%-2%. What kind of directional trend are you assuming for the industry over the next few years? Is that a sustainable target? My other question was just on the U.S. portfolio. You talked about how you have four wonderful brands. Carrabba's, there was no mention of unit growth. Bonefish, there wasn't specifics on it, but you talked about the potential for growth.
It does seem like there are other brands that are seemingly available across the casual dining space. Just wondering, Dave, how you think about over the next number of years, whether this is the size of the portfolio or maybe an additional brand would help to sustain this type of growth.
You want to take the sales piece first?
Sure. As you know, from 2010- 2015, we did pretty significantly outperform the industry, and it's not like two-plus comps are something we haven't seen. We had a rough 2015 and 2016, but 2017 and 2018. I would say, maybe I'm a year off, but seven of the last nine years, I like our batting average versus the industry. You've seen what we did during that time to invest ahead of growth. I think we feel that's a very good number, and we hope this morning we gave you enough granular detail to support why we felt really good about that number and how it would continue, whether it was incremental opportunities, doubling down on the brands, and investing in things that drive the top line.
I don't want to rehash the morning, we feel so confident in our growth levers, and we've shared a lot of line of sight into why we feel confident about those growth levers, what the multiplying effect is when you move into loyalty, what the multiplying effect is when you move into delivery. On the margin question, there's all these questions about, restaurants don't like delivery because it kills their margins. Not us. We like delivery. We're making money on delivery. It's a profitable sale for us, and it's going to continue to flow through. It's going to continue to contribute to the margins. In terms of the tightly edited portfolio, I'll let Dave.
Sure.
Since he's going to be leading this tightly edited portfolio, I'll let him take that.
Sure. I want to mention the first thing about that is the first statement out of Liz's mouth today on the first slide. Great brands in casual dining are alive and well, we have four great brands. We think we have a tightly edited portfolio. I think you see today, this management team in front of you, we have a fantastic management team, and that is the opportunity to build scale within our brands. Before I get into the portfolio a little bit further, I just ask all investors and analysts, please, we tried to lay out today the Brazil business. It is spectacular. Pierre is here. You'll be able to see him during lunch. When we talk about scale, we're talking about global scale. Global scale, not just U.S. scale.
As far as future plans go, I think the best thing and all I can say right now is a couple things. One, we have the people and the cash flow to be a very strong company in this business. That affords us a lot of different opportunities. Am I today going to say that we're on an acquisition hunt or anything like that? No, I'm not going to say that. On the other hand, I think you'd be pleased to know as an investor and analyst, that we ask those questions very carefully each and every day, we have game plans as to what we would like to do. Jeff, what makes me so happy as the CEO of the company is we have the financial muscle, the cash flow, the team and the brands. That offers us a lot of flexibility.
If you look at our past, we've been proactive in making an appropriate divestiture or trying to get involved in new lines of business or doing an acquisition in Brazil or selling Korea. This is a very proactive team, but we love our portfolio. Absolutely love it.
The only thing that I would add on the Carrabba's front is that this is a team that can do anything, but we can't do everything, and we can't do everything at the same time. Carrabba's has enormous growth in the 240+ stores they're in, between catering and off-premise and what they're doing. From a priority basis, you saw from us what we're contemplating for new stores. The other thing is, just the reality is, as you guys know, is that the competition for A quality sites are such that we are moving as fast as we can to get the Outback reloads up and those new restaurants. If there's some capacity that eventually shakes out of the industry, that will free them up should it make sense from an ROI standpoint.
[Sure. It's for Nick]. Do you think because your menus are pretty protein-rich, that you have an opportunity to target certain diets like paleo and keto to be the go-to place that people who follow that, because people who follow certain diets do have a difficult time eating out, and if you become a more friendly restaurant to that diet, you could drive traffic because it is a main focus today in people's eating habits.
Yeah. Great question. We are always looking at ways to be trend appropriate and provide folks with how their eating has shifted. As you've seen since the calories have been put on the menu, we get a lot of comments about, "Wow, I didn't realize you had so many.
Right.
40% of your entrees at such a lower calorie level than we would've thought," right? You hear a lot about the Bloomin' Onion, but when you go menu by menu, there's a lot of really healthy ways to eat and better options and ways to eat across the portfolio. Our first thing with customers to cater to their dietary is to provide transparency. That's one, and to provide menu selection, and we have a lot of things in the healthy area. We do talk specifically, which I think is a great point. With our personalization efforts, to folks that we know enjoy eating that way. Bonefish does a great job, communicating the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, our fresh fish, and how that is.
We also make sure that folks are allowed, regardless of what angle they're taking to maintain their lifestyle, that they can find it on our menus. We're kind of addressing it that way. At the end of the day, though, our most important thing is to provide people with an incredible experience when they come out to dine and connect with family and friends and enjoy that time.
Yeah. Brandon Sonnemaker, JP Morgan. Dave, thinking about.
Yeah.
The international business today, 8.5% EBIT margin. In the five pieces that you gave on getting to that consolidated EBIT margin target, assuming the international business is roughly one-fifth of that, it wouldn't imply that international business, and mixing at 20% today, would imply that international business getting to a low double-digit operating income margin. Is that the right way to think about it? I guess, where do you see the international business trending long term from an EBIT margin perspective?
I think they have the opportunity to continue to grow their margins where they stand today. They're already blessed with very high margins. I think you'll see a significant basis point improvement, much like you're seeing in the U.S., and I think you'll see them becoming a larger part of our portfolio as far as the profitability that they derive. What I won't do is say, at the end of three to five years, they'll be this particular margin or this percent of our portfolio. But I can tell you they have the same margin targets and the same margin growth opportunities that the rest of the U.S. does. As you mentioned, they already have very high margins compared to the U.S. business. That's why we're so excited about what's happening in Brazil.
Yeah. Then just one follow-up on delivery. Delivering 375 Outbacks, 115 Carrabba's currently.
80% of that is direct, you mentioned, the other 20% with third party. I believe just this past week, you partnered with DoorDash to deliver via Bonefish.
Could you discuss why direct deliver and why do some third party? Discuss why you are confident that this is not sacrificing the in-restaurant experience. Could you talk about the beverage-led decline in average ticket from delivering via [Peter].
On the experience, we watch it extremely carefully within our restaurants, the dine-in experience and the delivery experience. We're very pleased to say that those scores, people that have delivery, those dine-in sales growth and dine-in scores are just as good as the rest of the system. Our very top restaurants are some of the very top restaurants in delivery. That's number one. Number two, as far as where we expect the delivery business to go, and will it not cannibalize or hurt our base business and who wants to use this delivery platform going forward. We have different customers that use delivery in different ways. My daughter, a 27-year-old Washington, D.C., resident, is very much, "I want to use that app, that third-party app." That's a customer we need to reach as well.
We're testing that because if a customer wants it, we will provide it. What we're thrilled about is we've taken the time and effort to build the delivery occasion within our company to deliver direct, because that's, we're finding, what the customer prefers. We'll have both available.
Right.
to people. Now, on DoorDash with Bonefish, it's a test that we're doing. We didn't talk much about delivery with Bonefish today. That doesn't mean that Bonefish someday wouldn't be doing some delivery, and just how agile and flexible we are as a company to see if DoorDash may work for Bonefish. We're blessed with both the in-house capability to do delivery and the experimentation with partnerships we think can really come together.
Yeah. I had two questions. The first was just on the G&A dollars declining over time. Is that going to come from corporate headcount or field headcount, or is there some other area of the G&A structure that you see a big opportunity?
Yeah. Where we've been seeing it, I really have to give a hats off again to our accounting organization. They've done a fabulous job. It's mainly in our infrastructure areas as we use technology to move forward. The stuff the customer doesn't see. We're not gonna sacrifice proper spans of control management and stuff like that out in the field. If you look at the infrastructure opportunity in our company, and as we continue to work on fewer and better things and make bigger bets, efficiencies will come there as well. It's mainly the stuff that the customer does not see that we are working on, and we've had some excellent work done by the accounting organization and some of our supply chain organization on this, and that we can leverage that going forward.
Thank you. Then just a second question, just on the delivery business. I think you said I don't know if you said it was dollar accretive or margin accretive today. Is there a minimum order size or ticket size that would make a delivered order margin accretive, and how are you allocating those costs?
Yeah, no. We allocate the cost like we allocate any other transaction. There is a break-even at the restaurant level, number of orders per week. We're well above that. Because it's incremental, the flow-through on that incrementality, because in the restaurant business, in-restaurant dining, you get a 40% flow-through. With delivery, the margins aren't quite as high as that, but given the flow-through, not only are we profitable today, but we expect it to be and expect to continue to be margin accretive as we go forward. That's part of our sales growth and margin story.
Okay.
Jeff Farmer, Gordon Haskett. Just a couple of follow-ups. You guys have added roughly 600,000 Dine Rewards customers per quarter for the better part of the last three years. How are you going about acquiring those customers?
If you go back to what we were talking about doubling it, because that's where we see this going, and you're right, Jeff, it has been a very sustainable rapid clip every single quarter. We use a couple things. In-store acquisition. Really wired the minute you walk in, when you sit down, the meet and greet, continue to sign up that way. We integrate it into all of our digital assets, and put it in all of our advertising. It just continues to grow. We're going to continue that march. We see a very clear line of sight to doubling the current loyalty members. We also will have interesting ways to refer a friend and the typical things you use.
Honestly, for competitive purposes, I don't really want to get into more detail than that on how we're going to continue to drive it, but it's pretty clearly the areas you'd expect.
Okay, that's helpful. Just two follow-ups. Liz, I don't think you want to get into this, but doubling that volume, are you willing to share what that volume is right now as percent of your mix?
We've shared an awful lot of numbers today, I feel like, Jeff. We need to leave something for Dave and the team for the next investor meeting.
Correct. Last question.
Thank you.
Marketing dollars were down 25% over the last four years to roughly $150 million. You touched on it, how much lower do you theoretically see that number going?
Yeah. We're here, Jeff, to optimize our marketing spend. I can tell you as CEO, if we have great digital ROI opportunities, we're spending it.
Yeah.
One of my favorite stories from last year, and you guys all saw the turnaround in Brazil same-store sales in Q4. Through Pierre and his team, we made some digital investments that paid off in a big way. We're going to optimize that marketing spending. Could it go lower? Who knows. Could it go higher? Sure. What I can tell you is we're going to spend it at the highest ROIs, and we're going to spend it if there's a return on investment idea there for me and this team, are going to give it to us and we're going to use it going forward. It's a marketing optimization as we go forward. Yes, sir.
Hi. Thanks. Matt DiFrisco, Guggenheim.
Hey, Matt.
Hi. Question on the incrementality of delivery. What is the threshold where it doesn't become incremental? Obviously, or incremental to margin. At 70% incrementality, I can understand how it's accretive with the flow through, even if it's less than that 40%. What happens when it drops below potentially in years three and four, below 50% or so incrementality?
I don't think we've run necessarily the math on that to say at 30% incremental, is it profitable, 40% incremental, is it profitable, et cetera. Matt, what I can tell you is, and we believe it's going to be a very highly incremental occasion.
Okay.
What we can tell you is if that's where the customer is going, if that's where people are going, we are going to be part of that. We think that is a very big part of the pie that we're very well prepared for. I think I'd even say ahead of the industry as far as being able to capture that. As far as what level of incrementality does it become less than or margin accretive or whatever, we haven't run those numbers, but we will track to see how incremental it is, and we are very thrilled to be out ahead of this important trend in our business.
Yeah. The incrementality has held up. We've been doing this.
Yep.
In some of our stores for two years now. That incrementality has held up because it is rooted in consumer behavior. You're taking that consumer and you're putting it in the $750 billion segment that they wouldn't even consider you. I guess just one thing I would say about cannibalization. Let's say if you don't cannibalize yourself, then someone else will. If that's where the customer's going, you need to go there as well. We think the incrementality will hold up, and we also think by having an omni-channel approach where very similar to retail, you can get me in club stores, you can get me in C stores, however you want to shop. We're going to be available in third party. We're going to have direct. By having an omni-channel approach where they want, when they want and how they want it.
The overall piece of the pie is going to be incremental. There will be some overlap. You saw when we do get you in for delivery, I hope you saw the one plus one plus one is equaling six and seven. That's the multiplier effect that we're getting as well because you're entering their ecosystem. That incrementality has been one number that we've seen really hold up strong.
Just a question on franchising domestically. I know Korea obviously has been a nice little turnaround and it's a franchise model now. What about some of the lower margin brands domestically? If you're going to be challenged, say a couple of years down the road with the 50 basis point improvement, have you vetted out what levels, how low do margins have to get at certain brands to consider maybe franchising them?
Yeah, Matt, our core competency is owning and operating company restaurants. That's who we are and that's what we believe in. That doesn't mean that we won't franchise restaurants in certain parts of the country. We did a very large deal a couple of years ago with a very strong franchise partner. We're contemplating, we disclosed about contemplating one right now with Carrabba's. That is not a change in strategy. It's basically where do we best go to market in the United States and how do we use our franchise partners to do that? Our core strategy and competency remains owning and operating company restaurants. We'll franchise from time to time in certain U.S. markets and we'll continue to develop new company restaurants in other certain markets.
Michael Halen, Bloomberg Intelligence. Can you talk about the difference between the margins on your self-delivered orders versus the third party delivered orders and maybe your self-delivered orders versus a competitor that's paying 15%-20% in fees?
Yeah. Again, I'm not going to talk about competition. I can talk about ourselves and what we see. We enjoy self-direct delivery for a lot of reasons. Profitability, it's much stronger than using third parties. End-to-end service. Our people provide service to the customer end to end, we own the data. Those are three extremely powerful things going forward, that gives us the flexibility to deliver direct, also experiment with our partners, with third-party partners, potentially, for the other customers. We are very happy with the profitability of the direct model and how that compares against the third-party model.
Right over here.
Yeah. Hey, hi there.
Hi. Jon Tower, Wells Fargo. Just a question on free cash flow. I think it said in the presentation, approximately $100 million of annualized free cash flow. I was just hoping you could walk us through that. I would've thought with the margin improvement that you've laid out, getting from 4.6%- 7%, that number would be a little bit higher. Especially with the $200 million in CapEx, is there something else that you can explain to us that gets to that $100 million?
No, I always like the at least number as we go forward, Jon. I think on allocating free cash flow, we have done a lot of share repurchases. We've done some dividends, and we've done some debt pay-down. Given our multiple, you saw the story today. You've seen our multiple versus the rest of the industry. We've been in the marketplace looking at share repurchases over time. Right? We're not going to disclose when and where and how, any of that kind of stuff. Given our multiple, it's something we've got to continue to look at. So you can expect the $100 million. That's certainly our goal as we go forward, and our goal is to exceed that in the coming years.
Hi, Mike Gallo, C.L. King. One difference from, I think, the last time you gave the presentation, I guess it was four or five years ago. You had a lot more emphasis on lunch. It was something.
Yep.
I don't think you spent much, if any, time talking about. How should we think about the emphasis on lunch going forward? Should we expect to see most of the focus just continue to be on dinner? Has that helped in terms of reduction in management turnover and just better execution at dinner? Is delivery an area that is more incremental at lunch or dinner at this point?
On the lunch business, we didn't talk much about today, but I can tell you that we love it. It's growing. It's a big part of our business. Dave Schmidt talked about the brunch occasion on the weekends at Bonefish. We can tag lunch if we want. We can deliver lunch. We have all kinds of flexibility there. This happened under Liz's watch before I got here. I am so glad we rolled lunch because it gets a whole new day part that's growing for us, and it's growing in the category as well. It will continue to get our attention. It'll continue to grow for us, and it'll continue to be a big part of our business.
The only one thing is on delivery with lunch versus dinner, both big opportunities. I think you see the catering menu that Carrabba's is doing presents a lot of opportunity for office delivery and small and large order party delivery. That typically tends to be a lot of lunch and meetings. The bulk of our ticket delivery in the restaurant is absolutely at dinner, just because most people are working in there. Large party catering, typically at lunch, opportunity at dinner, and dinner tends to be exactly what you'd expect, more delivery.
Yes, Jeff.
Just similarly looking back to the four years ago Investor Day, back then when you were trying to convince people about the sales opportunity and your momentum in sales, it seems like you've demonstrated that over the past number of quarters, and now the margin is getting more attention. With that as a backdrop, I know four years ago, the talk was the goal was to get to eight. Obviously, the industry's gotten a little tougher from a margin perspective, so seven is the new eight, presumably. It still seems like there's 200, 250 basis point opportunity. It's been tough for the past four years to get much of the margin improvement. Yet you've achieved the $50 million+ in cost savings every year.
as you demonstrated. Now it seems like labor pressures are higher, not lower. I'm just wondering, obviously, you have confidence in the different levers, there was similar confidence a number of years ago. Just trying to echo what you think is the biggest difference between four years ago, whether it's just the comp that really is a runaway and it's much easier, or because it seems like some of the pressures are higher, not lower, and it's been tough over the past few years.
Yeah. Two things, Jeff. Gregg Scarlett did such a fantastic job laying out Bonefish. We needed to make investments in the business. We determined that two and a half years ago or so, and that is now behind us in our base, and we're monetizing that opportunity through better comps. That is probably the biggest change. The second big change, Jeff, is the quality of the comp. We worked really, really hard, and these brand presidents had to step through the journey of taking discounting out. I remember talking to Beth at Fleming's. "Why are we paying $6 for a burger in Pasadena, California? We got to get out of" It's these kind of things that we've worked so hard at. It's a higher quality comp going forward, and it's the fact that the investments were made over the last two to three years.
You saw all those investments today, be it at Outback, be it digital, et cetera. That has set us up to such a bright future.
Any others? Okay.
Okay.
Great. You're in for a real treat. We're going to invite Chef Pleau up to talk to you about what you're going to be eating. After that, Dave, I think, just has some parting words. Cliff.
Thank you, Liz.
Give us the yummy stuff.
Thank you, Dave. I get to answer the best question of the day. What's for lunch? It's an honor and a pleasure to be with you today. We've been cooking and you've talked a lot about Bloomin' Brands, now you're going to get to taste a little bit about what's been being said. I could let you know that there's a lead culinarian from each one of the brands here putting their best foot forward. They each picked out what they think represents us to give you a taste of lunch. If you'll indulge me for a second, I'll walk you through that. One, I have the opportunity to let me work your taste buds so you can start to think about it, right? From Bonefish today, you're going to taste a cobia.
It's going to have a tropical salsa with a little bit of shrimp in that salsa, a little bit of mustard sauce as a cold starter. With that, a signature Bang Bang Shrimp. Who doesn't like Bang Bang Shrimp? You're going to share that together. From Carrabba's, you're going to have a taste of Chicken Bryan and a little bit of pasta with that has a savory pancetta and tomato to it. This morning I woke up and said, "I wonder who Bryan is." I got the answer. You may or may not know, but Bryan is the town in Texas where the founders moved, and they became strawberry farmers and later figured out that Sicilian food would do good. That was the little story. That's the short side of that, but really tasty stuff.
From Outback, you're going to taste the brand-new enhanced filet that we've been working on. It's a barrel cut. We've put with that a little bit of the pecan blue cheese salad just to make sure you got some veggies in the mix. While you're having that, we're going to share with you two different tomahawks, two groups come together. The Fleming's team and the International team are both seeing different kinds of success. Beth came up with this Tomahawk Tuesday thing. From International, you'll taste the Korean version of a beef tomahawk. It's 35- 40-ounce tomahawk. From Fleming's, the new pork tomahawk. I think we call this the Chancellor's Cut. It kind of sounds cool, right? We figured that would be enough, so for dessert, you got a little cookie to take home with you.
Because if you don't eat it, someone at home will like that a lot. I'll just go out there and say that everybody in town is going to eat lunch today, but I'm pretty sure no one's going to eat better than you do. Enjoy yourselves. Lunch, I think, is straight out those doors and straight down the hall. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Chef Cliff. If I just may say one quick thing. First of all, thank you very much for coming today. As you can tell, we are extremely excited about our company. We have an incredible management team. The good news is Liz may be stepping down as CEO, but she's not saying goodbye. I've had the chance to be in the restaurant business over 30 years, and there is no executive that I've enjoyed working with more, that has taught me so much, than Liz Smith. I look forward to continuing our partnership, me as the CEO and Liz as the Executive Chair. I just want to thank Liz for everything that she's done for our company.
I think the question that I get from time to time is, "Okay, Dino, what's your value add here?" I think what I will try and bring going forward as the CEO is, I firmly believe in standing on the shoulders of people before me in any job I've ever done. We've had wonderful CEOs in our company, and Liz has worked so hard to get our company in this spot, and we're so grateful to her. One thing I do bring is 30 years of restaurant experience, both in the U.S. and internationally. A very large portfolio of experiences, both in operations and finance and in brand management. I've had the chance to work on delivery. I've had the chance to work on international.
I've had a chance over the last seven years to get to know all these people and all these great leaders in our company. I've had a chance to really understand the history and culture of our company as we go forward. I'm personally going to capitalize on that and use that to our advantage because we have a fantastic history and a fantastic culture. I appreciate very much to Liz and the board for the opportunity to be the CEO of the company. I hope to use my experiences in taking the company forward. I look forward to working with all of you as I've done some of you for many, many, many years. I think after today you see that the opportunity in our company is fantastic. Thank you very much for coming, and we look forward to seeing you in the future.
Thanks again and enjoy lunch.