Okay, we're ready. Hi, everyone. John Ivankoe with JP Morgan. Happy to kick off the afternoon session with Black Rock Coffee Bar. Very happy to have the company's Chief Executive Officer, Mark Davis, Chief Financial Officer, Rodd Booth, join us. This was a September 2025 IPO led by JP Morgan. Very happy to have the gentlemen for our first public conference together, and look forward to hearing about this story. You know, I think many people in the room, many people on the call have not had the opportunity, had the pleasure to visit a Black Rock.
Maybe we can talk about really from your mind what differentiates this business from a customer perspective, and I think the two are related, but what differentiates this business from an employee and partner perspective.
Perfect. Well, first, thank you for having us. We appreciate it very much. When we speak to Black Rock, we are in seven states. We finished last year at 181 units, and we have promised 20% growth. That's part of our guidance that we provided. When you go to a Black Rock, you have the ability to do it through a drive-through. The first place I would start is every store has a drive-through, and then I would go secondarily that they have lobbies. When you think about the lobbies, you think about the ability to use the app, third party in the drive-through, that physically is going to be different, call it 1,800 sq ft or so, but more importantly, our team members are our point of difference.
When you think about our team members, we're very proud of the fact that we run on an industry that's somewhere between 140% and 160% turnover. We on a team member basis will run under 100. Last year we finished at 74, and we're better than that this year. When you think about that great retention, what you end up getting is this outstanding guest satisfaction. Having been in the industry a long time, I've never seen it. We will run in the neighborhood of 92%-94% on guest sat. When you think about that, there's great engagement, great in ownership. One of our pillars is we really invest in the team, teaching the acumen. There's profit sharing. There's a scorecard that drives performance.
We do things with our top quartile meeting where we reward them, and all of this drives career versus job. All of that in turn drives this great guest experience. When you look at it on a two-year basis, finished at Same-Store Sales of 19%. On average, we finished the year last year at 10.1. When you think about that, we did it the right way, transaction growth of about 6.4. All of that is driven around this great barista, this great engagement, drives frequency, drives transactions, lifts your sales, which in turn leverages into profitability.
Thank you for that. You know, in many companies, I think you view all of your employees as key employees, but many companies talk about their general managers as being the, you know, restaurant's number one employee or maybe the position just above the general manager, you know, perhaps as being the number one employee. If you can talk about the role of the manager and the multi-store lead as it were, you know, in terms of, you know, creating the culture and execution of Black Rock and maybe, you know, just explain to us what you are doing is different than many of your peers operating in similar businesses.
Of course. As you look at our structure, we start with we have store leads in the stores that run the stores. One of the points of difference is that, again, open at 5 A.M., close at about 7 P.M., they are able to receive not only hourly pay, but they also receive bonus, they also receive tips. Again, when you look at the store lead turnover, it's gonna be exceptionally strong, and it's gonna be far better than the industry right around 20% or so. When you move as assistant to them, we have assistant store leads, and again, those are the future. When you think about the assistant store leads, they again are hourly paid, they again are able to receive tips, and most important, they're able to receive bonus.
Both store leads and assistant store leads have a target profitability target, and when they grow their sales and leverage, they share in the profitability. There's an ownership and an engagement component that works really, really well. John was good enough to reference this. This is a big point of difference. I haven't seen it anywhere else. We have multi-store leads. If you think about it, if Rodd were promoted from store lead to multi-store lead, he goes from one store to three to four stores. When you think about the three to four stores, Rodd is a multi-store lead, has his hourly salary, so he gets paid hourly. He also receives tips, and then on top of it, he receives bonus.
When you think about this, what that means is if you have four stores as a multi-store lead, you go to each store one time a week, and on the fifth day you have an admin day. What you see is really strong culture. You see great quality of life. They do very, very well from what they earn. On top of it, the best part, and this is different than most of the industry, they work in the store shoulder to shoulder with the store leads. When you think about our growth, we opened 32 stores last year, and we have guided to at least 36 stores this year.
When you think about it, that builds that succession planning pipeline really, really strong. Moving out of multi-store lead, we have area managers who again run, call it 8-10, and again, their whole main job is to cultivate the acumen, the performance, and help those young leaders become better leaders. From a demographic, that group is gonna be somewhere between 19 and about 24 years old. I'll use one example, and this is the best way I can say it. Taylen, who used to run all of California, she had 10 stores. She's 22 years old. Taylen running 10 stores is in Colorado does $1.4 million-$1.5 million, is running a $15 million business, call it on a store level profit somewhere around 25%-28%.
Again, so when you think about that, Taylen at 21 is responsible for about $4 million of profitability. She's gonna have about 100 team members that work for her, running that great retention and that great satisfaction. I think what we're most proud of in the business is if you think back to all of us in the room when we were 21, we did not have that kind of responsibility. Instead of it being a job, it's a giant career. They are on the ground level. They see their ability to grow, and Rodd, in a bit will talk about the profitability and how it has compounded dramatically, and it is because of our baristas and our store leads.
We'll just stay on that just since you mentioned. You know, how has that translated, you know, to your labor costs and it translated into overall margins? I think, you know, there's what's interesting about, you know, about seeing your specific P&L. I'm gonna answer my own question, you know. Black Rock has very low prime costs, which is food and paper plus labor, very high margins, and you're able to do this, you know, by having, you know, a very differentiated, you know, labor and just overall human resource plan. Maybe talk about just how that's actually translating, you know, to the percent margins that we'll see on the income statement.
Yeah, I think, you know, John, and I know we've talked about this for the group. I think the biggest part of that, Mark mentioned it, is really the scorecard. It's really the fact that they are engaged with us every step of the way in building their plan, building their budget for the year, and they get monthly results, and then we also support them with other tools, weekly sales to labor forecasting, where they have the ability to really understand their business and drive the performance. Because they're a part of, you know, Mark said profit sharing, but it's essentially a bonus plan where they understand, "Hey, here's what I'm going after." We help them understand, "Well, here's the opportunities you have to drive the sales. Here's how the company is supporting you.
You support the team, take care of the guests, more profitability, you share in that." What it's really done over the last two or three years is really accelerate the ramp profitability of our stores. More than anything, it's really just giving them the tools and the support to go run their stores like it were their very own. I think that's been a big, big factor to our success.
In taking you public, I mean, you are, you know, just, you know, objectively speaking, still a small business. I think you ended, correct me on my numbers, please don't be shy about this. Ending February twenty-sixth, I think 184 stores, round numbers.
That's correct.
You know, 62 of which are in Arizona. You know, so, you know, really of kind of a market of scale of any size, and we really have Arizona, and I think even Phoenix specifically, you know, within that. So as we think about, you know, you achieving 1,000 stores in seven states by 2035, yeah, I don't think you said that in your prepared remarks. You know, how do we maximize? This is a big question. How do we maximize returns and minimize risk? In other words, you know, how can Phoenix be kind of the, you know, be some of the future success?
Importantly, you know, how can we maybe avoid some of the pitfalls that some of your nearest competition and much of the industry, quite frankly, has experienced as they've tried to expand outside of core markets?
Yeah. I think the biggest opportunity we have. You used, you know, Arizona, Phoenix as the example, while albeit smaller markets, you know, we have other markets that are still growing but doing very well. They're growing their AUVs. They're very profitable. When we think about continuing to scale, it really starts with the team and making sure that we have the people pipeline that matches the development pipeline. Really, as we continue to grow, and I know, John, we've had this conversation more, but it's also we wanna be balanced in everything that we do. You know, we wanna support the team. We're gonna support the guest.
When we think about even development, we want to balance our capital, the different deal types that we do, making sure that as we scale and grow, we're doing it in a responsible way, and we don't find ourselves in a position where you're spending too much on capital, too much pressure on the operating side of the business. It's really balancing the two. I think as we again continue to grow, we use, you know, the learnings from the past markets that have gone really well and continue to leverage those going forward.
Okay. I would like to, you know, stay on this. As part of, you know, the overall story, I think you've done, you know, quite well in your initial stores in Denver. You've done quite well in your initial stores in Austin, yet Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston, I think, you know, and again, this is fair to say, were generally below your expectations. Like a lot of things, right? Doing more of what's working and doing less of what's not working.
Yeah.
That's like a good lesson for life, right?
Yeah
Let's talk about more of, you know, doing more of the good and doing also less of the bad, if we can. Just, you know, overall, just kind of lessons of, in terms of where we can go from here. That's fair.
Do you wanna speak to those markets or?
Sure.
Yeah.
I think for everybody in the room, we run AUV of about $1.3 million. When you look at the two-year comp again, we have comped at about 9%-10% each of the years. Rodd did the earnings call a couple weeks ago, guided that we would be mid-single digit this year, which call was on March second, we feel pretty confident in that number. I think when you look at the markets, there are ways that we plan on closing the gap. You know, Starbucks around 2.1-
Yeah
$2.2 million.
Yeah.
Dutch Bros gonna be around 2.1. Starbucks obviously much older than us. Dutch Bros gonna be 16 years older. When you look at it, there's an awareness component that we're addressing through paid media. We just started that this year. I think you go to the second part of it, loyalty, we launched in April of 2024. At that point, Dutch Bros was number one at 65% of transactions were loyalty. Starbucks was number two at 55%. This would have been April of 2024.
Yeah.
Fast-forward to today, Dutch Bros is at 71. Second in the industry is us at 64%. The digital loyalty that we launched was very, very successful. Now, what I would say to you is, up until December of last year, we had planned on doing segmentation where we would send a drink to each of you specifically, and it would be to your specific drinks that you like. When we got to December, we decided to start segmenting, which meant you're now gonna get the Cold Brew, or you're now gonna get the Americano. Again, prior to that, everybody got the same offer.
Okay.
When you think about that, the segmentation that is going on is now driving more people to come more frequent. Again, we had strong transactions already, but again, this should help. Loyalty check is about a dollar more than non-loyalty check. When you look at loyalty, top quartile comes 10 times a month at least. Quartiles two and three come five times a month. When you think about all of the quartiles, using segmentation to shorten the gaps between and grow loyalty is really important to us. We are doing LTOs, when you look at the LTOs, our most successful LTO last year was a chocolate mocha. Has marshmallow foam, had graham crackers on top. What you can see is those type of new items drive awareness, drive frequency.
We just talked about in the earnings call that we have a Dirty Soda that we are launching with OLIPOP as a partnership. Again, the team loves it, the guests love it, and it's priced accordingly, so there's no trade-down. The idea is to open new avenues. We rolled out Egg Bites. Egg Bites rolled out, let's call it July of last year. When you look at our food mix, our food mix went from 18 months ago, 9% up to 12% today. Again, you've got your awareness, you've got your loyalty, you've got your innovation. As you look at some of the other things that we're doing to drive this, one of the things back to the team members is they understand at a 29% store-level EBITDA, we don't need any more margin.
What we need is to grow the AUV. They are very much incented to what Rodd said earlier, we wanna grow our sales and leverage into more profitability. All those things will drive the company. More density in markets. Colorado a year ago had five, did about $1.4 million. Colorado now has 12, does about $1.5 million. When you think about that helps with that awareness and drives frequency.
Let me ask, since we're on a webcast that, you know, we're being disseminated. Your comments, you know, if you're comfortable with it. Your comments on the first quarter relative to your annual guidance, and many people ask me, you know, to kind of talk about your customer relative to the average customer, Starbucks customer, Dutch Bros customer. What? How would you characterize your customer in being economically sensitive or not? Those are two different but related questions.
I'll take questions, maybe you talk about the quarter, if that works okay.
Sure.
Customer, when you look at our brand, demographic is 18-45, which again is going to be a more mature group than some of our peer group. When you think about that, more disposable income. Here comes the other things that really win for us. When you look at our day parts, we are very consistent through the day, with afternoon being the opportunity. Newer company, people come for breakfast, take the kids to school, come for lunch, and then as you see, as we move through the day, we have opportunity to grow that. When you look at days of the week, we are also very, very strong and very even across the days, which is excellent. Shows that you don't have weak days. I think when you think about our customer, 55% of our mix is coffee.
Coffee is very resilient, and I would go a step further and say that when you look at our peer group, who tends to do more energy, that group is gonna be a little less resilient. When you look at our customer, generally speaking in the past, we haven't felt the bumps, and we've been very predictable and very consistent.
Yeah, I think just in terms of, to your question, John, how's the year started? You know, Mark, you made the comment, but you know, we're happy with how the year started. John, as you said, you know, we have opened three stores through January and February. We have committed to 8 stores for the quarter. We feel very strong about that. I think when you think about those mid-single digit comps, we also feel good that our performance in the quarter supports our projections, our forecast for the year. I think it's been a strong start to the year. I think we've had a lot of learnings from the last year, and we'll continue to build upon that and grow.
It sounds good.
You know, driving awareness through paid media. You know, you're not, you know, broadcast media, probably not some radio, necessarily billboard. Talk about what paid media means in 2026, and talk about maybe what paid media increasingly means in the era of ChatGPT, where maybe the three of us could put together an ad in the afternoon with a couple of key prompts and make it look pretty good. It's kind of amazing how, you know, how quickly kind of the advertising and just overall awareness where it's driving. In opportunities that might be presenting itself in the modern world, if we can.
Paid media, I think first and foremost, is going to drive awareness, and that helps us in a big way. I think if you look around the room and I said, "Show of hands, who's been in a Black Rock?" Our awareness, I think, prior to the IPO was around 9%. When you think about that, as that grows, that helps us with more frequency, more AUV, all the above. The second part of paid media is gonna be around that segmentation that I spoke to earlier, specifically social.
Yeah.
That is gonna be the best way to do it.
Yeah.
I would say generally, and I think we've learned this over the last couple years, we have comped somewhere between, I'm gonna make it up, 8%-12% just about every month over the last 24 months. Ideally, this is part of the reason we guided the way we did, we would love to have mid-single digit comps, and then we would love to have strong store weeks, and together achieve and beat the consensus on revenue and ultimately leverage into our profitability.
What I would say to you more than anything is that because we're a little bit smaller, I'm playing on John's words a little bit, and because we're more nimble, I would say that when we have a person, when we have a market, when we have a region that's not performing the way that we want to, we have the ability through paid media, through social channels, through the marketing, to be able to drive that individual to come in more, to drive the region in a better way, to help push sales or pull back on sales if we're growing at too fast a rate for the stores. I'd go as an example, and I'll use Texas for any of you that are from Texas. Generally speaking, third party plays really well, when we wanna give a lift to Texas, third party has been one of the ways.
Yeah
...that we have come back on marketing and been able to go, "Hey, here's a way we can help elevate awareness, drive more people in." What we see is, while they'll do third party initially, they also come into the lobbies, the drive-throughs, and it works really well.
I could see Rahul looking at me when you said 8%-12% every month for the past 24 months. Is that inclusive of what we have in 2026? I have to ask that question.
I think.
Mark, I'm not doing my job if I don't follow up on that.
No. Here would be the answer. We gave mid-single digits. We gave it on March 2nd. That is 60 days.
Yeah.
You've been a math guy.
Yeah
End of the quarter.
You're the math guy.
I would say generally, Rodd and I would have never committed to beat the consensus if we didn't feel we could do it.
Yep. Okay. All right. That's very helpful. Just so everyone knows, I think we're in the model at 6.5. Correct, Rahul? In the first quarter. Okay. All right. Perfect. Okay. That's very important, you know, to
Sam, our CLO, is back there glaring at me right now, John.
No.
I wanna make sure.
The point is like we're in open disclosure on this call.
Yeah. Yep.
I guess that we can maybe go in some different directions. Okay. You know, I think, like I said, you know, I mean, you've mentioned that, you know, opening three units, like planning to open eight in the first quarter. I don't think, you know, you yourselves were as happy as you would have liked to have been with your Store Weeks, you know, not necessarily in the third, but maybe the fourth quarter. Just talk about pacing development in 2026 into 2027. You know, kind of, we have what's in the pipeline versus what you've committed to, and maybe, you know, how Store Weeks in the future can be an upside surprise and not necessarily, you know, something that's going to be back-end loaded in the quarter, just from a revenue contribution perspective.
Yeah. You know, Mark mentioned this on the call a couple of weeks ago, and we've certainly had conversations with some of you in the room about this. When we think about the pacing of our stores, how we're modeling out the year, the cadence of eight 10 nine nine for the 36. You know, the first quarter, we are still back weighted in the quarter. One of the things, in terms of weeks and how we're continuing to think about this, obviously, we would like very consistent pacing throughout the year. A little bit back weighted in the first quarter in terms of more stores opening in March.
As you think about the 10, the nine, and the nine, one of the things we've done, you know, spent a lot of time on, is continuing to develop our real estate pipeline. We feel really good about the stores. The issue has never been the stores, it's more the predictability of when they open.
Yeah.
Historically, we've done a lot of build-to-suit deals, very capital friendly, but you kind of lose because we aren't managing the build side. You kind of lose that predictability on when that store is gonna deliver. Still feel great about the store. Store's still gonna open. You may have just had said, "Hey, I want it to open February first.
Yeah.
...but now it's opening four, five, six weeks later." One of the things we've done to continue to invest in our pipeline is to, you know, execute more of these reverse build-to-suit type deals where we find the GC, we manage the project through the build, and what we found is that'll continue to help us stay ahead of the weeks. Also when we have quarters where stores have been pulled forward, we have the ability to shift stores up and down more than we historically have. 'Cause ultimately, again, going back to balance, predictability, we would like better pacing and consistency throughout the quarters. First quarter is gonna be a little more back weighted, but I think as we move through the remainder of the year, second, third, and fourth quarter, you'll see that you know more consistently.
Okay. I wanna, you know, talk about capital. I think, again, correct me, I think you ended the first quarter with around $28 million cash. Does that sound right?
Correct.
Okay, perfect. You know,
Fourth quarter.
Okay. All right. I actually show it as the, yeah, of course. Sorry.
Yeah.
I don't remember what the hell quarter I'm in. Fourth quarter, you know, very similar numbers, by the way we showed you in the first.
Yep.
You know, $28 million in the fourth quarter of cash. I shouldn't curse. That's like a curse word on a conference call. $28 million in the fourth quarter of cash. You guided to a CapEx number $40 million-$41 million in 2026. I do wanna use this opportunity. You know, that CapEx number is inclusive or exclusive of reverse build-to-suits? Where I wanna go with this is, as you think about future capital plans-
Mm-hmm
you know, your ability to hit your stated growth rate, you know, comfortably, you know, using a combination of cash flow from operations, reverse build-to-suits, you know, a few ground leases, and also straight build-to-suits, you know, your ability to hit your capital plans within your current capital structure.
Yeah. I'd say we feel really good about that. You know, I had made the comment a couple weeks ago, when you think about that $40 million-$41 million, that's inclusive of the TIs or the landlord contributions that we would receive. As we've done and kind of pivoted more to these reverse build-to-suit type deals, what makes them more attractive is we have better visibility into the delivery times. We have more control over that. More capital upfront. If you thought about a typical reverse build-to-suit deal, it's about $1.7 million in capital. We would pay for that. Obviously, once the store is open, once you get your certificate of occupancy, lien waivers are removed, we've got about $1 million of contribution coming back from the landlord. We're still in that about net $700,000 of capital per store.
The reason why you're seeing the bigger jump than probably we had originally-
Yeah
modeled in 2026 was we had executed more of those leases. What you have is it's the first year we have more capital for the 2026 pipeline, but you also have about $15 million of capital for the 2027 pipeline, and then you have some contribution from the fourth quarter openings that are rolling into 2027. Really, in the future, what you'll see is you're gonna roll some of the capital from one year to the next, but you're also rolling some of the TIs that are collected typically in stores that you'll open in the fourth quarter into the first quarter of the following year.
It's, you know, moving pieces that obviously.
Yeah
You know, attention to detail is important in this way. Is there a year in your mind, a year that you're comfortable talking about, where, you know, free cash flow neutral, you know, and again, this is on a-
Yep
on a net CapEx basis after proceeds
Yep
Received from reverse build-to-suit. Free cash flow neutral and even free cash flow positive. What? Where are we thinking?
Yeah, I mean, it is a giant focus for our team and for our company. I think our biggest opportunity to achieve that is, again, to continue to manage the average build cost per store per year. You know, if you go back to 2025, the average build cost was about $650. It's gonna be about $700 in 2026, and we're gonna continue to manage that and monitor it, you know, where we're balancing it with our overall profitability of the business. I think in 2026, it's probably a stretch to say that we would be near free cash flow positive, but certainly 2027, 2028, we'd be closer to neutral, and then beyond that, we would look to be free cash flow positive.
Okay.
All right. We will make sure that we study the model in 2028 so that's obviously a very good, important goal to have.
Okay. Let's focus or change the focus to think about 2035 development and where those stores will be coming from. We've obviously talked about this, you know, quite a lot, but you know, California as a market, and you know, California's one of the largest economies in the world that happens to be one of the most difficult to do business for a U.S. restaurant company. You know, talk about California being an opportunity for you, what you've done to reduce risk in California. You know, to kind of give a punchline of this, and I think I have the number in front of me.
If you have five or six stores in California currently. Is it five or it's six?
Six.
Six stores in California currently. You expect up to 350 stores in 2035. That's out of 1,000 stores that you wanna have in 2035. There is an importance in getting California right. Let's talk about that path of getting it right, and maybe what you can do better that, again, others have really struggled with.
I would start with, if you go back to the original stores that Jeff and Dan franchised, again, we have bought them all back and they're all company now, but the original three stores in California, Oceanside, Escondido, and Vista, were among the highest AUVs, call it $1.6-$1.7, and on a store level, profitability would run north of 30%. Really, really strong. We in California have added three, and when you look at it, those three were conversions, average cost of about $800,000. When you think about that store-level EBITDA and you look at the cash on cash, that's gonna be somewhere between 40%-50%. Really strong performance. That is our customer. We get great transactions. The two new stores or three new stores that we've converted have all done very, very well.
We're looking at, we're in San Diego County right now, but we are moving into Temecula. You'll see it in Orange County, you'll see it in the Inland Empire, and you'll see it in Los Angeles. When you look at the 2026 and 2027 pipeline, there are somewhere between 12 and 15 signed leases. When you think about that, there are more LOIs out there. Again, big push around California. I think the second part of your question, when you look at the markets we developed, 70%-75% are in our really high-performing markets. I would say generally what that does is you get higher AUV, you get higher profitability, more density, and everything grows well. As John pointed out earlier, our three least performing markets would be Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.
They are gonna be closer to $900,000-$1 million in AUV. Still make great money, but they don't contribute to the overall growing the base at the moment. What we've learned is we wanna grow in a very predictable way. If I were to speak to Dallas, for those of you that are familiar with Dallas, Southlake, Arlington, Frisco, Allen, these are gonna be suburbs, and they play really, really well. Where in San Antonio, we went more urban. We have felt it, and we have learned from it. It's not to say that those markets won't be profitable or grow, but again, I think, John Ivankoe, you and I spoke to this.
When you look at all of the markets, the way we have taught the operators is our capital will go where the volume is and where, again, the profitability is. What that does it blocks and tackles for smaller markets where we wanna do it the right way so that we can grow. I made a comment to Rahul earlier that one of the opportunities with a public market is if you grow a DMA too fast and you don't do it well, it is literally the kiss of death from an optics standpoint.
Yeah.
We're trying to balance this in a way where we hit our commitments.
Yeah
We also protect the markets and grow them in the right way.
You know, something like a 2035 target by state is something that obviously has a lot of flexibility in it.
You bet.
You're gonna go where the returns are highest and maybe even where the risk is lowest.
One of the things that you asked earlier and Rodd brought up, to ensure that we hit the Store Weeks, we have to have more in the pipeline.
Yeah.
When you think about that, we learned this the hard way. In November when we had our first earnings call and we had to move four stores, we realized we had to add more stores into the pipeline.
Yeah.
Problem is that doesn't solve Store Weeks in November, nor does it solve Store Weeks in January. What you'll see, to Rodd's point, is those additional stores in the pipeline will come on in the second quarter. We will have that mid-single-digit same-store sales. We'll have the Store Weeks, and in turn will drive the revenue. I think to John's comment, we have said 20% compounding growth, and we don't have any issue with the sites. We've got this fantastic model that works really well. It's making sure we keep up with the people.
Yeah
that we can drive the right culture and experience.
We have one minute 30 left. One of the questions we oftentimes get asked about, and we certainly were making it our own issue, is about competition. You know, we can, you know, focus on a 7 Brew or, you know, or Dutch Bros. because we can see their development in the states in which they're opening and the market in which they're opening. You know, many investors actually bring up Taco Bell or even more pressingly McDonald's that did a big specialty beverage testing in Colorado that's gonna inform their national rollout. You know, you mentioned, you know, this is a case where capital goes to volume and profitability. I think to use your words, we know that. You know, capital chases excess returns.
You make us comfortable that, you know, we couldn't potentially see, even in a short term, you know, a case where we have more supply growth than demand growth and that, you know, affecting you and quite frankly everyone in the industry.
Yeah. I think I would first say that when you look at Dutch Bros, 7 Brew, Starbucks, we respect them very much. I think they do a really solid job. Starbucks is getting better. Dutch Bros had an unbelievable earnings call. Again, all you have to do is read about 7 Brew and what they're doing. I think using my 14-year-old Piper. Piper, when she goes into a store, loves customization.
Yeah.
There is nothing Piper likes more than every day she can walk into high school with a different colored drink. When you look at McDonald's in Colorado, when they tested it, there are four, five, six choices you can have, but ultimately you have very limited-
Yeah
customization.
They're not built to do it.
They're not built to do it. When you look at our two-year comp of 19, call it 9-10 a year, Colorado was better than that and is one of our strongest markets, newest markets, and again, we saw no bump or issue or pain on that.
Yeah.
I would say generally that's a different customer.
Yeah.
I think our ability to be differentiated is why it doesn't affect us.
Thank you very much. That was great.
Thank you.
Time flew.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate everybody very much.