Great. Good afternoon. I'm Dennis Geiger, restaurants analyst at UBS, and I'm pleased to welcome and excited to have with us on stage John Peyton, Dine Brands CEO, Vance Chang, Dine Brands CFO, Lawrence Kim, President of IHOP, and also, in the audience and in meetings today, Matt Lee of Investor Relations. Wanna also thank the team for the IHOP swag mugs.
It's a little bit of a gift, I guess, to everyone that stuck around till 4:30, so we appreciate that team. Dine Brands owns and franchises over 3,500 restaurants globally across family dining, casual dining, and the fast casual categories, including over 200 international restaurants. The brand portfolio includes over 1,800 IHOP locations, over 1,500 Applebee's locations, and about 100 Fuzzy's taco shops, I believe, or so. With that, John, Lawrence, and Vance, thanks so much for being here today. We appreciate it.
Thank you, Dennis.
Maybe we could start just, you know, kind of bigger picture talking about the full-service space, the casual dining space. You know, moving through 2025 and into 2026 even, what, you know, what have you been seeing there as you think about the consumer and the casual dining consumer, and how, in particular, Applebee's and IHOP have been and are positioned?
Yeah. As we think about the consumer, the consumer behavior that we expect in 2026 looks a lot like 2025, which looks a lot like 2024. We're not expecting a significant change, and we would characterize that both for IHOP and for Applebee's that have a very similar customer profile, particularly when it comes to financial and household income demographics, is that they're very value-oriented, right?
Not a surprise. That's been going on for a couple of years. The definition is that they want to know the full cost of the meal and no surprises, which is why our everyday value at IHOP, 2 for $25 at Applebee's have been resonating and driving performance the last couple of quarters.
Terrific. Maybe let's shift over to guidance and 0%-2% on the same-store sales side of things for both brands. Despite some of the weather impacts already this year in the first quarter, can you talk about some of the key drivers supporting that positive same-store sales growth expectation for the year? Do you wanna talk about the guidance generally?
Yeah. I think that the makeup of the guidance, Dennis, what we're planning for is flattish traffic, with a low single digit sort of menu price reflected and a slight offset with mix is kind of the makeup of that guidance.
You wanna talk about the IHOP initiatives that you're planning for the year to drive this traffic?
Yeah. Absolutely. For IHOP in the past year and a half, you've seen a steady focus on value. It's the first time that IHOP has had a consistent set of, you know, of value, especially at a single price point. The offering we have right now is a $6 everyday value platform, and that started this past September, which evolved from a Monday through Friday program, which launched in October 2024.
We're consistently driving that $6 message even into all of 2026. Of course, that complements. We have to complement that with our barbell strategy, which are check-driving initiatives from our innovation platforms. Like, we have, you know, this coming March, with. I mean, it's already March now. At the end of this March, from a new omelet that we're launching, a new proprietary coffee blend.
That's why you see some coffee mugs here, so please grab one. Of course, throughout the rest of the year, we have a continuous set of innovation streams that complements the value strategy that we have in place today.
Yeah. At Applebee's, the similar approach. We used to have at Applebee's 10-12 marketing periods a year, each with a different message, each with a different item we were promoting, a different price point. When you're only in market four or five weeks at a time, it's hard for that message to break through. Same is true at IHOP.
Particularly for brands like ours, which, you know, we're not coffee, so we're not seeing our guests four, five, six days a week. We're seeing them two, three, four times a year and, you know, they were missing messages. We've reduced our marketing messages to six to eight a year and focusing at Applebee's on two for $25, which is 2 entrees and an appetizer for $25.
That's our value message throughout the year, which we think is important right now. To keep it fresh and exciting, adding a new entree and a new appetizer each quarter. Back in Q4, we added the Grilled Cheese Cheeseburger, which quickly became our best-selling burger of all time.
Then in Q1, we added the OM Cheeseburger, which is a cheeseburger cut in half and served in a sizzling skillet, so when you pull it up, you get a cheese pull. That is now our best-selling burger of all time, selling 35 burgers per restaurant per day, which is a big number for us and rivals things like the Ultimate Trio and Boneless Wings, and is really good for a new product launch.
It checked all those boxes around what menu innovation is supposed to do, right? You can't make it at home. It's experiential, it was photographable, you know, and unique. That's our plan, is to have that throughout the year in a way to highlight the two for $25 menu.
Terrific. For John, you and for Lawrence, maybe just unpacking value a little bit, some compelling offers for sure. Where would you say the brand is right now on value scores? Are you kind of where you wanna be on value? Is it gonna take marketing, maybe more on the value push to get there? How would you kind of summarize each of the brand's position right now on value?
Yeah, I'll start with that. As I mentioned, because our value journey started really a year and a half ago. The name of the game was consistency because the consumer can only take so many messages in at one time. For IHOP in particular, we wanted to really nail this $6 message.
If you think about it is difficult to make a breakfast at home, especially for a young family, and all of a sudden now you have a $6 platform. It resonates extremely well with the guests. We've continued to hone in on this. Even at this upcoming end of March, we are evolving the everyday $6 value platform with a different offering as well.
This evolution that we work closely with our franchisees is a critical next step, and it is a core part of our marketing focus as well. Almost all. You know, majority of our primary message in the marketplace is around the $6. It is what's driving traffic. It's why we've outperformed Black Box in traffic every month in 2025, and it continues into 2026, and we wanna continue that momentum moving forward.
I would add, Dennis, a couple things. One is what is the definition of value right now? One is they wanna know the full cost of the meal, whether it's $6 or $25 for two. When you talk to guests and you talk to just diners in general, the experience in the restaurant is super important and shows up from guests in a much more significant way than in the past.
We've talked about that value is also about the vibe, right? Good price, great food, good portion, and the experience of being served and taken care of by somebody else. Guests are looking for all of that right now. You know, I think also implied in your question is do we think the value portion of our sales is gonna grow?
Is it too big? Is it too small? You know, we've been asked that question a couple times today as well. Our answer there is we don't have a target ceiling or floor for what mix of our menu sales should be value. It's driven by our guests, right?
If the guests are coming to us and they're choosing from those portion of our menus, and that's what they need right now, then we're fine with that because the value portion of our menus are profitable. We design them in partnership with our franchisees. They often upsell, right? 2 for $25, you can add $2 for steak, $3 for the next category. That's how we think about it.
Interestingly, the portion of our tickets that include value items, about 30% for Applebee's, 20% for IHOP, has been super steady now for quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter. That seems to be the current state.
Yep.
Great. How about on the menu innovation side? You guys both touched on it a little bit there. If we unpack that, I guess, how would you say that 2026 differs relative to 2025 as it relates to new menu innovation and maybe just even going forward? You know, just does going forward look a lot different than what we've seen in past years?
Well, I'll start with IHOP. You know, innovation is part of our DNA. When you look at especially the core items that IHOP stands for, which are amazing breakfast equities, we want to make sure we complement the value menu with breakthrough innovation. You know, when you think about, you know, the trends that are out in the marketplace today, whether they're global, domestic or whatever TikTok unleashes on you grasp onto these.
It's also some of the power of AI as well because you can start extracting from your portfolio and your mix and work with your culinary team, go, "What is going to drive attraction? What is gonna drive buzz in the marketplace?" You know, we look at a quarter-to-quarter basis, but we're staying focused on our core and complementing the value menu together with these innovation streams.
You know, I mentioned we have a proprietary new coffee because we truly believe you better match your world's best pancakes with the world's best coffee. We have a proprietary blend exclusively designed just for IHOPs, and it really complements that of our breakfast items that's coming out later this March.
We have a new barbecue pulled pork omelets because our guests and the feedback have just been clamoring towards some kind of barbecue dish, and we've paired it perfectly with our omelets. As we go further into the second half of the year, we've got a few surprises.
We've gotta, you know, of course, keep that suspense, but I can just give a quick highlight that we're gonna be bringing back a fan favorite that has just been really top of mind and, so a lot of exciting news coming back in the back half of the year.
Yeah. At Applebee's, Dennis, one of the things we've had to work on the last two years is building a pipeline of innovation. It's fair to say we weren't particularly or regularly innovative, and so we spent most of 2024 and 2025 building out what we now have as an eight quarter pantry of new entrees for eight quarters and new appetizers for eight quarters that we'll introduce, as I mentioned, via two for $25. The burger that I talked about last year and the Grilled Cheese Cheeseburger are examples of what's now coming out of the pipeline, and there'll be more of that as the year progresses.
That's great. Lawrence, I wanna touch on day parts with you. Just as we think about the broader macro and breakfast, generally speaking, for the industry now being under a bit more pressure purely related to macro, I would argue how you think about that in the context of like a key day part for you, and then maybe just some of the other important you know, where you see the other most important day part maybe outside of breakfast.
The fascinating great part about breakfast is that if you look in the past few years of breakfast behavior, breakfast used to be associated only in the morning hours. Now breakfast items are associated with all day parts. If you even look, because most of our restaurants are 24/7, 60%-70% of all items ordered during any part of the day are breakfast-specific items.
That's opened up the aperture, especially when you look at how delivery and off-premise and all those areas of different channels and accessibility have made breakfast, and I use it in quotes, but breakfast items accessible and relevant for all parts of the day. We have stayed focused on our core. We know those are what's most craveable for our guests.
You look at even opportunities, as you just kind of alluded to, late night. You know, I think about, you know, my old college days and the behavior of going into IHOP. I go into IHOP, so my, you know, tours across the nation, and I go into late nights, and I work those shifts as well. I see restaurants crowded with, you know, students, people coming from their night shifts, and of course, what you see them ordering are breakfast items. We are looking not just from the off-premise channels, but also in restaurants, to really create a distinctive niche within the late nights, to drive that part of our business moving forward.
Great. Wanna touch on ops. I think you both might have alluded to it a little bit, but as far as the operations go for each brand, where we are and, you know, in 2026 and beyond, what kind of opportunity you think operations can be for each brand?
I can start. Applebee's is focused on what we believe is the biggest driver of improving guest satisfaction in the restaurant and the biggest driver of improving guest satisfaction outside the restaurant, 'cause 22%-23% of our sales are off-premise. The number one guest complaint for off-premise is missing item in the bag, whether it's a soda or it's a pack of ketchup, that's the number one missing item.
Our relentless focus in 2026 is on improving the missing item incident. In the restaurant, we've done a lot of research that demonstrates when the more the general manager of the restaurant is in the front of the house interacting with guests and directly supervising, coaching, correcting staff, the higher the guest satisfaction scores are as well.
We're doing a lot of work to help general managers get out of the back of the house, where they tend to migrate because they're gonna expedite, and that's where they wanna speed things up, and get them to the front of the house. That's not just telling them to do that, right? A lot of the data that they're looking at is in the back of the house, and we're trying to get data on their phones and things like that so that they can spend time in the front of the house.
You know, I think one of the most interesting statistics in guest sat, which is true in our industry, it was true when I was at Starwood Hotels for a long time, is guests that experience a problem that is corrected give you a better satisfaction score than guests that experience no problem at all. You know, those addressing a problem typically happens when there's a manager in the front of the house.
Yeah, I'll complement it with two other things. Accuracy, no question, 20% of our business at IHOP is off-prem, and accuracy is a critical part in making sure that, you know, the guests get the right products, the right, you know, butter, syrup, et cetera, that complements that of our products. The other area is speed because, you know, I have two young kids, and nobody wants to wait 20 minutes for your food.
We've been laser-focused on this, so much so that in 2025, we've already taken off 6 minutes plus from our table turns, and that continues to be a focus just because there's always low-hanging fruit that we've identified. Finally is, you know, we are a service brand.
We call it, specifically in IHOP, we have a program called IHOPitality, and it's important that, you know, that hospitality, that service resonates with our guests 'cause it keeps them coming back over and over again. It's why there's certain restaurants like, in Pasco, Washington, where I visited a few months ago, I met a family, the Ochoas. They come to the restaurant over 360 times a year.
Wow.
I mean, you just take a few days away from that, and you got the full year covered, and that's because they really appreciate the service, this hospitality, the IHOPitality, and the magic that comes with the IHOP experience. We're trying to make sure we keep hitting the bottom-
Do they come to the same daypart 363 times a year?
They come mostly in the breakfast, but sometimes they mix it up. Yep.
Love the consistency. How about on marketing? Both brands, big marketers, sizable budget, good creative. Can we just talk about what 2026 looks like from a marketing perspective, if any changes in strategy overall in marketing versus what we've seen?
Yeah. For IHOP, you know, we have this mantra where we work at the speed of culture, and it's why IHOP and Applebee's, we have an in-house set of social teams, but also for IHOP, we have an in-house creative team.
It's so that we can act and react at the speed of culture, meaning if a trend pops up, for example, you know, Mr. Fantasy, who is a big influencer, we realized he was gaining a lot of traction in the space and especially with Gen Z, so we quickly, you know, connected with the creative custom content and tied him in with National Pancake Day on March third, this past March third. You know, at the same time, we're constantly creating new social material. Our engagements in 2025 versus 2024 was almost 4x.
That momentum continues into 2026 because we have an in-house team that reacts at the speed of culture. The second is we're optimizing the way we drive mass awareness. We have, you know, in similar to Applebee's, as we've compressed the number of windows that we needed, we've also optimized our production dollars, meaning we've taken the savings from there and applied it to working media.
We've had 15% more dollars in working media, which means greater awareness, greater number of eyeballs, better buys across scale, and ultimately, that drives you not just top of mind, but of course, traffic. Finally, I think is you gotta be real-time when it comes to cultural activations, and that's why certain programs and launches, you know, like we did, for example, with Malik Nabers of, For those of you who are New York Giants fans.
You know, star wide receiver, we wanted to make sure that we bring programs like, you know, that to life, especially with Bottomless Pancakes and National Pancake Day, and we've got a lot more to come in 2026.
Great.
Yeah. For Applebee's, I would just add, in addition to having fewer messages in market longer, we have also leaned into digital/social in a big way. 2026 will be the first year when we have more of our marketing budget dedicated to digital and social than we do to television. Television still moves the market in this category.
But we think that mix makes sense for us. We're focused on really leveraging two things. One is when we've got exciting new product like these two burgers, that's what you're gonna see as the hero in our TV spots. We're also leaning into some of the equity we've built in the Date Night Pass. If you remember, a couple of years ago, we did the Date Night Pass.
We'd like to claim we broke the internet and people registering. You know, this year we linked it to Club Applebee's, which means you had to be a member of Club Applebee's in order to participate. In addition to the couple million people that are in Club Applebee's, we registered over 300,000 new people. We can see extending the Date Night Pass. There's other passes, family pass, holiday pass, that one could do, and that's gonna be part of our marketing as well.
That's great. How about on loyalty, how you think about the program benefits and then the opportunity that exists, from a loyalty perspective?
Loyalty is a, you know, a key priority for us. We have over 12.5 million users on our loyalty platform today at IHOP. It's a 23% increase versus the previous year. You know, similar to, you know, all different trends, you're constantly listening. You're evaluating, you know, just based on loyalty behavior, the user behavior, and also just, you know, reading threads from Reddit and all the different social feeds, how to make the platform better.
You know, we have something called The Stack Markets, where you leverage your, you know, your coins or your PanCoins to really redeem some of the best offers, that we can at IHOP. We work closely with our franchisee partners to evaluate what the next evolution of that is going to be. We're, you know, constantly listening. There's a lot of white space opportunity, in my opinion, and we're gonna continue to drive the platform and create that stronger connection with the guests and the loyalty users.
Yeah, Applebee's has a program we call Club Applebee's. It also has eight or 10 million members, most of which allow us to contact them and give us their email or their text. It's not a point-based earn and redeem system. It's more about insider access to getting promotions and special deals, you know, ahead of others.
The challenging thing about loyalty in terms of the traditional loyalty programs, when you think about it like airlines or hotels or coffee in our space is, like we mentioned before, that we're not a three, four, five, six day a week purchase, right? We're maybe a once a quarter purchase. Points are not a motivator when you're only participating three, four, five times a year. We're thinking about how do you engender loyalty in a way that doesn't require you to accumulate points?
Yep. That's great. Then you both, I believe, touched on off-prem. I believe it was earlier last year in 2025, you talked about maybe being able to get a little sharper, a little better from an off-premise perspective. Just kind of maybe where are we? I know you have some metrics, but on off-prem now, do we think it can go much higher? Is there a target that you think about on the off-premise side?
For IHOP off-prem, as I mentioned earlier, accounts for around 20% of our business. Really, it's broken down a few layers. Number one, delivery. Number two, catering. Number three, you know, online channels like IHOP.com. For delivery in particular, which accounts for more than half of that 20%, we have been working with the aggregators, the delivery partners, to really create a strong strategy in regards to promotion.
Even this quarter versus previous quarter, we've had 15% more promotions planned. You see a very strategic focus in regards to driving the right proposition for our guests, and it's obviously resonated extremely well with these partners. The one I'm really excited about is catering. If you think about your breakfast options in catering today, just think through the normal ones that you would normally have for breakfast.
Have you had IHOP catering? You know, our world-famous pancakes, you know, our bacon, eggs, and, you know, just syrup, everything that comes with it. I know because when I take IHOP catering to events, it is such a huge hit because it is so distinctive. It is so different. We didn't just wanna do it blindly. What we did was we took a step back and looked at our catering platform last year. We looked at, okay, what packaging do we need? Do we have proprietary packaging? We looked at what's, you know, the angle of positioning and marketing behind it.
There's a lot more focus, and we're working with the franchisees now to deploy these catering kits, these, you know, even local store marketing toolkits, to get the word out and get them out to, like, hotels and conferences and, schools. We're really excited because this has a lot of upside potential this year and beyond.
Off-prem for Applebee's is 22%-23% of sales. We thought that was the ceiling. This year we grew 6.5%. We did it two ways. One was we weren't including nationally advertised promotions on our off-prem channels. That was a bit of a no-brainer.
Once we started to do that and you had the marketing behind it, that made a difference. Then the basics just around the classic analytics and A/B testing. We just got much more purposeful and data-driven in managing it. We still continue to believe that there's upside there. I think the broader picture on off-prem, Dennis, for both brands is that before the pandemic, both brands were less than 10% of their sales were off-prem.
Now they're 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. What's great about that is, number one, it's largely incremental business because we know that our off-prem customer generally doesn't eat in the restaurant. We like that. It's competitive with QSR and fast casual because we weren't necessarily considered a convenient buy right before the pandemic.
Now 20% of our guests, you know, view us as, you know, equally convenient to the off-prem people and to the fast QSR. What we're focused on now is how much can we direct business to our own channels versus the third parties.
Right. Terrific. I want to shift over to development and in particular the exciting dual brand opportunity.
You only left 19 minutes for dual brand. It's the best topic.
We saved the best for the middle, I guess, right? Let's talk about that opportunity and why it's so exciting. You know, maybe what have you learned so far and, you know, how do you compare those dual brand locations to single brand locations?
Sure. Give you some numbers first. For those that don't know, there's almost 40 of them open outside the US. They went first, and that's where we tested the concept. In February of last year, we opened the first one outside San Antonio, Texas.
We have now 35 or 36 open in the US, and we've said we'll have 80 open by the end of the year, and we're on track to do that. One compelling thing is in two years and three months, we went from 0 in the US to having 80 in the pipeline by the end of the year. It's really compelling. The concept is an Applebee's and an IHOP in the same building. A common menu that goes from breakfast to dinner.
If you're here in the northeast, it's sort of like a diner, where it has the best of both brands. Each of our respective brands has about 100 items on the menu. The combined restaurant has about 100, so we make sure that the kitchen isn't taxed by adding in everything from both brands. Inside the restaurant, there's a core red area for Applebee's, which is around the bar, and then wrapped around that is the blue area for IHOP. What we're seeing is that guests are sitting wherever they want, regardless of daypart. Our new favorite statistic is that 62% of guests or 62% of tickets, tabletops, are ordering items from both menus.
Right. One of the definitions of innovation is to give guests, in our case, or consumers, something they didn't know they wanted, right? No one came to us and said, "Gosh, you should put an Applebee's and an IHOP under the same roof." When you invite them into the restaurant, two out of three times, they're ordering from both sides, which tells you from a guest perspective that it's got a lot of legs.
Financially for the franchisee, when they add the second brand, 'cause most of these have been adding a second brand to an existing restaurant through a $1 million or so renovation, they're increasing their revenue 1.5-2.5 times, and they're increasing the flow-through on their margin for that incremental revenue by about three or four times because fixed costs don't change. Rent is still rent. For Dine, you know, this will show up as incremental royalty fees as the revenue of these combined restaurants grows.
You touched on, I think, some of the most important numbers there, but what is the feedback from the franchisees so far, the overall demand? How would you kind of size that up now? Early days still, of course, but.
A couple of things. The fact that we're going from zero to 80 within two years of opening the first one tells you a lot. The second thing is the franchisees that are building these are larger, more experienced, more development-oriented people or companies that have been in this business for decades for each of them. They see it, and they're investing their own money in it because they see the potential. They're not unlike consumers, right? When we said to them, "We think we have this dual brand idea," they were reluctant, and they were skeptical.
Once we opened the first one, we flew them down to see it, you know, one of our very large franchisees said, "I came down here highly skeptical, and I'm leaving highly intrigued," right, and is now building one, and that's a really big franchisee of ours. They are in the business of making money, and this can add $1 million or more to their top line, throwing it $200,000 on that $1 million bucks.
Terrific. What do we think long-term potential? Again, maybe it's too early to say so far, but as you look at kind of the twelve-month rev, what's the latest you've been sharing on what the potential for this could be?
We've been talking about the potential for 900 additional restaurants to tackle at some point over the next decade. Of those 900, they're free and clear, meaning you can add the second brand without tripping over somebody's territorial protection on their current restaurant. Of that 900, 450 are new builds, meaning there's no IHOP and no Applebee's. It's a green field, and you can build a new restaurant with no conflicts. The other 450 are either an Applebee's or an IHOP adding the second brand without having a conflict. Call those the easy ones.
Right.
After that, you can horse trade. For example, our franchisee in San Antonio, who's a longtime IHOP franchisee who's got 30 IHOPs, bought the Applebee's franchisee in San Antonio. Now he owns the market for both brands and can dual anywhere he wants without having to worry about conflicts.
Yeah. Terrific. Based on those growth targets, how about the pipeline? What does that look like? What kind of visibility do you have, even at a high level, looking out over the next couple of years? What else, I guess, goes into some of those development targets as we think about returns and some of the key metrics that matter as you look at development?
You wanna talk about the pipeline and development?
Yeah, I mean, to start, you know, the 50 that we're gonna build is off of the pipeline that we had. A year ago. You know, and that pipeline is evolving and is growing. John talked about, you know, the fact that the franchisees get to trade markets and then, you know, the company restaurants is actually. Think of it as almost like a clearing house for that process, because we get to take back restaurants and then re-franchise them out to franchisees and opening up territories e cetera. The pipeline is definitely growing. Your second question was...
Anything on the returns as you took, you know, to support the growth looking ahead, to support those development expectations over the coming years maybe?
Cash and cash returns for the franchisees?
Yeah, however you wanna take it. That, you know, as specific as that would be, would be terrific of course. Obviously dual brand looks different than single brand.
Right
Yeah. If anything that you guys have shared and are comfortable sharing on that front.
There are a few ways you can think about this. You know, most John mentioned this earlier, most of the dual brands that we've built so far are probably lower AUV units that are adding a second brand, and they're doing 1.5-2.5 times. On average, you know, if you say added about $1 million of top line, the flow through on that is probably 30%-40%. John also mentioned, you know, the cost to convert is about $1 million, plus or minus a few, depends on the location. That's a three-year payback, right? Which is a very, very attractive return profile for the franchisees.
On top of that, you know, the way we think about this is these are not new brands that haven't been tested. These are two brands that's been through many, many cycles. IHOP is 65 years old. Applebee's is 55, 60 years old. The risk profile for this return is lower than a brand-new, hot, you know, exciting concept that the franchisees are building.
Yep. Makes really good sense. How about just broadly the development environment, not even thinking about dual, but just what are you seeing there? Obviously, macro challenges, et cetera, aside to some extent. Anything that you'd frame up on between build costs and time to get approvals and how that has kind of impacted the development trajectory over the looking ahead?
The two biggest challenges coming out of COVID were cost and red tape, and getting permits and et cetera from the local jurisdiction. The cost to build remains largely elevated, which is why we've been focused on not only duals, but we've got, you know, we've got multiple ways to develop a restaurant. IHOP opens 30-plus restaurants a year, 40 last year, and 80% of them or more are conversions of other concepts, right?
That's a great vehicle for growth as well. The cost of materials is if it's gonna come down, it's gonna be very low. So that's sort of still elevated. What's gotten much better is municipalities, counties, et cetera, have rehired all the people that, you know, sort of disappeared during COVID. Getting things approved is faster, with the exception we're learning of liquor licenses, which depending on the state or jurisdiction, can take months and months and months.
Great. How about on remodels? Once again, let's put dual brand aside as we think about remodels. I think you've got the Lookin' Good prototype on the Applebee's side of things. How do we think about and how are franchisees thinking about remodels, you know, from here over the coming years? What that cycle perhaps looks like, if you've got that visibility currently.
Yeah. Applebee's has fallen behind what we would consider best practice in terms of renovations, and there's a lot of reasons for that. But at the moment, you know, 20% of Applebee's we would consider current, which is why we are so focused on the renovation process, and to their credit, why the franchisees are now focused on that as well. Because as we've now gotten back into, you know, quote, "normal time".
We can really focus on what the guest is telling us. Part of what they're telling us is that the restaurants, some of them look tired, and that we've gotta focus on the bricks and mortar. We're now in year two of a renovation process. Our goal is to have a third of the portfolio renovated by the end of this year, and then we'll go on to the next phase from there.
Great.
IHOP, on the other hand, is has a history of staying current. They're 80% current, and you never really get to 100. It's sort of like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you finish, you start again. You start to work on the next 20%.
Yep. How about on the international side as you think about the international opportunity? Maybe just the performance of international, some of your key markets in general, and then how you think about the development from an international perspective.
In addition to IHOP, big news, Lawrence is now overseeing international as well. You can take that.
Yeah. It's a recent change. Super exciting, just to look at the opportunity for international. Our primary areas of growth are in the Americas, 'cause you would definitely see scale when you think about Canada, North America, and then, LATAM. You know, we have a big presence, for example, in Mexico. We have a big presence in Canada, and then some of the Caribbean islands.
We're also looking at scale opportunities within the global kind of aspects. When there's scale innovation, there's scale marketing. Can those be leveraged across the globe? If so, how do we best approach it? There's a lot of great upside that we see in terms of opportunity for international, and we're working through that plan and strategy right now into 2026.
Terrific. Lawrence, I wanna ask you kind of another one maybe. Actually I'll ask both of you kind of as we think about, you know, tax refunds and just the beneficial macro perhaps, how are you guys thinking about that? How did that weigh into guidance at all? I know there's a whole lot of macro cross currents out there right now, but any kind of expectation that you folks have had or have as it relates to stimulus this year and what kind of benefit the brands may see?
Yeah. I would answer the same way for both, which is we expect the stimulus to make a difference in our guests' ability to spend, because particularly for guests that earn $100,000 a year, which is our sweet spot, that couple hundred or couple thousand dollar refund makes a difference. We do expect that.
We didn't build a specific moment into the calendar for when we think that spending will go through, but we do know it'll have an effect to some extent because we know from history that our traffic can mirror gas prices, for example. When we built our budget last year, we didn't know that gas prices would be affected as they are today. Major macro events like that, we tend not to build into a budget because they're just so hard to predict.
Yep. Makes really good sense. Wanna shift over to G&A and CapEx, maybe. Vance, maybe I'll target you with those questions. You've talked in the past just about the benefits of the model and the low operating leverage and all the return on capital opportunities. I guess first, just on the G&A side of things, how do you think about G&A going forward about the efficiencies and maybe some of the opportunities also to invest at the same time?
The way we try to benchmark our G&A target is call it 2.5% of system sales is sort of where we wanna be. You know, to the extent that you know we have new areas of investment we wanted to grow into, for example, the dual brands and development function within the company, we tend to you know reallocate. We would find efficiency and savings elsewhere and push our resources towards the growth area. That's how we've been able to sort of keeping the G&A spend relatively flat over time, even in the middle of our investment in-
Yep
in new capabilities.
How about same question, but from a CapEx perspective, given the importance of free cash flow, but also the importance of making the investments and keeping the brands healthy, how should investors think about that CapEx going forward?
You know, we provided specific guidance on CapEx, you know, in the $25 million-$35 million range, and that's part of that is the company restaurant portfolio. The core franchisor-based business, you know, usually the CapEx for that business is sort of in the $15-$20 million range, and anything on top of that is company restaurants related.
Specifically, it's earmarked for remodeling and for dual brand construction process. You know, broader question in terms of capital allocation, we do you know, we allocate our capital towards the highest ROI usage, right? Organic investments, whether it's CapEx or G&A, is part of that algorithm.
After investments, as you think about capital allocation, how do you think about the other under the investment line, other uses of capital and how you prioritize those?
A big part.
Excess capital? Yeah.
A big part of it is capital return. In 2025, we returned $90 million back to shareholders, 60 of which was through buybacks and 30 of which was dividends. We think as long as there's a disconnect between where the stock is trading versus where we think the stock should be traded at, I think we're gonna be aggressive with buybacks.
Great. You touched on the company-owned stores, the company-owned portfolio. How do we think about that going forward? I know you've gotten a lot of questions or in recent quarters, other opportunities to do more of that. The current portfolio of company-owned, what's the latest and greatest and how we should think about the go forward on that front?
The strategy with company restaurants is to prove out the initiatives that that's important to us. First being remodeling, the second is dual brands. Specifically with the restaurants that we have currently, there are operational improvements that we're working on as well in terms of training employees and staffing restaurants the right way.
Ultimately, the goal is to refranchise them back to franchisees. In fact, you know, obviously we're not there yet. We're not finished with fixing the restaurants yet, but we're already getting inbound interest from franchisees that wanted to build dual brands and take some of the restaurants from us. What you will likely see in the next few years is that this portfolio is not gonna be static.
We're gonna have restaurants that we refranchise out, but we may take on a few more as well. It'll be a lot of in and out. Again, the ultimate strategy is to turn them around, refranchise them for a proper return on capital for our shareholders.
Makes good sense. I'm gonna ask most of the companies this, just given the investor focus on GLP-1s and if you've seen anything to date and how you're sort of planning for the next few years of that. Maybe John, any thoughts there?
We haven't, in either brand, seen anything to date that, you know, materially affects our numbers. As we think about it for the future, we think about it a couple of ways. One is because we are occasion-driven brands and people frequent us three, four, five times a year, that provides some protection versus if we were, again, exception of your friends in Washington, versus if people were visiting us three, four, five days a week.
That's number one. You know, number two is both brands have, you know, protein-friendly, carb-light choices, right? You can get an egg white omelet and vegetables at IHOP. You can get our salmon and broccoli.
What we like about that is that we also think that we just wanna make sure that we're not vetoed by the one person in the family who might be, right, thinking about their weight loss journey. That we've got a way to offer that to others. We continue to focus our innovation on making sure that we have enough of our menu that will appeal to them, but we're not radically changing the menu for those reasons.
Terrific. We are just out of time. John, Vance, Lawrence, and I wanna thank all you very much for your time sharing the insights. We really appreciate it.
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.