Good morning to everyone, and welcome to San Diego, California. And good afternoon to those of you out in webcast land, where that applies. For those of you here, welcome to our Restaurant Support Center headquarters, and we are thrilled to have you join us for our first in-person Investor Day in many years. Great to have you here. A few quick housekeeping items, otherwise known as the standard IR legal statement. Today's presentation features forward-looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our forecast. Certain non-GAAP financial measures are used in today's materials as well. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our filings with the SEC. Finally, I'd like to give you a brief rundown of today's agenda.
As you can see, or you will see, you'll hear from several members of our talented management team, a mix of some familiar faces and some new faces. We hope that our in-person attendees skipped breakfast, since we will be taking a brunch break midway through the event, where you will have the opportunity to try our Smashed Jack and some other Jack and Del deliciousness. As you know, our menu is all day, every day, so burgers and tacos at 10:30 AM in the morning for us is normal and a beautiful thing. Presentations will be followed by a Q&A session, and we anticipate today's event to wrap up by noon Pacific Time. Now, with that, I have the honor of introducing you to the man of the hour, the brilliant, visionary leader that you all came here to see today, and that man is Mr. Jack Box.
Let's see. Good morning. Hopefully, that gives you a little Jack humor, but just wanna say thank you for all that are attending. Thank you to all those who are on the webcast, taking time out of your busy schedule. We're excited about the opportunity to share with you today, so let me just jump right in. Starting with our goals today, we wanna give you an opportunity to meet and learn from our executive leadership team. We wanna share our brand vision and the journey that we're gonna take to achieve our objectives, and then also communicate our long-term guidance. So that's our goals for today. Now, I believe we have a tremendous opportunity to grow these two challenger brands. We're combined, we're over 130 years of experience. We have over $6 billion in sales.
We have two exceptional business models and concepts. As challengers, you know, we're always looking for ways to be nimble or defy the status quo to achieve our objectives and drive performance. And what I believe is unique about Jack in the Box and Del Taco is we have a real growth opportunity within burger QSR and Mexican QSR. So why do I think that? As the fifth largest burger chain and the second largest Mexican QSR, I'm not sure I'm knowledgeable of any other restaurant chains that have such scale and proof of concept that still has such tremendous white space across the United States for growth. Now, this takes time. It takes time. In the last three years, we've been preparing for this growth.
The significant number of development agreements we've signed over the last two years are just one data point that suggests that growth is within our sight. So despite some of the challenging macro factors, COVID, supply chain disruption, 40-year high inflation rates, probably more than what I've experienced in the last three years of challenges than I have in my entire career. Since 2020, we have grown earnings by 20%. Beyond earnings, we have returned over $600 million to our shareholders through share repurchases and dividends, which have been bolstered by proceeds from our Del Taco refranchising. Jack in the Box and Del Taco have been steady performers for many years. The last three years have been no exception, including comp performance of 5% at Jack and 3% at Del Taco on a combined annual growth rate basis.
The acquisition of Del Taco has created exciting growth opportunities for franchisees. Our franchisees have solid scale. At Jack in the Box, the average franchisee has over $4 million in EBITDA, and the Del acquisition gives them an opportunity for additional growth. We've also seen Del franchisees sign agreements to become Jack franchisees and develop restaurants at both brands. When we conducted due diligence, we knew the QSR Mexican category and Del itself was the most requested brand by our Jack franchisees to expand with. And they couldn't expand in Mexican due to restrictions that we had within our franchise agreement. That is, until now. So rather than Jack franchisees use their capital to develop other brands, because many of them in our well-developed markets, like California or Arizona, had limited growth opportunity.
There's still opportunity, but it was limited on how fast or how many restaurants could be built in a five-year period. So rather than take that capital to other brands, we saw Del Taco as a tremendous growth opportunity for our existing franchisees, and we're seeing them welcome it, and welcome it with open arms and, and become franchisees through refranchising transactions. I believe our franchisees share in our ambition, and they're partners in strategy... This is a very important point in our story. You know, having a relationship with our franchisees where we are partners in strategy, we have the ability to assist each other, to provide better service to our guests, to share information on how we drive both our top line and bottom line performance, it's critical to our business.
These relationships have to be built on trust, because these best practices are shared among each other. We get feedback from our franchisees, and then we share them across the community. So I'm pleased that this is a core part of our company culture. In fact, based upon the last study, I think it was a couple of years after I became the CEO, we did a franchisee satisfaction study, and very quickly we increased our franchise satisfaction by 15% because of the way we started to engage our system. This improvement, and why I make this point, is it helped fuel our success. It also helped fuel our existing franchisees want to develop and develop both Jack and Del Taco restaurants. So let me talk a little bit about prior to 2020, where our business was.
Jack performed consistently, but it wasn't on pace to reach or achieve our growth potential. Same-store sales growth on average was about 2% per year, and less than 1% of our business was digital. Our relationship with franchisees were strained, causing them to pull back on growth. We were underinvested in many categories, whether it was growth, new prototypes, technology, or the image of our restaurants. We had very few commitments for development agreements to build new restaurants, which led to our new restaurant pipeline being dried up. Over the last few years, we've established a very strong foundation. It's designed to reshape our future, and in order to do this, we had to rebuild our leadership team, and we had to create some key areas to focus on. We started with culture and people, and we developed a clear strategy.
This included repairing the franchisee relationships, concentrating on operational basics. We had to go back to our heritage, and that was a heritage of innovation. That wasn't just innovation on product, that was innovation across our business, how we executed the brand, whether it was equipment, whether it's technology, whether it was, you know, people, process, systems. So it led to AUV growth and improved margins. In addition, we had to build a clear technology roadmap that would require investment in restaurant-level tech and data capability, and then becoming a formidable digital competitor. Then, of course, we had to expand our reach. That is the true unlock to value. So we began building a pipeline of future restaurants. We had to create a new prototype, a new image, and it also included opening company restaurants in new markets successfully.
And lastly, we wanted to build our scale and our capability by adding another brand, and that's Del Taco, which we believe has a tremendous upside and growth potential. Now, that brings us to today and what we wanted to talk about, and we're, we're glad you're here at our Investor Day. I think we're ready to run and, and reach a new phase of our growth. And so we have a bold ambition to transform the business, what we're entitling Break Out of the Box. And so Ryan's going to provide to you specific guidance today, but let me share with you some of the key metrics in our ambition. And I want to be clear between our ambition and our guidance. Guidance is going to be clear about how you build your models.
Our ambition is we're going to strive to achieve these objectives every day, and the sooner we can get there, the better. Our mission, our ambition is structured around our North Star of reaching and achieving 2.5% net new restaurant growth, attaining AUVs of $2.5 million at Jack and $2 million at Del Taco. This top-line growth is attained through CRAVED marketing, innovation, value, and driving both brands to 20% digital sales. Further, we have to continue to improve our store-level economics in achieving 15% restaurant-level EBITDA per restaurant, specifically new restaurants, which will ensure a payback period of less than five years. Today, you're going to learn from our executives how they will support this ambition in achieving it.
So if you think about our strategy, we have three key drivers to help our ambition, our pillars to our strategy. First, we want to achieve top-tier AUV in both brands. We want to improve our restaurant-level margins and economic model. And third, we want to enhance our development capabilities so we can expand our reach. This is the red thread that you're going to hear through everybody's presentation today: top-tier AUV, improving store-level economics, and improving our, enhancing our development capabilities. And these things are enabled by three key areas. The first is a clear technology roadmap, with emphasis on investing in restaurant-level tech, in data capabilities, and in Mar Tech. A Strategy Realization Office, so that we can keep our projects and programs on time and meet our objectives. And then developing centers of excellence like digital or supply chain that support both brands.
And then lastly, a clear capital allocation strategy, where we return cash to shareholders but invest for growth. Beyond that, I want to talk about two specific areas that a lot of our executives will touch on today, and I, I want to spend some extra time on those. First, starting with the importance of us developing a new restaurant and opening playbook. Since assertive expansion was not something that was happening at both brands in the past. And there are four main elements to this playbook, and it delivered success in 2023 and will continue to enhance it as we expand our reach. First, franchise recruitment and market selection. We spent significant time building this capability with people resources, but also designing what markets... And how do we wanna go about selecting and recruiting new and existing franchisees to grow with? And then prioritizing markets for expansion.
This new approach also included supporting new markets with our co-development strategy, where simultaneously, the company and franchisees are developing together. Salt Lake City, you've heard us talk about, that's a prime example. It was where we partnered with two existing franchisees so that we could all develop at the same time, and very quickly we're gonna get scale and awareness to 15 restaurants within a two-year period. So beyond that, we also partnered with our existing franchisee to operate the company restaurants until we could get scale, and we both needed our own supportive operations. It's a way that we're developing markets that is different than we've done in the past, where we're partnering with franchisees so we can be successful in the markets. It helps share in overhead costs.
Louisville, another example where we started as a company-owned market, but very quickly, one of our existing franchisees saw the success we were having and signed up to develop alongside of us, and they will begin to open new restaurants next year. In Ryan's comments, you're gonna see a very high level of brand awareness in our non-existing markets, which demonstrates that there is plenty of demand and awareness for both of these brands across the United States. I think it's also worth noting we're entering new markets with a new image. Our Crave design has a modern feel with the latest equipment and features, and it's delivering performance. And I would also say the same thing about our Del Taco brand, which you'll see the Fresh Flex right here. Both images are getting tremendous guest response.
Next, we are building excitement with pre-marketing and awareness prior to opening. That's part of our playbook. Launching with menu and operational simplification for the first few months, in essence, no digital, no LTOs, and a simplified menu. Simplification allows us to offer the best experience possible to our guests, and as I see the line of cars and people lining up at our restaurants and in our new stores, it makes me very happy. But nothing makes me more happy than if we provide guests with a very excellent first experience at our restaurants. Lastly, we are making sure that this playbook is scalable, it's repeatable, and so we can apply it to future markets and future new restaurants.
Whether it's Utah or Florida, Montana, Wyoming or Mexico, we wanna make sure that we can repeat this over and over, and it's an executable and proven plan. So now let's go deeper. I know there's a lot of questions about Del Taco, and my belief is that owning more than one brand, and in particular Del Taco, will help us achieve our ambition, but also create shareholder value. The bottom line is we can grow faster, achieve our synergies, innovate more rapidly, and get Del to asset light faster if we're together than apart. We built the capabilities at Jack, we'll apply them to Del, but we also have capabilities at Del that we're already applying to Jack. So now we have the number two player in QSR Mexican, with the ability to scale and pursue the number one player in the category of Mexican QSR.
We all know we need a strong number two in the category with a better quality product, and we believe Del has that. Scale and centers of excellence are also a competitive advantage, and we are on track to achieve $15 million in synergies, and we'll continue to pursue even more. We've invested in our leadership team, and I'm excited you're gonna get a chance to hear from them today. Because when we built this leadership team, we wanted to make sure that we had a capable leadership team that had experience managing dual brands, so they could apply that knowledge to the Del Taco acquisition and leverage and develop them. As it relates to refranchising development, we are on our way to becoming asset light at Del Taco.
We started at 50% franchised, we're now at 70% franchised, and we're on our way to 90%. Refranchising is a growth opportunity. We are attracting qualified operators known to us already, developers to acquire restaurants at attractive multiples and sign for additional development opportunity. Jack franchisees wanted, as I mentioned earlier, the opportunity to grow and expand their existing markets. They couldn't go with the Mexican QSR, and now they can, versus building other concepts. Most of our franchisees have multiple concepts, so we wanna make sure if they're gonna invest capital, let's invest in Jack and Del Taco. Both brands are investing in technology. Now we can scale, we can consolidate, we can move faster together than on our own. For example, having a common MarTech stack, data, capabilities, loyalty, POS, and help desk, all of that is in our future.
Some of it has already occurred. Doug will talk more about that, including what I would say is the most important, and that's shared knowledge. Whether that's AI drive-through and kiosks at Del Taco that we can incorporate at Jack, or it's automation and digital pickup that we're doing at Jack that we can incorporate at Del. We have plenty of examples where we shared knowledge back and forth and taken advantage of each other's capabilities. And so when it comes to operations and margin improvement, we see a sizable RLM opportunity at Del, which was appealing in the acquisition. Tom will share margin enhancement program today, where we are implementing at Del, similar to what we've talked about to you, that we've done at Jack in the Box.
I'm really proud of this leadership team that we've built in the last four years, and I'm excited you're gonna get a chance to talk to them today, hear from them, and present our story. You know, I'm often asked by investors, "What part of our story is underappreciated by the street?" And I typically point to two key things, and the first is, people and culture. I believe these are what drive performance, and I'll put this leadership team up against any in the industry, and I'm excited that you'll get a chance to meet them today and hear from them. And as a, an investor, I typically, myself, personally bet on leadership teams that have a clear strategy and they know where they're headed.
I think you're gonna get a good understanding of this team. I think you're gonna get a clear understanding of how we're aligned, and I also think you'll get a good feel for how well we work together.... Next, I think the second thing that's underappreciated is just the business transformation that was necessary, along with the required investments to transform both of these brands from being, you know, consistent performers to a real growth story. We have tremendous progress in this team. I will give them tremendous credit for what we've accomplished so far and what's in front of us. Lastly, we are supported by a great board of directors. We have a few new faces, new capabilities that will support our ambition.
One last note before I turn it over to our team, we're putting together our first ESG report, which will be sent out over the next week. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Ryan Ostrom.
How you doing? My name is Ryan Ostrom. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer for Jack in the Box, as well as the Chief Digital Officer for Jack and Del. I'm was excited to meet a lot of you last night, and as we look at our ambition, you look at net new unit growth, AUV, digital sales, and our full four-wall EBITDA. I truly believe that continuing our CRAVE strategy will help us reach our ambition in the coming years. There's four areas I'm gonna dive in deeper, from marketing, innovation, value, and digital. So I'm gonna dive into each of these and make sure you have the same confidence we do in what we think we can achieve. Let's start with marketing and making Jack more craved.
Crave is a barometer that we measure everything we do, from our, our creative, to our stores, to our uniforms. Basically what that stands for is, it's an acronym that stands for cultural, relevant, authentic, visible, easy, and distinctive. Are we being cultural with what's going on around us? Are we being relevant in our category, to our guests, to the trends? Are we being authentically Jack? Are we being visible with the right message, to the right people, to the right time? Are we easy to buy, easy to get, easy to find? And finally, in this world of sameness, sometimes it's QSR. Are we being distinctively Jack? But instead of kinda diving into each of these a little bit more, I'm gonna do what all marketers do and just play a nice little sizzle reel that kinda sums it all up. Here we go.
Hope that gives you a little bit of sense. That last song, actually, I think we're the only brand that we have a song by Ice Cube called Jack in the Box. That's about a 20-year-old song. So that just shows how a part of culture we are across California. And what I do wanna do is take you back about three years. When I first got here, we took a second to understand the guest, redo our segmentation, and really understand what we're doing well and what we have improvement on from a guest perspective. And what we heard was, guests really didn't know who we were fully. They didn't know what we stood for, and we definitely were called out for losing our edge and our attitude that made Jack famous in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
What we did was redid our positioning. We set our communication pillars to be all about late night, our variety, and all-day, everyday menu. But we also decided to create this mantra and live it every day about being unapologetically Jack. Bring that challenger brand mentality back to this brand. Why this was important is because it set a foundation to help us set a tone to take the brand to the next level, and that is to make Jack a more cultural brand. What this did was allow us to free up our ideas, how we express this, and bring that attitude, that unexpectedness and unapologetically Jack, to the market in every single execution we do, but also make us more of a cult following brand, because that's what all brands want to do. We want a cult following.
Here are some of the fun things we've done. You saw that in the video, but, I mean, we created a seven-minute-long short during the Hollywood strike, using all the top producers and writers, at cost, mind you, because they love our brand so much in this town. We have a lot of fun with creating a unique, culturally relevant product. This is our Pineapple Express Shake for 4/20 . So if you know, you know. And if you laughed, then I know you know. We do this a lot throughout the year. We do some out-of-the-box executions with Ryan Reynolds, putting two sexy CEOs together. We do more in box that people expect us to do with Snoop Dogg, resonated with our guests across all our markets. But I think one of the things we've really leaned into is in our CEO.
You saw it when we launched the start of this with Jack Box talking, but he is a cult icon. I recommend all you guys just follow us on social if you have some free time. I mean, there's some interesting comments about our leader, Jack Box, that will make anyone blush, because he is a sex symbol now, so we lean into that. Speaking of social, what we're very proud of is we consider ourselves a best-in-class social brand. This has been a road over the last three years to really push who we were, creating 3 x more content, authentic, real, distinctive content. We're not just a me-too brand. We're defining who we are, that unapologetically Jack. It has driven benefits. We're the number two most engaged brand on TikTok. We're the number one most engaged brand on X. Almost called it Twitter.
Close enough. But this just shows that we're out punching our weight. We're matching the bigger players because we know clearly who we are and who we want to be. And all this is really paying off, and you start looking at our consideration rates on core guests. We're driving more Gen Z, we're driving more Latinx community, but most importantly, we're not alienating our core guests. We're staying in that box enough that people that love us today love us even more. We're - but we're continuing to build these visits and build the excitement. Now, what this room should be excited about is we're three years into this journey, and you've seen some of the success we have done. You're going to hear from Sarah and Tom. They're just starting this journey.
They're just starting the segmentation and the guest research to define who Del Taco wants to be over the next four-five years. But Crave goes beyond just marketing and social. It's also about our stores. I mean, I can't... That is an ugly baby. That's all I'm going to say. I'll be straight blunt about it. It's mustard and ketchup on a wall with some gray. Compare this to our new Crave design: ownable, distinctive, relevant. Our Crave strategy basically designs our store. We have the purple and red. We are the only two with those two brand colors combined. Now look at late night. You start seeing the big box, very visible, inviting, bringing people to the store. But the other aspect I want to call out here is that we're actually bringing the brand to the store.
When I got here, we had those first stores on the left. It never talked about the brand. Now, you look at it, we mention open late night, reinforcing our late night leadership. We're talking about, on that sign, the best burger joint famous for its tacos. You drive by and you see that, you sense variety. There's something different here. They're not just a regular QSR. So bringing these messages to life are key, and as we get into our remodel program, that's really led by Tim, I just get lucky enough to speak about it, we are seeing on average 16% same-store sales growth and upwards of 24% same-store sales growth in our second year. Now, we haven't rolled out enough of these Crave images yet, but we're excited and truly believe it's going to perform, if not outperform, those numbers as we roll those out.
But we're more than just about remodels. We're about growth. You heard what Darin was talking about. We know that this is key to everybody in this room, opening new stores. And we've all sat down as a collective leadership and created a playbook that we have seen very successful in Louisville and Salt Lake City. And from a marketing standpoint, what we've done is we've gone to these markets to understand the guest, what they know about us, what they need to know about us, how they think about us. We then introduced a brand that is more about those pillars: late night, variety, all-day, everyday menu. We're not getting overly complex. We're keeping the menu simplified, but still maintaining our variety. But I think the biggest change is this last one, sustaining the market.
What we used to do at Jack in the Box was we roll out a new market, new store, we have some balloons and some streamers. Two weeks later, we walk away and go to the next store. That isn't how you sustain a market or how you sustain a brand. What we do now is use analytics to understand what is the right amount of stores to sustain via marketing investment in a market. So in Louisville and Salt Lake City, we have those targets. We will invest as a company until we reach those minimums to keep it self-sustained, which keeps the buzz going, keeps the excitement, keeps the traffic, keeps the sales. You'll hear more about the success of this through the rest of the executive team. But this playbook is going to get worn out because it's going to get used a lot.
We have 80% awareness across the United States. This is a big number for us, and one of these reasons why it's even more now than I think it's ever been is because of our strength on social. Social now has broken down barriers that the brand has never been able to do. We have followers across the whole East Coast. We also have some interesting stats where we have mid-90% awareness in Wyoming. We have 90% awareness in Illinois, and then if you do follow us on social in Florida, we cannot post a comment on any social media channel without people from Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami commenting on, "Why are you not here yet?" I think there's a lot of Californians that live in Florida, so they're demanding we get there as soon as possible.
Being craved also means we have to talk about our product. We're a food brand, of course, and I am blessed as a marketer to have, I think, one of the most iconic lineups of food in the industry. Everyone tries to copy us, to be honest. We have things like the Sourdough Jack, the Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger. We do over 60 million tacos a year. Spicy Chicken. I've heard rumors that we are the leading seller of chicken amongst the QSR players and burgers, so we sell more chicken than them. Your eyes aren't deceiving you, that's an egg roll. You will be trying our famous egg roll today as well. I made sure that was on the menu. It tastes amazing in our homemade ranch, if you haven't tried it yet.
Our shirts actually say that on the back, "I get my egg rolls in ranch," our employee shirts. We have a lot of fun with our brand, but we also need to go beyond our iconic brand, our iconic products, and really lean into our innovation. I think this is something we are famous for. We were the first QSR to introduce a breakfast sandwich. We beat McDonald's at it. We were the first to do a portable salad in QSR. We rolled out the Buttery Jack, Popcorn Chicken, Tiny Tacos, and we're not done. You know, last year, we rolled out in new categories, new innovation, which you haven't done in a long time, with the Red Bull Infusions. And even a few months ago, we rolled out boba drinks for coffee and tea, the first of its kind in QSR. We're still pushing the limits.
Now, I wanted to tease out some ones we really think are great, which is, we tried chicken wings a few windows ago. We're really excited about the opportunity to continue our chicken leadership. But then also, we've learned from our partners at Del Taco, and this is where the shared knowledge between the two brands come into play. You'll hear about their success from Sarah on Birria. And we said: How do we be authentically Jack with Birria? Well, our Tiny Tacos and Birria make a great combination. And we have a strong pipeline that we're gonna rely on for the next few years. We have over 500 items in our pipeline, from ideation all the way to commercialization. But no more...
None, none of those are as more important as our latest innovation, which I talked to you a few last night, you've all heard about, which is our Smashed Jack. This burger took over two years of development, exclusive equipment, our own proprietary blend of meat, U.S.-based meat, and it has freshly grilled onions, fresh pickles, and our own Boss Sauce. During our first day, we sold over 70,000. We had a store in one week sell over 1,000, and we had one order that someone ordered 27 of these. I actually think it was a competitor trying to get some inside scoop or something. The, you know, the good news and bad news is we sold out during a soft launch with zero marketing in two weeks. The good news is we have some here for you to try later today.
So you'll each get to try some, and hopefully you like it as much as the guests do. Let me play the commercial. This is a sneak peek that not many people in this room have seen, even the executives. Just for you to get a sense of what the brand is gonna be launching in the next month. That's just a glimpse. Our whole campaign, we use real people who do not like us. They do not eat us. You saw some of the words they call us, and we have changed their opinions in blind taste tests. That's how good this burger is. It's something we are so proud of to roll out to the industry and to our guests. But beyond innovation, we also have to talk value. We know the current economy, where we need to go. I talked to a lot of you last night.
Value is on top of everybody's mind. We firmly believe we have a competitive advantage in value because of our variety. We have a wide range of products that we offer that nobody else does. Let's start with our iconic $0.99, two-taco deal. That is famous at Jack in the Box. It's exclusive on the app, and you're gonna see us continue to drive exclusive offers on the app, because we know this is where the value wars are gonna get really heavy, if they haven't already. Offering exclusive, targeted value offers to our guests, using customer data to drive one more visit.
But you can also see the wide amount of value offers we have across our menu, from our $3 Jack Wraps, our $5 Jack Pack, our $10 Fan Favs Box, which I can update every single month because I have jalapeños, churros, tiny tacos, regular fries, curly fries. That variety allows me to keep that fresh. And then also our $12 Munchie Meals. And even though it's $12, this is still value because it's value for your money, and you get a lot of food, and this does satisfy those late-night cravings. But we still have opportunity and value.... You look at our Jack's Deals, we haven't touched our everyday value offering in many years, and I think we have an opportunity to make this fresher and more aligned. Learn from our sister brand at Del.
We're testing a few different options today, and look for this to be improved in the coming year. But we're gonna continue our Hook and Build strategy. You guys are probably tired of hearing about the Hook and Build strategy. We say it every time we talk because it is a strong lever of our success in our business. Where this comes from is when we did our segmentation, we learned that we had a value guest and a premium guest. We need to satisfy both those individuals. We don't want the value guest to be priced out, and we don't want the premium guests to trade down. Every time we launch an LTO, we really think through this execution.
We try to get what is that value that drives transactions, it drives excitement, and what is that premium offer that partners with it that maximize ticket and profitability? You look at the two options here. You have our two-piece snack box, and when you get to the store, you can buy that, but you can also buy a three-piece and a five-piece. Look at our cheddar biscuit. We do two for $6, but then we offer the chicken version of it, and we're seeing high percentage rates of trade up into each of these every time we do it. And what that... What does that mean? That means more profitability for the franchisees. Now, speaking of profitability, one of the areas we've really been focused on is providing more pricing support for our franchisees. We have a dedicated pricing team, we have dedicated analytics on pricing.
We provided the tools for our franchisees to measure their price by market, by item, by store, the competitors around them, where they can make smart pricing decisions. And I want to restate that, smart pricing decisions. I think historically, we had a lot of franchisees make blanket increases. "We're gonna take 2%, 3%, and do it across everything." What we found is we can take that same 2%-3% and put it on the right items to still maximize transactions, still maximize profitability. Some of these examples are, we realized that, we had a lot of guests trade into our large shakes, but the profitability of that shake was significantly less than our regular shake. Well, we looked at competitor pricing, we analyzed the markets.
We were able to take upwards of $0.50 on that large shake, make more money for the franchisees, and we actually somehow increased our upsell rate on that. On our combo pricing, we generally like a 10%-15% discount on our combos. We had some franchisees, 20%, 30%, 40% on their discount. They had room to go because as you look in competitors, we were underpriced. We were able to get to the right place where we're still at the value, but being able to raise upwards of $0.75-$1 on certain combos and still maintain that transaction and value scores. These are what these tools provide us, a clear look into what's going on around their stores to make smarter pricing decisions. The last area I'm gonna talk about is digital.
I'm also Chief Digital Officer, which means we have a center of excellence across both Jack and Del. And why this is important is we share ideas, best practices, platforms, and it's been working because... you just look at this chart from 2020 to 2023, we've had over a 400% increase in digital. Jack was actually considered one of the top or fastest growing QSR brands in the industry over the last few years. But we have a lot of runway left. We think we're gonna reach over $1 billion in sales, which will get us close to our 20% aspiration, our ambition. But let me break this down in some components on why we're very confident that we can do this and why we wanna do this. The first area is we're gonna accelerate first party.
The first point on there is we're gonna further invest in the Jack app. You heard Darin talk about the walk. We're gonna invest in digital and technology, and we're gonna make our app best in class, because it is not today. Our customer journey is not fluid, it's not seamless, it's not frictionless. We don't have consistent upsell as a guest goes through the purchase rates. We don't even have digital payment. When's the last time you used an app that didn't have digital payment? These are one-on-ones of apps today, and we're still driving significant sales. We're gonna increase this, and what you'll eventually see with us is we're gonna use this same app and platform across both brands. We're gonna get it right for Jack, and then quickly slide it over to Del to maximize investment and maximize use.
The other area to talk about is loyalty. Talked about that customer journey. We also don't have our loyalty seamlessly integrated through the app to do those targeted offers as seamlessly we want, seamless redemption, but we're still driving tons of customer data. We know how to use it to drive one more trip, and you start seeing our acquisition and engagement rates of 2023, very successful. And one of the things that drove this success is, because of the new, center of excellence, the digital team is more connected to the marketing team than it's ever been. We've been able to create unique campaigns that really drive sales and transactions for the brand. Del Taco kind of led this with Tacktoberfest, 31 days of taco deals in October.
And then Jack, we followed us with Jackmas during the Christmas time, our peak timeframe, targeting those value guests with the right offer at the right time. Now, what I do want to point out is that percentage of sales at the bottom, and this shows one of our bigger opportunities across both brands. Del has a more seamless cross-channel loyalty program, because this is what this measures. What is the amount of sales that were impacted by earn and burn in store and online? You can do both on Del. Jack, due to our current platforms and technology, we mainly do online, and if you wanna earn in store, you literally have to get your phone and scan on your own receipt. It's not frictionless, it's not easy.
So, as you hear from Doug and some of our new technologies and our plan for the future, we have tons more opportunity to affect 2%-3% more at Jack through targeted offers, using that data to drive one more visit, especially in-store transactions. We also have third-party. You saw that growth from 2020 to 2023, that was mainly driven by third-party. We went from zero to 60, and technically, we broke our operational processes. This is gonna be our focus in the next year, is fixing those. How we broke these is because both brands are late-night brands, what tends to happen is the driver on third parties gets in our drive-thru. They're in the same drive-thru as our guests who want to eat late night, who drove to our stores.
We get backups, speed of service slows down, sales are impacted, as well as third parties turn us off and penalize us for 30 minutes. We're leaving money on the table. What we're really focused on is really improving this entire touchpoint experience, especially for drivers. So recently, we tested pickup windows in a few stores, and we've seen some strong results. We have reduced our speed of service at night by 30 seconds. That's big in our brand, but it also gets those drivers outside, picking up the order, and we get turned off less, which means more digital sales on third-party, better operational scores. So look for this to be something we continue to push over this next year and implement.
The final piece, which you're gonna hear Doug talk about, you'll even hear Tony talk a little bit, is continue to invest in future innovations. We look at kiosks and AI. Del Taco is a little bit ahead on us. They do have kiosks out in store, looking to how do we roll those out in the near future. But for Jack, we're gonna still rely on the new POS. There's no point to do this heavy right now while we bring a new POS in, because they have to be a seamless network. And so you'll see us roll out more kiosks, more solutions. You'll hear this from Doug in the future, but this is key for us to get to over 20% of sales. Because if you think about modern technology, it helps the ordering experience as easy as possible, as frictionless as possible.
So I know I covered a lot. Us marketing guys like to talk, as Tony, who's next, will tell you. But really shared about what... why we're confident about reaching our ambition through marketing, innovation, value, and digital. Give a clear strategy to reach our AUV, AUV growth, as well as our margin improvement. I'm excited to be here in front of you and pass the mic over to Tony, who will talk about operations.
Thank you, sir. Again, I'm Tony Darden. I'm the COO here at Jack. I've been here a little over two and a half years. Before I get started, I wanna just take you back to our ambition, right? So if you think about us achieving our ambition, what happens within the four walls of our restaurant really matters. It really does. This is where everything's gotta come to life. So today, what I'll do is I'll take you through what got us to where we are today. We did some really foundational work to strengthen our foundation from an operations perspective. Then what I'll do then is give you a glimpse into the future, right?
As we prepare to unlock growth as a brand, give you a glimpse into the future in terms of what that looks like from an operations perspective. Okay, so as I mentioned, our focus over the last 18 months has been to solidify our foundation as an operating team in three key areas. One is financial fundamentals, right? Really institute a financial acumen across the organization. Two, build our people capability, starting through training. And then third would be to execute consistently across all the geographies that we're in. And what I'll do is take you a little bit deeper into each of those.
So from a financial discipline perspective, and at the core of this, right, when we started down this path, two years ago, at the core of this was to instill a rigor in our corporate team to continuously look for ways to pull out costs from the system without materially impacting the team member experience, or the guest experience. And through this path, you know, we've really identified this path to a 15% franchise EBITDA, and then within that 15%, we've identified $100,000 in savings across the system. And as you think about that $100,000, it's really, for us, when we're looking at it from an operations perspective, it's focusing in the buckets of people, through process, and through innovation.
So again, I mentioned we've got $100,000 in savings that we've identified through people, process, or innovation. And of that, right now, 40% of that is available for our system. 40% of that is out there and available for our system to participate in. As you think about the runway for that, the other $60,000 will then layer in over the next 12-18 months. And the outcome of this, as you think about this financial discipline, even in the face of, you know, the inflationary headwinds that we've had and coming out with supply chain opportunities, our franchisees are making more money. They're making 40% more money now than they did before, before COVID came.
So we're certainly proud of that, and obviously in service of our franchisee profitability, we'll continue to push to pull costs out of the system. Then from a corporate store, corporate restaurant perspective, we're seeing the same sort of restaurant-level margin improvement in our company-owned restaurants. And really great to see. Then the one note that I would tell you here is as you think about these initiatives, we always start with this group of restaurants. Right? Everything we do, we prove out, we test, we drive the ROI, and then from there, we'll take it to the franchisees. And the other thing I would point out is that of these $100,000 in savings, I mentioned 40% of that's available in the system.
All of those are implemented in our corporate restaurants, right? It's not an option, right, for our corporate restaurants to participate in that. The second piece that we focused on over the last 18 months is really to build our people capability and really drive this foundational training across our system. The first thing we did is we modernized our training platform. We didn't have an e-learning platform. We instituted a new e-learning platform that's really made it much, much, much more easy for our team members to go through the training and certification process.
But the thing that happened is when we implemented this, and we really went narrow and deep on how we're training and certifying our folks, our team members in the restaurant, is that what we realized is that two years ago, about 3% or 2% of our system had been trained and certified appropriately the way that we would deem appropriate, right, from a brand standard perspective. And so obviously, we've been narrow and deep on this for two years, and fast-forward to where we are today, 95% of our team members have gone through the appropriate training and gone through this new modernized training platform. So we feel great about what's going on from a people perspective. I mean, so great that it's allowed us...
I mean, 'cause we started with our frontline team members, but the success we saw there, it's allowed us to move on to our above restaurant leaders or those multi-unit managers and really start to drive the leadership development of that group, right? We took them through, you know, Leading with Heart, and we took them through Success Routines in 2023. We then took them through Unlocking Growth, which really was focused on how do we execute from a digital perspective, and then in 2024, we'll really start to drill in on building that business and that financial acumen of that group. So we feel great about where we're at from a people capability perspective.
Obviously, you know, the reason we're doing this is, you know, we feel like by providing this great team member experience and giving them the tools, you know, we feel like it's created this workforce of motivated and engaged individuals that ultimately are gonna drive a differentiated guest experience in our restaurants. Third area we focused on was consistent execution. First thing we did there was we created a guest experience review. So if you think about it, think of like a brand standards audit. But what we did is kind of invert that process a little bit, and we started with the customer journey.
And so every touch point that our customer goes on, we created this review process to ensure that, you know, at every inflection point that our customers go through, that we're executing, and we have the ability to have visibility into how we're executing with that. And those occur, we partner with a third party. They occur on a quarterly basis. And the kind of that extra layer that we've added is we've changed the way that our field restaurant leaders interact with franchisees. And so in a sense, we've created this consultative approach, but really think about this as an additional layer of accountability to our franchisees, which is not something that we've had before.
So on a quarterly basis, and then on a monthly check-in basis, our field leaders are checking in with franchisees to ensure that, you know, areas that we might be not executing, that they're having those conversations, right? And then visibility comes all the way up to the executive level to ensure that, you know, we have alignment in terms of how we wanna execute, and we have consistency in terms of how we execute across all of the geographies that we're at. And the outcome of this is we feel like it's working, right? We are driving a better guest experience. From a speed of service perspective, you see we've had sequential improvement in speed of service, and I think the cool thing about... Two cool things about this is, one, we didn't focus on speed.
We simply focused on process, the execution of a process. And the other thing that's great is we know from our perspective, that every five seconds in speed gives us about $8,000 in top line, right? And so we feel like we've got a lot of room to continue to improve speed. So as you think about growing top line and getting to that AUV, you know, continuing to move speed of service forward is really gonna do a nice job of driving that top line. The other thing we're seeing is historic lows in service alerts, right? Obviously, if you're gonna give a better experience, if your team members are taking care of your guests, speed's a little bit better. You know, we're seeing lows in service alerts, which is great because it's certainly...
You know, that's the barometer for us in terms of the experience that our team members are giving in the restaurant. And then the really cool thing is we're starting to gain share within the QSR segment. So I don't know if you guys know this or not, but QSR Magazine does an annual drive-thru study, right? We hadn't participated in it, at least in the more recent time. And so we chose to participate in it this year. Now, we didn't make the data public because we didn't know where we were gonna rate. We simply wanted to benchmark ourselves against the competition, right? And in the magazine, we're pretty pleased with the results, right?
We came out number 1 in order accuracy, number two in overall satisfaction, and number three in food quality. So we feel like that this is a product of the foundational work that we've done to really materially improve the team member and ultimately the guest experience. The one thing I will tell you where we didn't rate really well is speed, right? Even though we've seen sequential improvement, we didn't rate in the top five in speed. And while certainly you would like, we would like to be better, the thing I would tell you about that is this is- there's some intentionality to what we're doing, right? You can't focus on speed without materially improving the guest experience. So this is kind of the way that we wanted this to go.
Make our team members better, be accurate, make the food right, treat people well within the restaurants, and now what we can do is we can start to materially move that speed of service forward and really start to focus on that without losing the quality cues that we gained within the four walls of the restaurant. All right. As we move into our next chapter of growth, we feel like we really feel like we're in a position of strength to leverage these key levers of growth that we have, right? One being the new restaurant and market opening playbook. Darin talked about it, Ryan talked about it, and the other being to leverage the technology that's gonna start coming into the restaurants that Doug will take you through here in a little bit.
With regards to the new restaurant and market opening playbook, you know, really for us from an operations perspective, there's really two things we did different here, right? One is applying our learnings from simplification. And by simplification, meaning you've heard about a simplified menu. Makes it easier for our team members to execute. Also makes it easier for our guests to order, right? It's not such a broad menu where it kind of bogs down your speed of service. Simplification from equipment, right? These restaurants and these new markets have all the new equipment that we've been testing. From a digital perspective, Ryan talked about that. How do we market from a digital perspective?
But the other thing that we've done differently, too, is really start to move ourselves to a digital-forward organization to make sure that we can execute from a digital perspective. And then last, marketing. Ryan talked to you a little bit about it, but, you know, not only, not only like, do we do LTOs or do we not do LTOs, right? To make it a little easier on our team members, but what is that - what is the pace and sequence of marketing, and how does that pace and sequence over the course of time versus just stopping after two weeks or four weeks, right? So, really thought differently about that. And then, the other thing we did is we just thought differently about how we staff the restaurants, how we train the restaurants, and how we support the restaurants.
You know, in the past, you know, it wasn't a super robust training program. It wasn't a super robust support plan. And so, I mean, you guys have... You've heard, right? These restaurants are doing record volumes, right? And so we gotta have the ability to execute for these guests in these markets over the course of time to really minimize that J-curve or minimize that dip you may see from a honeymoon perspective with the sales. And again, we're continuing to see amazing sales in these restaurants. From a technology perspective, you know, what technology does is it allows us to innovate really in three areas, right? The way we think about automation is through kitchen, through service, and through management, right? And I'll take you quickly through each of these.
Automation, for us, it's more about, like, I want you to think about it in terms of task elimination, right? What automation does, it allows us to eliminate tasks that our team members have to do to allow them to be able to make a bigger impact on their guests or their team members, right? And so what you have here is, this is an example of our fryer station. I got a video to show you this robotic fry station on the next slide, but what you have here is our fryer station. And, and for all intents and purposes, this is the most difficult station that we have in our, in our restaurant. The hardest, hardest station to work, right?
So what you've got on the screen is you've got this AI, demand-driven, build-to chart, right, with a connected piece of equipment that, sorry, with a connected piece of equipment that recognizes the demand needed and then automatically goes and starts to prep and make these items without any team member involvement. So I'll show you a quick video of it and then and then come back to you. Just a funny little anecdote. I always joke that I always have to follow marketing, right? Because they got the sexy videos and all this stuff. So it's not Ryan Reynolds, but that's probably as sexy as we get from an operations perspective, is a robotic fry station.
The second second area that we're looking at from a service perspective, from automation, is really two main areas: drink automation and then voice AI in the drive-thru. Obviously, you can see the drink automation there, but the thing I would speak to specifically would be on the voice AI in the drive-thru. We don't currently have it in our restaurants, and we won't be able to get it until we get a new POS. But the one thing that the leverage that we have with Del Taco is they've been using it, so we have the ability to learn from them. So as we implement our new POS, we will certainly be a fast implementation of voice AI in the drive-thru.
We know, and again, in working with our partners at Del Taco, we know, one, the consistency level of the service experience, and two, we know the check-building qualities that come when you have voice AI because you've got suggestive selling, and there's really not an option, right? You're gonna get that suggestive sell, which again, is gonna build the check. So again, we're super excited about that. And then, you know, from a, for our guests, it's really about driving a frictionless guest experience, no matter how they wanna use us, right? And for us, being a more digital-forward organization. A good example... Well, you got three examples, right?
One is the kiosk, the self-order kiosk, which again, Doug will talk about, but as we go into a new POS, that's part of the base package for us, right, is this kiosk. The other thing is food lockers, and this is a great example. Ryan spoke to this a little bit, but as you think about a key unlock for us, it's really that 10:00 P.M. and overnight. Like, we have so much room to grow sales after 10:00 P.M. when our dining rooms close. As Ryan mentioned, everything gets funneled through the drive-thru. So a big initiative for us is how we pull those delivery drivers or those off-premise orders, how do we pull those out of the drive-thru after 10:00 P.M. Food lockers is one way.
Pickup windows, you're gonna see Ryan talked about that, but really, we feel like we've got so much upside from a top-line sales perspective by driving that overnight. And then last, from a team member perspective, deploying technology will allow our restaurant leaders really to spend less time in functions and more time being able to impact their team members, or work being able to impact the guest experience. And so you see, you know, forecasting, scheduling, digital checklists, AI vision sensors in the drive-thru that tells you how many cars you got, how many factors you have, because we don't have any visibility to factors in the drive-thru right now. And then so certainly helps us out from a drive-thru standpoint. And one thing I'll call out, just digital checklist, that's already been rolled out.
Like, we've got that across the system, really digitizing Success Routines, and digitizing the things that our managers do in the restaurant. But what getting technology, Doug is gonna bring, is really gonna help us take that data and be able to use that data, what we're seeing in these digital checklists, and really drive a better, more differentiated team experience. Last thing I have today, we've talked a little bit about equipment, but just so you know, some of the things we've got in our new restaurants that we're going into new markets with.
Semi-automated drink system, the forced air holding bin, which again, might not sound sexy, but really is game-changing for us in terms of having the ability to hold food, hold it at high quality, hold it for an extended period of time, to really allow us to get through our peak periods and really open up the bottleneck that sometimes we see. And then digital station, you know, in our new restaurants. But again, I talked about being a more digital-forward organization, and for us it's, okay, how do we take, how do we make, how do we bag, how do we stage these digital orders? And how do we make it as frictionless as possible for the end consumer? So that is all I have for you today.
I appreciate you all being here, and I'm gonna turn it over to Sarah and the Del Taco team.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Sarah McAloon. I'm the Chief Administrative Officer for Del Taco. I'm two months into the role, and I'm so honored to be here on the Del Taco brand, working with Tom Rose, our President, and the other members of the executive team in the box. I've been in QSR since college, so a number of years, I'm not gonna disclose how many. And I've worked on two continents for brands like McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Costa Coffee, Sbarro, and Cici's Pizza. Tom and I will be sharing our initial thoughts on how we're going to achieve our ambitions on AUV and EBITDA for Del. So we've identified four initial pillars for our initial thinking for growth. I'm gonna take you through the first two, which are the Crave Marketing Strategy and our development of it, premium and value.
Then Tom will take you through the last two, which are menu optimization and operations excellence. As far as the Crave Marketing Strategy goes, we've already made a lot of progress on this pillar. We transitioned to a new media agency 12 months ago. We had, at Del, an independent agency, kind of a monopoly, and so we moved agencies. We did an RFP, but in the end, we moved to the same agency as Jack. That enabled us to pool our resources, and we were able to save around $8 million. About $5 million and change on the Del side, and Jack also got $2 million and change on theirs. So that just shows you the immediate efficiencies that we could get by joining forces.
That change to me, to the media agencies and the efficiencies that we got actually enabled us to expand our really important Lakers partnership. So we already had a partnership, but through that transition, we were able to double our impressions and add digital to that platform. In addition, it also allowed us to create a brand-new partnership with the Dodgers. So we're really happy with those immediate gains that we got. But there's still significant opportunity in media. We definitely need to look at our window promo lengths, so how many promotions we have over the course of 12 months, our TRP levels, and our tapering levels. So there's still more to come, and the benefits that we can get from media. Back one slide. Yeah. We've also completed a Mexican segmentation study.
As Brian said, this is the stuff that they did three years ago, so we're following in their footsteps. So right now, we just finished a QSR, Mexican QSR segmentation study, and we've identified two high ROI targets, and we've definitely confirmed our brand strengths. Our brand strengths, for sure, are fresh, quality ingredients and value. No surprise, but it's really great to get that validation. We've also moving into projects that we're just starting. We've just moved into a brand positioning project. It kicks off this week, and we aim to be finished in February. And that brand positioning project will give us a clear definition of the Crave Marketing Strategy. Brian took you through what that meant, but it's cultural, relevant, authentic, visible, easy and distinctive. So we'll have clear definitions of what that means for Del.
Because Jack have already been on this playbook, it means that we can rapidly progress along Crave. They've got a lot of learnings for us, and we'll learn from them where appropriate. So in the end, after we've finished this brand positioning project, we'll understand the new expression of Better Mex, what that means to our guests, what that means to our core product and new product innovation territories, and what that means to our interior store design, our people strategy for in restaurants, and also it will give us a red thread to weave through all of our advertising and communications, which means that our media works even harder. On the second pillar of value, we've done a lot of research. So we've done first-party research, and we've also looked at the third-party research, so we know a ton.
Basically on every metric, Del wins on value. But the way we were defining value internally was quite narrow, so we had defined it as low prices. And Tom and I firmly believe that we can expand that definition to not always be the lowest price, but in some areas we will be the lowest price, but even in those, we think there's some room to close that gap compared to our direct competitors. We can also expand our definition of value beyond low prices to more food for the money. So this is something else that the segmentation study has shown us. There's a large group of customers within the market who don't just define value as low price. So they want more bundles, larger combo deals, family packs, et cetera.
We have been underserving that category, and we can definitely do more to offer up those types of value on our menu. So Tom and I agree that there's a large opportunity to expand on value. In addition, we can execute smart tactics like Hook and Build, where we have low prices on in our communication, and we upsell with larger items and upgrades on our drive-thru menu. We have a ton of opportunity to expand our definition of value while still retaining our leadership. Moving on to premium. Birria was our most successful promotion to date, and that's no surprise when we looked at the results of our segmentation study. The two high ROI segments told us they wanted more products like this. They want premium items that are more authentic, real, and flavorful.
So at the same time we were learning from our first-party research, Birria was launching and taking off, so we've really got some good data points. We have great capabilities to develop more promotions in premium like this, and our guests are telling us, "Go further. Go beyond the basics. Go beyond what your competitor's doing." It's the best promotion we've had in years, with 7% same-store sales growth and even driving positive traffic. In addition, we've done some more work separately on menus, and we found out that we have the opportunity to add more items, particularly on tacos, which we should own in the $4 price point and above category. Our competitors are already offering tacos in this price range, and we're not. So we have a ton of opportunity in premium as well as in value. Okay, so we are...
In summary, before I hand over to Tom, we're very excited about the opportunities that we've got just in our initial learnings. It's actually great that we're behind Jack. They've got three years of, like, more of experience, and we'll follow that to grow rapidly, to meet our opportunities. I know that just from my eight weeks here, that we have great products. I've eaten a lot of it, probably too much. Technomic have told us that not only do it, does our own segmentation study say we have great products, but we actually win on craveable tacos and craveable burritos. We have great products. We win on value, but we think there's opportunity. We know there's also opportunity in premium that's been proven by Birria already.
What I've learned as I've gotten to know our team at Del Taco is that we have a bunch of great people who have got really long tenure. That means that they know the industry, and they know the brand. And together, I'm really excited to meet our ambitions. Tom will talk about our next two platforms. Thanks, Tom.
Thank you, Sarah. Thank you. Hi, I'm Tom Rose. I'm brand president for Del Taco. Tell you just a little bit about my background. I view my career kind of in thirds. All of it has been spent in food service, the far majority of it in quick serve. I started with Yum Brands, actually, even before it was called Yum Brands. I was talking to somebody last night. When I was there, it was Tricon. But I spent the first number of years with ultimately Yum Brands on the ops side, where I learned a great deal about quick serve and how to operate. I then left and joined a company that was also in food service, predominantly on the convenience store side, and ultimately it became part of the Kohlberg portfolio.
At that point, I was elevated to COO and a member of the board, and that gave me my executive experience. At some point, there was a transaction. I was able to cash out, and I became what I ultimately always wanted to be, was a franchisee. Went back to Yum and began to buy, acquire Yum brands. The major focus was KFC and Taco Bell. Excuse me. My focus was on acquiring distressed organizations and fixing them. That's what I realized my true love was.... And ultimately ended up having markets up through the East Coast from a number of six markets, from Miami all the way up to Syracuse, New York. And I loved it. Decided ultimately it was time to slow down, and I had until Darin called. Darin and I have a 23-year friendship.
We've always stayed in touch with each other, and he called me and said, "I've got something I think you might enjoy," and that's led me here. You've heard Sarah talk about our advantage to Taco Bell on quality and value. One of the main questions, and I guess I have a bit of a unique, unique vision, because having been a Taco Bell franchisee, of what some of the challenges and opportunities might exist for us. But value is clearly one that Sarah and I have spent a lot of time talking about is: How big of a gap do we really need on value? But pause on top of that, we've got quality. I want to pause just a second and let you all know that are here, you're getting ready to be able to try our main Del Taco.
When you do try it, try not to devour it all immediately. Try and look at it and see just how much meat and cheese we load on these tacos. And know that's our base taco. And compare that to a Taco Bell taco. There's no comparison. And again, those two tacos are priced at parity. So huge opportunity, particularly because of the quality side. In fact, that's what gives us, what we believe, the pricing headroom to be able to improve both the bottom line and keep that value perception going. So we're doing it on two levels, is how we're beginning the process. One, certainly creating marketing around promoting not just our value, but our quality as well. But we also have to communicate to the customers in the restaurants, and that is also another huge opportunity.
What you're seeing here is our existing menu boards today. If you're anything like me, the very first time I saw a Del Taco menu board, I had to step back and look at it for minutes before I could step up and begin to order. It's very complex, and it's also not getting our guests' eyes where we want them to be. Clearly, the yellow is a massive draw. Well, we ran financial, operational, and guest research on our menus. Not only that, we also conducted eye motion study. Of course, the eye motion study confirmed what common sense told us all. The 20 Under $2 had overwhelming influence on the guest view, which the issue is it draws their attention to lower price and some of our lowest margin items. What we've done is we've initiated a recreation of our menu boards.
We're launching. Actually, it just launched this morning in 15 California stores, five different versions of a new menu board. We're beginning to test that. Actually, the idea is that not necessarily we pick one of the menu boards as a winner. The idea is we're going to choose what from each of those boards has been well-received by the guests, and it may not look anything like one of the five we currently have in test. We chose four goals, specifically, that we wanted to achieve with the menu board. Obviously, it's drive strong margins and sales. Also, improve speed of service to increase the labor efficiency and create a more simplified back-of-the-house, while also staying aligned with our core strengths of freshness and value. And finally, what's most important is make it easier for the guest to read.
The concepts that we're testing include a reintroduce of a combo box, revised meal formats, boost attachment rates for drinks, fries, and desserts, streamline the value menu to optimize for better margins, and reduce back-of-the-house complexity. We're excited about it, and we'll be monitoring this daily as this goes along. As you may have heard, I spent the majority of my career leading underperforming organizations and turning them into high-value assets. I don't know that I've seen a better opportunity for that to occur than with Del Taco today. It's been decades, literally multiple decades, since the brand has evaluated its production flow, workforce deployment, and its current operating systems. We've already formed a team that's beginning the process of basically reimagining how the kitchen is going to operate going forward. But I've given them two limitations....
First, it has whatever they develop has to operate within our current four walls, and that means all the different style stores we have. Second, and more important, is it can't affect quality. We have to maintain that. Short of those, we're examining everything that we do currently in our stores, and nothing will be left undiscovered. Oh, sorry. Now I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll introduce those results in two phases. First, those that offer the best EBITDA results to improve margin and the simplest to execute. In fact, last week, we did just introduce our first one around shift accountability. That kind of, frankly, is almost a basic, you must operate this way, but Del Taco hadn't been operating with shift accountability. Huge opportunity that we believe in short term, we can see some significant margin improvement, but more of the will be coming.
And then longer term, the initiatives that we'll introduce longer term will have a smaller impact on EBITDA or be a little bit more complex to execute. But either way, we see a huge opportunity for margin improvement. Some of it, instead of low hanging fruit, some of it literally is picking the fruit up on the floor. And then, I think I've got another note. Here. Thank you. Talk about digital a second. You, let me... I really advanced way ahead.
That's all right.
As you can tell, I'm real enthused about this. I want to talk about digital. You heard Ryan mention we've got kiosk. We do have in four stores that we were trying to make sure we could prove that it would work through our data systems, and it would be seamlessly operated. We've been able to prove that, thanks with Doug's help. Next, we're launching in another four stores to also focus now specifically on placement and marketing, make sure that the customers are more engaged with the kiosk. We're taking these learnings in preparation to eventually launch system-wide, but we're also sharing them with Jack in the Box as well, with what we learned.
Second digital piece that we're really excited about, both Sarah and I, is catering, specifically app-based catering, because it requires no capital investment, and it's kind of what everybody's used to at this point, or they're going to it. But Sarah has significant experience in this field. I've got some limited experience, and both of us realize it could have a really good impact on us. The nice news is, it, whatever we get out of it is 100% incremental because we don't exist in it today, and also, Mexican is just perfect, you know, for catering. So we're in the process of developing that now and hope to have it launched sometime in the next two or three periods as a test. Now, I can go to this one.
So, I was introduced to the Del Taco franchise community at the Del Taco conference five weeks after I'd first joined Del Taco. Of course, I had, all I'd been doing was going on a listening tour and trying to listen and learn what the focus should be, so I didn't have any strategy to share with them. So instead, what I was able to share is I'd learned two things: had to improve the relevance of the brand, and absolutely a must, we had to improve their economics and profitability. So what you've heard today from both Sarah and I is our initial thoughts on how to get the relevance and improve profitability. Sarah and I have been moving fast, but with discipline, and that's how we're going to continue to operate.
We cannot be more proud to be the leader brand with a 60-year legacy of quality and value into a more promising future. Same with the talent, knowledge, and resources at both Jack and Del, we view that the next five years are going to have huge growth potential. With that, Chris?
Thanks, Tom. I was going to say let's go devour some food, but you said, "Don't devour anything," so-
Well, you can devour it after the meeting.
Okay, great. So at this point, we'll take a break. For those in the room, we're going to head out this way to Jack in the Box restaurant and try some food. And for those of you on the webcast, we will be back on at 10:45 Pacific, 1:45 Eastern, so about a 20-minute break. And we'll start that now. Thank you.
That's a great thing.
That's it.
Everybody's hungry. We have to bring it back.
Yeah, I probably will do it. [Audio Distortion]
Welcome back, guys. Hopefully you guys enjoyed that little snack or lunch or brunch. I don't know what you guys liked the best, but my favorite menu item for Jack in the Box is the tacos. They have the Tiny Tacos out there, but I'm a taco guy. I don't know. There was a time in my life that I could eat 10 of those tacos.
Was that last week?
That was a long time ago. Anyway, thank you for, again, for sharing your time with us. My name is Tim Linderman. I'm the Chief Development Officer for Jack in the Box and Del Taco. I've been with the company now for three years. I've been in the industry for a little over 20 years. Absolutely love the business. I'm excited to share with you the development strategy and how it supports our ambition of achieving the five-year payback and a 2.5% net unit growth. It's clear looking at this map that there's a ton of opportunity available for both brands. Even with Jack in the Box at 2,200 units nationwide, there's still room for growth in our mature markets, our emerging markets, and more importantly, our new markets.
We've demonstrated that over the past three years in all the development agreement signings that we've done in these markets. Today, we have over 80 development agreements worth 340 commitments with Jack, and we have over 30 development agreements with 200 commitments for Del Taco, and that was after the acquisition and with help of some of the great efforts that we've done. Keep in mind, and what Darin had mentioned earlier, we are the number two player in Mexican QSR with 600. So there's definitely a runway for us to grow the Del Taco brand even more. We opened two markets at Jack in 2023, which are the first that we've had in a decade.
Jack has signed agreements in six new states, including one international market, Mexico, and Del has signed agreements in seven new states. The idea is to get into these markets, build them out, using our new market playbook, and then, we obviously want to build to awareness levels versus the ones and twos, like we've done in the past. 2.5 years ago, at the Investor Day, Darin laid out the three-prong approach to market expansion. The approach really hasn't changed. We still utilize all three avenues for growth, focusing on our most two recent markets, Salt Lake City and Louisville. Salt Lake City performs really well. It's our wagon wheel market, with five stores in it currently.
We're expecting to expand that to about 15 in the next couple of years. Louisville is our true white space market. It has two company stores that are currently open. We think that we'll get somewhere around 10, 10-15 in the next two years. Orlando. Orlando is our next white space market that we're looking at. Very excited about the opportunities there. Last year, we signed a franchisee to a development agreement there. We are also developing there. We're co-developing that market. Just recently, we're gonna open within the next year there as well. We just secured our first piece of real estate in Florida.
But more excitingly is, or more exciting, is that we signed a franchisee, a new franchisee, to a 10-store development agreement last week. And as you've heard from others today, we're gonna take the same systematic new market playbook, and we're gonna replicate it over and over and over into these future markets. We've produced a strong pipeline and signed agreements that support our growth ambitions. We have 370 total for both brands, all of which are committed to open by 2027. This graph doesn't show the 200 additional commitments that we have for openings beyond 2027. And that number is gonna continue to grow as we continue to sign development agreements in new markets.
Then last year, we signed over 100 commitments for both Del Taco and Jack in the Box. So we're hoping to continue this trend of moving this business forward. The exciting part is the overall pipeline is translating to openings. We've seen an increase in openings over the past three years with Jack, and over the past year with Del. 130 of the commitments are sites that have been approved and are moving into the construction phase. This means that leases are getting signed, they're either in planning, they're permitting, or they're already in under construction. Once the deals get to this stage, we feel pretty confident that they're gonna get opened. We have a strong plan that accelerates each year to support that unit growth goal.
Brian's gonna go into detail on the numbers in his section. But for the development, our focus is still on identifying those markets, recruiting franchisees, finding sites, and reducing that timeline and that development cost. As far as enablers to support the growth, we're proactive in filling the funnel with franchisees, development agreements, and sites. Something that hasn't been done in a long time. We're gonna continue to improve the efficiencies of that development process. And last, it's important to further reduce the build cost, and we're doing that through value engineering and synergies that we're finding between the brands. Our growth is supported by newly optimized and accelerated development process. First, we offer a compelling development incentive program.
Second, we're proactive in site selection and permitting, in the permitting process. So no longer are we waiting for franchisees to bring real estate to us, we're gonna find that real estate, we're gonna take it to them. And if they decide they don't wanna do it, then we have an opportunity as a company, to go ahead and, build that store. We're also engaging political consultants, expediters, where possible, to speed things up. Third, we've standardized the construction best practices, such as managing equipment, ordering lead times. We've also partnered with key vendors, such as our sign vendors, our kitchen vendors, to help improve, procurement and installments. And fourth, we've value engineered three prototypes, for Jack and for Del, each, using the Crave and the Fresh Flex images.
Here's our Jack value engineered restaurant prototype and what it looks like. We have the walk-up drive-thru, we have the 2,300 sq ft building, and we have the 2,000 sq ft building. The walk-up drive-thru was the first company store that we opened in Salt Lake City. And it was a result of the learnings that we had in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The 2,300 sq ft building was a result of the learnings we got when we acquired Del Taco. We used their building, and we dropped our kitchen into it. The 2,000 sq ft building was a request from our franchisees, and it's sort of a hybrid between the first two prototypes that I spoke about.
We really feel that this 2,000 sq ft prototype will be the choice, choice prototype for our future restaurants. It has a better economic model, and it should lead us to that five-year payback and that $1.9 million investment. Similar story here with Del Taco restaurant prototype. We have the walk-up drive-thru, we have the 2,300 sq ft building, and we have the 2,000 sq ft building. They began with the 2,300 sq ft building that opened up in Kissimmee, Florida last year. And Jack utilized the shared learnings from this building, as I just spoke about. And then we have the walk-up drive-thru that just opened up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which utilized the shared learnings from Jack.
Like Jack, the 2,000 sq ft prototype should also lead us to that five-year payback and that $1.8 million investment. So part of our strategy is also getting these restaurants built faster and more efficiently. We built the team, we built that process, and now we're just laser focused on shortening that timeline. Biggest opportunities that we see in this process is the real estate and the planning and permitting. We're already starting to see results over the past couple of years. In fiscal year 2022, we were over 30 months. Fiscal 2023, last year, we were down to 25 months. And then, this year, after our first six openings with Jack in the Box, we're already down to 21 months. So we're moving in the right direction.
And so as you've heard, the team is driving the AUVs and improving margins. Our role in development continues to be picking the right markets, bringing the right franchisees on board, and building that pipeline, and we're doing that. The good news is the market, the new market playbook is working. And we see a substantial increase in sales in these new markets, as you guys have seen as well. So the synergies are coming together, and we're excited about it. So with that said, I'm gonna introduce Doug, and he's gonna talk to you about technology.
Thank you, Tim. Good morning, everybody here in the room and on the webcast. Thank you for being here. Hi, my name is Doug Cook. I'm the Chief Technology Officer for Jack in the Box and Del Taco. I joined the business about 2.5 years ago. I've had the privilege and the opportunity to serve as Brand Technology Leader for multiple or several multi-unit, highly franchised, quick-service restaurant brands, most long-standing in my time, almost two decades, with Sonic Drive-In, helping that business digitally transform. Like my peers, I couldn't be more excited about the business, about our two brands, and our ambition. This has already been introduced to you many times.
What's unique about technology is that as we dive into our technology strategy and plan for the next few minutes, technology supports the whole of our ambition. All of these goals are unlocked in so many ways by technology. And so when we think about EBITDA improvement, when we think about restaurant expansion, doubling our digital sales and AUV growth, these outcomes, technology is critical. I think we'd all agree in this room, it's essential to realizing these business outcomes. Now, before I get into this, let me just say this, first of all. In my first few months on the job, it became obvious to me, our technology, our key systems were old, they were outdated, hard to change and difficult to secure, and oftentimes unreliable and unstable, getting in the way of operators serving our guests.
Well, that in large part was due because of a lack of ongoing investment. Many years of not investing in technology. So it was no wonder, of course, it was nearly impossible for us to respond to new ideas and rapidly innovate in order for us to compete with our peers. Now, back to this slide. You might notice I brought forth this paradigm that was in Darin's presentation, this idea of crawl, walk and run. Why did I do that? Well, in so many ways, the technology environment, the technology landscape, should I say, mimicked the business environment that all of this management team walked into. Crawl, I think of it as stabilize. Walk, for us, is modernizing the technology. Where we all want to be is running, and that's innovating, being at the cutting edge, catching up to our competition.
Not really catching up, more leapfrogging, right? So what do I mean when I say stabilize? Well, when I think about stability and stabilizing technology, I think about uninterrupted operations. Our technology should never be in the way of taking, making, paying for, or delivering the guest order. It should never interrupt daily business operation. So when we're focused on stability, well, we're talking about our key systems and their performance and their availability. We're talking about attacking vigorously, escalating help desk call volumes, things like reliably processing guest credit card payments and mobile orders not getting to the point-of-sale system. I think we'd all agree, right? That's just unacceptable and an unacceptable guest experience as well. So the good news is this, this is largely behind us. We've improved system stability over the last two years.
In the last 12 months, we're now into the phase II of our technology plan, and that's modernizing our technology. We'll spend the bulk of our time, the rest of our time talking about that. Now, when we think about modernization of our tech, I think about rebuilding the foundation, a solid foundation that we can innovate upon. I'm thinking about increased quality through automation. I'm thinking about optimized IT cost. I'm thinking about a reduction in the variety of systems and tools that's required to run the business every day. Over the last 24 months since we joined the business, we've now assembled a strong technology team with really deep restaurant and digital technology experience, and that team has created a multi-year, as Darin said, a multi-year tech roadmap.
Just like the headline says here, not only have we created it, we're now executing on that technology modernization plan. Why do we modernize? Well, we're modernizing so that we can innovate. I just mentioned that we're aiming to catch up to our competition with technology. Not only catch up, again, we want to be leaders. We will be leaders. And when we think about innovation, it's about introducing new business capabilities that allow us to accelerate enterprise value. Some of those ideas Ryan has mentioned and Tony has mentioned, these are things like digitizing the drive-thru. We talked a lot today about AI and voice ordering, computer-assisted voice ordering, so we can better or, more rightly deploy labor in the restaurant. It could be pay at the pedestal for speed of service. It could be digital menu boards.
It could be a lot of things as we look to digitize our drive-thrus. It also could be AI, machine learning models that help predict guest and team member experiences. And like we saw earlier from Tony, the fryer robot that helps us automate labor, maybe optimize labor deployment. This is what we think about when we think about innovation, but modernization of our tech plan has to happen first. Okay, so how are we gonna do this? How are we gonna modernize our technology? I like to think of it as re, again, rebuilding our foundation. We're gonna do that, through the enablement of a, what we call a unified commerce engine.... this unified commerce engine really is supported by two key foundational platforms. Our new app, really our new digital ecosystem.
You see the new app here, but really underpinning that app also is a MarTech stack. It's really a set of integrated marketing tools and data that flow off the app and our new POS system that allow us to unleash the power of data for our enterprise. Now, many POS platforms, our POS platform is, is not like the traditional POS system that you might see in a brick-and-mortar restaurant location. It's different. It connects all of our ordering channels, both first-party and third-party, in-store and off-premise, and it'll be prepared for the next ordering channel that comes around the corner. It enables and unlocks loyalty. It also builds upon production-level guest experiences for our businesses and for our restaurants.
It really puts the operator right back in the driver's seat, so they can focus on delivering delicious food for our hungry guests. It simplifies that complex technology ecosystem, that menu ecosystem, multi-brand and multi-channel menu environment. It helps our operators attain higher profits by using this platform that we're constructing. So I'm thinking about taking and receiving orders rapidly, and making orders accurately, paying for orders reliably, and delivering orders and serving guests wonderfully. You heard Darin say it earlier, everything we're doing, and technology is no different, stands in support of this approach of being a top-tier AUVs, doubling our digital sales and improving store-level margins. Now, let's go down a little bit deeper here and talk about each of these components. We're rebuilding, as I said, our digital ecosystem. Let's start there.
And we're not doing that just for technology's sake. We're doing that to grow our digital sales to 20% and beyond. We're gonna do that in a large way, due to the strong technology capabilities that we've been able to assemble, and a sound digital strategy that Ryan has set forth. We're taking our brands into the future with technology, starting with all-new Jack in the Box apps, built on industry-leading design principles, supported by, underpinned by, a digital platform. I want you to think of that as digital infrastructure that allows us to go faster and accelerate delivery over time. And we all know in this room, there's no shortage of new ideas, right? There's no shortage. The real question for us is: How fast can our technology respond to those new business opportunities?
With new apps and new integrated marketing tools and data, we're aiming to accelerate growth. Growth with increased acquisition, retention, sales. Based on reusable components, our technology approach encourages, it invites incremental improvement, iterative improvement, test-and-learn mentalities, fail-fast approaches, and rapid innovation. And it readily supports not only Del Taco, but any other brands we might acquire in the future. To achieve this, we've assembled a top-notch team with full control and full ownership, not only over the guest experiences, but also the underlying technologies. You know, we're on an exciting journey here. We're creating world-class digital experiences, and we're repositioning, should I say, or reshaping our digital presence to be as cool as our iconic brands, and more importantly, to unlock our ambition to grow digital sales to 20%. Now, as I just mentioned, we're rebuilding, enhancing our digital ecosystem.
We're also rebuilding our restaurant technology platforms. That's highlighted by our point-of-sale system and our restaurant network as well. Now, these innovations that you see here, many of them have been highlighted by Tony and Tom. All of these innovations... I mean, I got talking so fast I didn't move the slide forward. These innovations that you see here, we've been piloting and working with these innovations for months now. I think I already mentioned, Tom said with kiosk and voice AI ordering, we're actually learning from Del Taco's implementations. Those operational learnings and those technology learnings, for me, are being incorporated into our technology roadmap.
But here's the point: All of these innovations that you see here, food lockers to get our drivers and our guests out of the drive-thru, whether it be, again, robotic fryers or it be intelligent food ordering or smart employee scheduling, whatever these innovations are, they become a reality. They become a reality with this new modern, cloud-based POS platform. Now we have, and we're excited to tell you that we've selected a new POS provider. At this stage, we're finalizing the agreement, and then very shortly thereafter, we will start the implementation, the deployment of the system.
We're happy to also tell you that we are on schedule, and we are on track to complete that implementation of the POS at Jack in the Box by the end of 2025, and then we have all the intention to move into Del Taco shortly thereafter. Let me. So what you see behind me is our business technology roadmap. A set of milestones that by 2027 will allow us to have a unified digital environment, ecosystem, that's integrated with a fully scaled point-of-sale system for both brands. And also be supported by shared, consolidated corporate back-office systems. Now, I don't have to tell you this, there's lots of work to do, and there's lots of investment to make, which I'm happy we're doing and excited about. Brian will tell you more about that here shortly.
Just two things that I want to leave, leave you with. Number one, we're hearing from our franchisees a much different set of feedback. Early on, were some challenges with technology. Now we're hearing that technology is improving. We're on the right path, and they're in full support of our plan. And for me, with franchisees, that's music to my ears, excitement, buy-in, and alignment. Also, when I walked into the door 2.5 years ago, the summer of 2021, I could clearly see that our technology was not competitive. As a matter of fact, it was holding back our business. I stand before you here today, I feel much differently. I feel much different, and I'm excited about the future and our strong technology investments, and I look forward to us becoming a formidable tech competitor. Thank you.
Let me turn this presentation over to our Chief Financial Officer, Brian Scott.
Thanks, Doug. I just wanna reiterate our appreciation for everyone taking the time to come here to San Diego. For those listening on the webcast, we really appreciate you taking the time to do this. We're really excited, hopefully, that comes across about our future here. I also just want to thank Chris and the entire team from the restaurant employees, our IT team, and so many others who are involved in helping to put this together and orchestrating it. They've done a tremendous effort, and I'm really excited about about this event. So with that said, Brian Scott, I'm the Chief Financial Officer. I joined the organization about five months ago now. I'm new to the industry, but I've spent my entire career in accounting and finance.
Most recently, I was the CFO of a public company for about 11 years. During my time there, we went from about $400 million to about a $4 billion revenue company, and really, our success in growing the business was built on having a great strategy, great systems, and ultimately a great team to execute. So hopefully, you've heard today just a small sample of our leadership team, how confident I am in our ability to execute and grow this business. And they're just a sample of this entire organization with expertise, passion, and a vision towards growing this business. So I'm, I'm gonna get into the numbers. I promise everybody's looking for some updates on operations and some of our financial targets. But I, you know, again, we have clear ambition as an organization.
We want to have that North Star in some of our targets for the long term, but why we're confident in our ability to execute on those? You've heard about a lot of that today. We have a great strategy. We've got an excellent team to go execute against that now. And really, over the last couple of years, you know, Darin and the team have put together a series of initiatives that we are now executing on to achieve these ambitions. Crave, you heard about. We think it's a differentiator approach in how we think about our menu, pricing, and the way we serve our guests, and we're excited to roll that out to our Del brand as well. Tony talked about the tremendous opportunity we have to continue to improve our operations and unlock more value and more profitability for our franchisees.
Doug just talked about our tech roadmap. I think we're moving to this point now where we can really invest in growing this business. Got to underpin that with world-class technology, and we're on our way to achieving that. Del Taco, great asset. It's been with the organization about two years now, and really, we're just starting to see the opportunity to drive that business forward, and we're primed for even years of growth. From a unit growth opening, the work that's been done over the last several years to really build that development pipeline is now really turning into new restaurant openings, and we're confident that as we go through the next several years, we're gonna grow that more, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a couple of slides here.
Ultimately, from our capital allocation plan, we are pivoting more to a growth mode. We talked about it on the earnings call. We're investing more in our systems, building restaurants and our teams, and so that's a really important part of our strategy is pivoting to growth, and ultimately, all of this is about delivering more value to our shareholders. Let me frame this up a little bit. You've heard about our ambition today, and I want you to think about that as these are the North Star for us and how we're gonna try to drive towards success as a business. Some of those targets are gonna take longer to get to, but we wanna make sure that everybody in the organization has clarity on where we want to get to and what success looks like...
We provided our guidance several months ago for fiscal 2024, which you see on the slide. We wanted to also give you a marker in between of where we think it's a very reasonable and achievable target for us by 2027. Some of these will, will move us very close to or achieve our ambition. Others may take a little bit longer, but at least it frames it up for you as where we think we can, we can be here over the next three years. From a same-store sales perspective, you know, the last several years have clearly been impacted by inflation and supply chain issues, and we're still feeling some effects in our, in our fiscal 2024, along with our friends in California, making some legislative changes.
But as we roll forward in the next several years, we think it's very realistic for this business to have a consistent, sustainable, 2%-3% same-store sales growth. You couple that with the new unit growth expectations that we've got, we think we can drive really strong system-wide sales growth to achieve our visions. Always focused on profitability, particularly for our franchisees. Really starts with our restaurants, as Tony mentioned, the things we implement there, improve margins, and then we roll those out to our franchisees. You see our restaurant-level margin guidance for 2024. We know there's more we can do, and so as we look to 2027, you know, we think we can get to 23%-25%, on the Jack side. That gets us very closer to our ambition.
Del Taco has more opportunity, but they also see those opportunities. They're gonna execute against them, and we expect to get those margins continue to increase over the years. From a G&A standpoint, we've invested in our talent and our teams. We've brought in more, you know, more folks on the development side, on the technology side. So we feel like we've got a great foundation to build off of now. We've also been able to achieve a lot of synergies from the Del Taco acquisition, and so at this point forward, we feel like we can leverage the team that we have. We'll invest where we need, but we know we've got opportunity to continue to drive our G&A down as a percentage of our total revenue.
And then again, I'll talk about our net new unit growth, but we have a clear vision and path to get to that 2%+ net unit growth by fiscal 2027. And ultimately, that digital you continue to hear about, we think we can get close to that 20% by 2027 as well. So I'll just touch briefly on Del Taco again. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago at the ICR conference, but I just want to reiterate again our strategy towards getting to an asset-light model for Del Taco.
Darin mentioned earlier, we've already gone from 50%-70% by refranchising 111 of our nearly 600 restaurants last year, and we have conviction and clarity on how we can move to a +90% franchise model by no later than fiscal 2026. We've got very interested franchise partners, both existing and new, that want to have access to this incredible, iconic brand. And with that, we want to bring partners in that are going to build with us as well. So we have a great strategy. We're very confident we can get to that level over the next couple of years. On the synergy side, Darin mentioned, you know, the $15 million, that was the original target.
We feel like we're actually on track by the end of this year to be run-rate at closer to $20 million or more of G&A savings or cost savings overall. I think the other really key point is we've delivered a tremendous amount of value to the franchisees at both brands through all the supply chain and bulk purchasing power we have on marketing, commodities, and other areas, that it's dropping straight to their bottom line. We continue to focus on more ways to bring synergies to both of our brands. So capital allocation, I'd say again, with this pivot we're making, to see a drive in growth, we always want to have a strong balance sheet, but also continue to bring share value back to our shareholders.
I think that, if we reflect on the last four years, we've been able to return about $600 million to our shareholders through both share repurchases and dividends. Our dividend is currently at about a little over 2% yield at the current share price, and that'll still be part of our strategy. But the order of priority you see is, first off, investing in growth. We spent the last several years building the team and the strategy to go after growth, and now we're primed to do it, and so that is our number one priority. Talked about in the last call, increasing our investments in cap, you know, capital, building restaurants, and CapEx and, and technology, and I'll cover that more in a couple of slides. We always want to operate from a position of strength as well. We have a strong balance sheet.
We continue to make sure we have that. We have appropriate level of debt and leverage, and then ultimately, again, we generate strong cash flow, and we can do all of these things at the same time. And we'll continue to be able to operate with our dividend and also return capital through share repurchases, as we seek excess cash flow to do that. We had noted in our last earnings call for fiscal 2024, we intend to repurchase $70 million-$80 million of shares. We're not expecting any changes in that strategy, and also with our, with our refranchising, using the proceeds from that to also repurchase shares. So we have a balanced approach, growth mindset, and we'll continue to evolve our capital allocation strategy, as things progress.
So just touching on our debt, as you're all aware, we have a little under $1.8 billion of debt. Team's done a really good, good job of putting this in place. A very interest rate of about 4%, overall, and our maturities are staggered in a way that gives us a lot of flexibility. Over half of our debt is maturing in 2029 or later. So again, we're feeling like in a great place from a debt standpoint. We also, to the extent that we need access to capital in the near term, we've got about $200 million of borrowing capacity through our variable funding note and letter of credit that are currently undrawn. Don't currently see a need for it, but the extent that we do need access to capital, we have it available.
From a leverage ratio point of view, we think it's appropriate for the business right now to be in a 4x-5x leverage ratio range. We're... We ended the year in fiscal 2023 at about 4.6 x. We expect we'll be right around 5x through this year, and so we feel like we're in a really healthy place, but we're going to be mindful of trying to stay at or around that range as we go forward, and we'll continue to evaluate the credit markets, the operating environment. But again, we feel like we're in a great place now, but we think that range of 4x-5x is right for our business.
So to kind of piggyback on what Tim was talking about, you know, he really laid the foundation there of all the work that's been done over the last several years to really build that development pipeline, and that's now transitioning us into opening more restaurants. We had positive unit openings in fiscal 2023. We intend to have the same in 2024. But really, the momentum is building as we look out for the next couple of years. We have development agreements, we have more and more permitted restaurants, and we feel confident that we continue to grow our new openings. We've got a compelling set of brands here. Strong margins, strong AUV they're building, and a lot of white space to grow into as well.
As you see here, as we lay it out here over the next several years, we believe that by 2027, we can be up over that 2% as we look to strike to that 2.5% net unit growth in our ambition. So diving in, I talked a little bit after the call about our investments in capital, and you heard more today about why we're making these investments. We need to modernize our systems. We need to put our capital forward to help invest in growing in new markets, and we wanna make sure we have modern, relevant brand or restaurants. And so we wanna make sure we're remodeling some of our older restaurants, both the company and helping our franchisees do the same. So you see the step up in fiscal 2024.
Again, our priorities there, really starting to build more company restaurants, and I'll touch more on why we think that's the right strategy, predominantly for new markets, but also even to support in existing markets. The investments we're seeing in tech, going up to about $35 million projected for fiscal 2024. You heard from Doug a lot of the areas we're gonna focus... You actually heard from everyone about the different things we're gonna do. I'll go a little bit deeper on the next slide as well. We're now starting to make progress on remodeling some of the older company restaurants, and we're also seeing more traction now, partnering with our franchisees to help them remodel some of their old restaurants as well. We wanna ensure a modern brand image across the entire franchise.
And so when you look at this kind of $110 million-$120 million that we guided to in November, we think that's a good run rate going forward. At that level, we can sustain this growth strategy for the next several years. So I kind of gave an example of where we think we'll be in fiscal 2027. The point of this is 2024, 2025, you know, through 2027, we think that amount of spend will allow us to achieve, you know, all of our objectives and work towards our ambition.
And this doesn't even really contemplate a strategy I'll talk about, where as we build more company and restaurants in concert with franchisees, ultimately, those Jack in the Box restaurants, we're gonna want to refranchise those as well, and we can take those proceeds, pull them back in, and reinvest in the business again as well. So on the tech front, you know, Doug kind of went through some of the areas that we're investing in today. So if you take that kind of $35 million that we're spending in fiscal 2024, what I want to point out is it's, it's almost equally split between digital marketing technology and our store operations, and then the other half is really still focused on some of our corporate systems. We need to modernize across the board, so as we're integrating Del Taco, we're upgrading all of our corporate systems and infrastructure.
It also includes the investment we're gonna make in our company restaurant POSs. But as we move forward over the next several years, we're gonna be able to shift more and more of that tech investment directly into digital and store operations, and ultimately, a lot of the innovation that you heard about today. So we think that's gonna really help accelerate the business moving forward as well. So this idea about, you know, us building more company restaurants. You know, we are predominantly a franchise model here, but we're also shifting the mindset of this business, getting back to growing restaurants. And so as we're going to new markets, we think it's a really smart use of our capital to be the leader in that in many cases. We've demonstrated that already.
If you talk about today in Salt Lake City and Louisville, and now, you know, next we're gonna be going into Orlando. We're pulling franchisees, they're getting excitement, they're seeing the results from that. But by putting our capital forward, we think we can accelerate our entry into new markets. Now, as those franchisees are wanting to join in, we can partner with them, drive down our operating costs, be more efficient in how we market in those, how we use our marketing in those markets. Ultimately, as we get a couple of years out, we can resell those restaurants back to either those partner franchisees or others and take that capital, redeploy it again. So we think this playbook one is the right thing to do for the business, and it's a great one because it's repeatable over and over again.
It's also just from a shareholder perspective, we think it's a really smart way to invest capital. If you think about, you know, how we deployed excess cash over the last several years, share repurchases, we've given credit to our shareholders, but actually investing more in the business and the EBITDA we can generate from that, I think can actually drive more enterprise value and ultimately more value for our shareholders as well. The good news in this case, this isn't an either/or. We're gonna continue to, you know, increase that investment in building new restaurants, but we'll be, again, still be able to use excess capital to repurchase shares as well. I'll wrap it up here, just talking a little bit about that payback period target of getting under five years.
I think we've already demonstrated, as you heard today, we've got a compelling set of brands here. We've got very strong franchisee network. It's building. We have franchisees that want to build with us today based on our unit economics, but we know that there's even more opportunity to be a leader in this space and really having the most compelling opportunity for franchisees. We're gonna do that through what you heard today. Bringing down the build cost with these really modern, vibrant concepts, several different options, depending on the market, bringing down that development timeline, and having this tremendous white space opportunity, it's very unique in our industry, and then the focus we have on continuing to grow our AUV and margins. And so as you look at the AUV opportunity that we look ahead-...
margin improvements that we can go after here for our franchisees, and if we continue to bring that build cost, we're confident that we can get to that sub five-year payback period, which we think will be very attractive to continue to build our franchisee network. So with that, again, we really appreciate everybody being here. Obviously, hopefully you've heard today our excitement, enthusiasm about this business and our opportunity and our confidence that we can achieve these ambitions. And with that, we're gonna turn it over to Q&A.
Thank you, Brian.
Okay.
I always tell Brian, I don't know how you manage to sound like someone who's, you know, been here for five years when you've been here for five months, but today was no exception. Good job, Brian.
Thank you.
We are going to bring the team up and set up for Q&A. And kind of the way this will run is just raise your hand if you have a question. I'll kind of point to you and call on you, so, so that that's clear. And if you could just identify yourself for the webcast, that would be great. And once everybody's comfy, we'll get going here. There's one of those here.
Yeah. Yeah, sure.
You good? Space over here. All right, you guys ready? Okay, who's got a question? Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, I, you know what really, Alex Slagle from Jefferies, what really stood out to me, the awareness of the Jack brand in so many different kinds of markets, whether it's markets you've been in or new markets that you haven't been to or are just getting into, and it just feels like... I mean, the success of the, the social and the brand and getting out to what Jack really is all about, and even beyond just the new market playbook, it just feels a lot different. I'm kind of curious how that level of awareness compares to what it was like in the past when you were trying to go to new markets.
What it's like for other regional brands that maybe want to go national, get a little bit further out, and, I mean, probably extend that to Del Taco as well, and just impressions on where awareness is now, where that could go, what the path would look like.
You want to take that, Ryan?
Yeah, I think, you know, for us, I kind of mentioned in our, our presentation, I think us just taking the time to understand who we are and being authentic to our brand has allowed us to expand and get our awareness across the United States. I mentioned, and I'll let Del talk a little bit, they're on the same journey, and so the excitement we are seeing across, across the United States on our brand, the demand we have in states, and, and to be honest, globally, through social now, is like I've never seen. I can't speak of what before in the past, I wasn't here, but I just know with the, the focus of us here to really bring that brand consistency across everything we do is working.
I think Del is, like, just starting that, plan for themselves, and I think there's nothing but runway for them.
Yeah, we actually do have access to the same data that they chose to share their data. We don't pull it in the same way, so I've just requested that information from Del, so I don't got it yet, but I will have it next time.
We're still a couple years behind them. Our focus is trying to build our relevance in the environment. That's really my choice. Proper current.
Go ahead.
Great. Thanks, Chris. Thanks to the team. Great, great event. Wondering if you could talk a little more about the Jack in the Box restaurant growth opportunity, maybe where it's coming from as we think about those three-four buckets. You know, even existing franchisees versus prospective new ones. Any sense, Darin and team, on how that looks going forward over the coming years within the context of those store growth targets?
When you say three buckets, you're talking about fortressing new markets and larger-scale ?
Yes.
Okay. From an... I'll let Tim, you get into that, but as far as existing and new franchisees, our focus out of the gate was: How do we make sure that we get our existing markets, map them, understand what the opportunity is, build an inventory list? Where are all the trade areas we should be in our existing markets? Then go to our existing franchisees and say, "Time to sign up now, and those of you who want to develop this, time. Otherwise, we're going to open this up to the world and corporate to start developing." And as Tim said, the change is we're being proactive. We're going out with our real estate team. We're working with franchisees hand-in-hand, identifying real estate and saying, "If you don't want to do it, that's fine, even if you have a development agreement.
But the next franchisee over, who's closest, will do it if you don't, and if not, we'll do it." So that's a very different approach than no development agreements, no inventory list of what all trade areas we should be in, and not a proactive development process. So that's a big shift that we've made over the last few years, how we approach it. So majority of the early signings were existing. Now we're transitioning to still some existing based upon right site, right time, right area, and more getting into new franchisees. As Tim said, we just signed a new deal this week with the Orlando, with the tenth store deal out of Orlando. So a lot of the ongoing development will be with new franchisees at Jack's specifically.
Just to expand on that, as far as your three buckets as well, between mature markets, emerging markets, and new markets, when we see our pipeline of requests for franchises coming in, we're seeing it almost equally. Like for instance, I said our number one and number two, number one for Jack, number two for Del, is out of Florida, but then we also—California's in there as well. So we have interest all across all three of those buckets to grow the brand.
... But the focus is fill in existing, specifically for Jack, because that was our approach to start. Start to edge into the, the other markets, the wagon wheel, and then approach two or three new markets. We didn't wanna go just open up all the U.S. for new. We wanna do it, you know, in, in that kind of order. Then for Del, the same thing. Part of the AUV at Del, the opportunity, is go in and build existing markets to their full capacity. That's one of the things why AUVs aren't as strong as they are our nearest competitor, is because we haven't fully developed in, say, where we're most penetrated. L.A. is an example. We have tremendous growth still in L.A., and then awareness levels go up.
So whereas at Salt Lake City or Las Vegas, where we have a high penetration level compared to the opportunities- ... and lower cost per marketing TRP, guess what? Sales are high. So we know there's a huge opportunity there to go fill in existing markets with Del.
Go ahead, Andrew.
Great. Thanks. Andrew Charles from TD Cowen. You know, thank you for an informative day and for all the work behind it. Brian, question for you. You know, the goal to get to 23%-25% Jack comp company-owned restaurant margins, can you talk about the drivers behind that? You know, 2%-3% same-store sales growth leads more that needs to help lever the margins. So, you know, if you kind of help put a magnitude of order behind it, is it the remaining? I think the company-owned stores are around 60% penetrated towards the 200 basis points of target. Is that kind of the highest order of magnitude? If you could just help us kind of fill in how you're planning to get there.
Yeah, and it's, it's multi-pronged. So, like, those, those operational improvements we've already identified, there's still more. We'll roll those out completely. That's gonna be an element of it, and there's more, though. As we talked about, as we implement better technology platforms, we can drive more innovation in the front of house and back of house, which we know will bring down food costs. It'll improve our labor efficiency. So all of that is really just... It's just we've got to have the right platforms in place to be able to execute, and so over the next couple of years, we'll be able to do that as well. And as we drive up our AUV, we're just- we're gonna get more labor efficiency, more, more efficiency on, you know, rent and other areas.
It's kind of that multi-pronged approach that we, as we go over the next couple of years, have those technology pieces in place, we can continue to roll those out.
Then quick follow-up. Just on the development side, you know, the plan to get to less than five-year cash paybacks. If I just take the $203,000 of franchisee cash flows disclosed for 2023, you know, take that divide by the $1.9 million for new store, it's more than that. And so what are kind of the key steps that you're doing to help, you know, get from roughly 10-year, roughly-
Yeah, let me also clarify that. 200,000, you can jump in here. 200,000 is the existing base of stores that have... You know, as we refranchise, we have a high rent capacity on those because we get spread rent. So that's not your typical new build, right? So the new build is gonna be higher potential EBITDA just because-
Right
... of the rent alone, and then the volumes are higher as well, so its flow-through is higher. So, you know, when you look at a payback period, currently with, you know, what has happened over the last couple of years with inflation, increasing costs, we know we've taken some through value engineering out, through a smaller box. We've made up for that inflation, and we still think there's more opportunities. So overall, we're probably running now from a five- to seven-year payback, and we think we're getting closer with some of these recent builds to under... I mean, obviously, if we have Salt Lake City volumes, it'll be less than five years, or even more like two. But, and we hope to have more of those, but hopefully, that answers your question.
Yeah, you made points. I agree.
Thank you.
Go ahead, Jake.
Yeah, Jake Bartlett on Truist Securities. My first question is about just the target for unit growth, so 2%-2.5%. And Darin, three years ago, you had talked about 4%.
Yeah.
You know, one is the two to 2.5, both brands combined. So I'm wondering whether how much that's kind of... whether Jack in the Box is faster and Del Taco is slower. Just if you can address that. But what are the main drivers in your minds? You've gone out there the last three years that surprised you, you know, driven the more limited growth that you're seeing?
Yeah. I think, to kind of step back, we set 4% as the ambition, right? That was more like, "Hey, if we go aggressively, we think we can get to 4%." The reality is, new team, new knowledge of the system, new knowledge of what is the trend in history. We were looking at trends. We didn't have a lot of deep knowledge on how consistent the pipeline was, how consistent the franchisees were developing, what capability they had to develop. And so what we found out was we were further behind than we realized on not only having a pipeline, because that pipeline had dried up from the lawsuit. And so that trend, that historical trend of 16-18 restaurants per year, wasn't there. There wasn't a pipeline. They had not been searching for real estate.
We didn't have the capabilities in-hand. And so that was, you know, something we underestimated as we looked into our business, and just didn't know because we were so early on in the process. And the more we got into it, we're like: Okay, we have to build this from scratch. We have to get aggressive. We had processes that were broken. For example, we didn't have development commitments. Those development commitments were more a franchisee raised his hand, and we had a policy in place that if you were the closest franchisee to a trade area or a site, you had first right. Well, my first year, we lost five sites because a franchisee brought it to the table, and the other franchisee nearby said- ... "Well, I want to do it," and they never did it because there weren't development commitments.
So those are things that we learned as we were in the middle of it, saying 4% probably wasn't realistic, and then we had a lot of headwinds come, inflation, COVID, all the things that happened, and it disrupted the pipelines. Now we have a better understanding of where we are. We've built a pipeline that has solid data behind it, that says we've got sites coming, we've got development commitments, and so that's the majority of it. So we're further ahead at Jack but we're rapidly getting there with Del because of refranchising. And we knew we already had that built-up, you know, demand internally for Jack, with capable developers, people we knew in our system, that were gonna develop or are already developing. So we feel that, you know, Del, Jack is out in front of Del on a percentage basis.
You know, what did we say? Probably roughly percentage of Jack versus Del?
It's around 70/30.
Yeah, 70/30, and then we see Del catching up very quickly.
... I mean, purely on the net unit growth, the percentage is gonna be a little bit higher in Del, 'cause the base, the just number of restaurants is so much lower. But, but Jack is gonna be a much larger contributor overall, and they're, it's not materially different than, you know, if you just broke out J- Jack separately. We, we still have, you know, the ability to get to that 2%+.
Greg, go ahead.
I had two questions. The first was just, and I think it might well be for Brian. The first one's within the 2%-3% long-term, sorry, long-term comps, what is the traffic and check assumption within that 2%-3%? And then I have a second question.
Do you wanna take that first? So I think it's, you know, on traffic versus check. I mean, it's gonna be... I think pricing is gonna be still a strong contributor, just with the menu innovation and some of the things you heard about even on the Del side. You know, the traffic is still a bit of an unknown. We think it will improve over time, but we think it's, it'll be more pricing than traffic.
We haven't, we're not providing guidance around traffic or-
Right. Got it.
But-
My other question was just, you touched a little bit in terms of how much capital you're spending on both company remodels and also, contributions to the franchisees.
Mm-hmm.
Where do you think the asset base stands today? And then, for you to look out the next five years, how much of the system do you think gets re-imaged, and how much of... Like, what, what does that cost, and how much of it is you guys versus the franchisees in terms of who's spending that money?
Yeah. So, you know, we haven't set a mandate in place to say, "We want the whole system remodeled by a certain date." That was not our focus. Our focus is to show that we have a good return. We've done that, I think, with our initial step, which last year's remodel program, or two years ago, was designed to those 400, what we called ugly babies. Let's focus on those 400 that are really outdated and try to get a significant amount of those refreshed. That was the initial program before we had the Crave 3 option. How many of those have signed up so far or sent in applications?
114 for Jack and Del Taco.
That are already in permitting process. More than that have signed up, but they've already permitted is, is the 114, correct?
That's correct.
So we're making strides against the 400. Now, with the Crave image, we just rolled out to our franchisees a Crave program that is very much the same except we have a lower one, that because we have many stores that look pretty good, you know, that are newer, and so we have a minimal refresh for them. At that point, what we're doing now is going out to the system and offering it. We're not mandating it. We wanna offer it, and we wanna show a couple years of returns, and then we talk about ramping it up. But what we've estimated is roughly $15 million a year in incentives for franchisees to remodel, and we think that's the right number and the right pace and sequence to get franchisees to grow or to re-image.
We're going, you know, we're accelerating the re-images on the corporate restaurants with the Crave image, because we wanna continue to demonstrate. We've seen already the success in the higher AUV, so we think that's a smart investment. We wanna have, you know, good-looking restaurants across, but they're also just has a good economic return as well. The more we can do that and also demonstrate to the franchisees, I think it'll also accelerate their investment in doing that.
The incentive program we've offered is, in rough order of magnitude, 75% franchisee investment, 25% corporate. It depends on the level. If you're, you know, doing more, we'll do more incentive. Doing less, we'll do less incentive.
As Brian mentioned in the capital section, this also incorporates Del. So Del's now a part of the re-image program that we're investing in.
Thank you.
Go ahead, Jim.
Jim Sanderson, Northcoast Research. We had a chance to test out the Smashed Jack. Thank you very much. It's a great product. Can you talk a little bit more about the price position during test and how you would expect the product to perform when you relaunch it? If there's an expectation that we should see some pickup in average check based on the relative pricing compared to national burger brands and fast casual.
Yeah. So as we roll out Smashed Jack in our recent soft launch, it was priced at how we're gonna roll it out. You know, we have an entry level around $7.99 for the single, $9.99 for the double. And we see... You know, that's with no marketing, we sold out.
Mm-hmm.
So we think this is a premium burger to our current burger offering we have today, and we've seen significant trade up and acceptance by our guests. So we expect we have expectations that we'll see an even stronger response once we actually start marketing this.
In the form of-
Mm-hmm.
To Ryan's point, we're seeing more trade up into the double-
Yep, yep.
hook and build strategy as we roll out, which is-
Right
... even more promising.
All right. Thank you.
Hi, Lauren.
Two questions, one on unit growth. So you have 55-85 new units for 2025, 70-100 in 2026. Just given the two-year-plus, I guess, development pipeline, what's your visibility into actually getting to that level of growth and confidence there? It's double 2024 openings.
You wanna go?
Well, I spoke about the sites and process. I mean, once they get into that particular area or phase, we know that they're already have their leases about to get signed or signed, and then they're in planning and permitting or even under construction. So the fact that we had 130 between both brands in that, we have pretty good confidence that that occurs. And our guys are gonna continue to be more aggressive on the real estate side to make sure those leases are or those sites are found, LOIs are done, and in the lease stage, so that we can continue to be able to tell the same story.
You know, the development commitments alone give us insight that we have enough already in the pipeline, and, like, the team is already doing, like, Orlando, adding more on top of it.
Right
... that are near term, and then the more sites we get just even gives us even more confidence.
If I can ask a second one on-
Mm-hmm
... from a marketing perspective, Ryan. So you spoke to an increased focus on value for Jack, everyday value in particular. Can you just expand on what might be missing or constructs of some of these value offers while protecting margins?
Well, some of this is, you know, you heard from Del, and they're at 20 Under $2. And, you know, they're gonna adjust theirs and work on theirs to make sure to maximize profitability. We haven't touched our Jack's deals in over-
... five-eight years. So it's been the same product offering, the same size offering, the same value offering. So as we look at this, and as we have been have variety across our entire value, LTOs and everything we've put out there, we think there's an opportunity to further enhance that with the right sizing, the right profitability, and the right messaging to the marketplace. For that value, guests will see an everyday value.
So we've been testing three different constructs of what that menu is, similar to what Del's doing, only specific to value. We've got early reads in which we think is the front runner, and, you know, we're not at a point to report it, but we're getting close.
I think the other thing to pay attention to is we really think the channel and the right offer to the channel, to the right demand characteristic is the real driver. So whether it's a large, you know, box for game day or for, you know, Final Four, that we saw that drove tremendous transactions. That was considered value. Or if it's a $0.99 taco offer through the app, those are the things that we're seeing really pick up for the value component, beyond the everyday value. And then I think to Del, when I would talk about Del, and I think this is important, the 20-under-$2 menu, when we first bought the brand, it worked because it was a substantial price increase.
But as it's been in place longer, what we're realizing, and Tom and Sarah identified this very quickly, was they were trading, trading margin, and were trading most guests from maybe something they would've ordered and added from the, the smaller menu they used to have, and the discount menu they had, everyday value menu. They're, they're becoming... That's their core offering, versus and it's growing in percentage of mix, versus we want it to be an add-on attachment or a snack item or something that says, "I really want value. I only want one or two items, I'll go there," versus the feature of the menu. And so they quickly identified it as an opportunity. We think that's a, a good, good opportunity for us in the future to drive check, to drive, you know, more profitability, as they've talked about.
So wasn't the wrong idea when it started, but probably expanded it too far, and now we can dial that back and we can really adjust the menu and make some more margin. Herbert?
Thanks. Just a question on Del Taco. You just shared new targets, getting the restaurant level margins up to 18%-20% by 2027. You know, if we use the midpoints, it's up 400 basis points, you know, versus this year. Given what you laid out today, I think it's pretty clear how you're attacking the opportunity. Does that change how you think about sequencing any of the refranchising process? And I don't wanna confuse anything, and I know you're gonna get it done by 2026. But is there any thought or debate internally to waiting and seeing if you're about to grow the EBITDA at a better price, or that's just not worth it?
It's very been something we've talked about, but we still feel like the better long-term strategy is to move more to that lighter more quickly, and deliver that value for our franchisees. I think it will, it'll only strengthen the conviction of the partners we're gonna to, you know, move to the development agreements into new restaurants. So, you know, I think we'll phase the refranchising appropriately, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago. So, you know, I don't think we'll get them all done this year. Well, I think we'll likely get some more done this year and then continue to monitor that. So if we... Yeah, it's something we could evolve to, but I don't think it really changes our overall strategy.
And as Brian, and I'll add to it, refranchising is about growth. It's about growth. And so when you think about the potential market of who we market to to sell restaurants to, and they're typically developers, they typically want a basic cash flow to start from. Not all, as we identified in Orlando or others, but that's definitely a lot of the first questions you're gonna get from your consistent, known developers in the industry who you can count on to develop X number of locations: "Can I start with five restaurants or 10 restaurants as a minimum?" Because there's cash flow, and then they can build operations and go more rapidly. So we're gonna keep going because that accelerates our growth, which is a real underlying opportunity beyond the asset line.
A question about the store margin targets, too. Is, is there gonna be kind of a slow build to that? Do you think there'd be a step change any one year? I mean, you, those 100,000 of initiatives you laid out, it sounded like that was 12-18 months. So would you think there'd be a step up in, like, 25 because of those things? How, how much does that influence these numbers?
Yeah, my belief is it's always a build.
Mm-hmm.
We're just gonna keep after this. This is an internal discipline that we're not gonna stop. 'Cause we're, we're gonna have things that happen, like an inflationary year, we're gonna have, you know, headwinds from here. So it's always gonna be an iterative process. How do we keep looking for opportunities that drive margin opportunity? So there's not gonna be one step in time where it's just gonna change.
Right.
It's gonna continue to improve. Similar to what you've seen at Taco Bell, what they've done with margins over the years, it was a slow, steady build. And-
If you think about it in terms of we've got some things we can action on now-
Yeah
... which are already laid out, and others are perhaps dependencies based on technology, and that's gonna take another, you know, 18-24 months. So that's where we can, and then we can realize more of those.
Right.
That's why I think it will be more of a step, versus, you know, not everything we have is available right now to be able to get to that margin.
Simple things like franchises. We have a task force, we ask franchisees for ideas. One of the recent ones was, you know, shortening the receipt. When you do the math, that doesn't sound like a big idea, but it's $400,000 savings for the system. So those are the types of ideas that we just keep stacking on top of each other that builds momentum, and ultimately to the numbers we're talking about on the screen.
Do those depend at all on some of the more prospective things like robotics or, you know, AI drive-throughs, or is that kind of like-
That's potential-
Separate?
... That's potential additional opportunity. 'Cause we don't have line of sight yet until-
Yeah
... we have POS and what that could really mean.
Right.
Jim, go ahead.
Just a follow-up question. Given the level of technology and investment you're going to continue through 2027, is there thoughts of asking franchisees to contribute more on a regular basis to offset the technology costs or investments?
Yeah, we think that's a necessary component. This is something that we're both investing in.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously, a lot of the POS investment is gonna be on their dollar.
Mm-hmm.
So, no, no question about it, the majority of that investment in POS and some of these systems will be franchise-based, in addition to us making investments to get it ready to go.
... Go ahead, Jake.
I'm gonna follow up on some of these questions. It's Jake Bartlett from Truist Securities. On the POS rollout, it's gonna take a couple of years. So I guess I just wanna try to better understand what can get done in the meantime, or, you know, how much of in technology, and maybe some of the, maybe it's loyalty program or, kiosk rollout, you know, can happen as the POS rollout is happening. I'm just trying to understand the timing of some of the technology, which all sounds very encouraging and important. But the POS system's gonna take a while though, to roll out.
Yeah. Yeah, as I indicated, it'll be the end of 2025 before the Jack in the Box rollout is complete, and then we'll, you know, jump right into the Del Taco rollout as well. And so we can talk a little bit about loyalty if you want to, in terms of some things we wanna do. But a lot of these things that we've discussed today are heavily dependent on the POS system being in place because of the integrations that are tied to these platforms. So the app, yeah, the backend loyalty, all that stuff we can be doing immediately. Yeah. And you can tell timing on that, and then also our back office system for managing more effectively the restaurant operations. That's going on behind the scenes as well right now.
That, once that new POS right behind it will be ready, a back office system, and a back office system that can drive margin. For example, today, our current system doesn't allow us to take shift inventory. That's something that the industry's had for many years. That's a substantial cost saving to our restaurants. So we knew, so we're not waiting. That stuff is being built behind the scenes, and you can talk about maybe some timing, like back office or loyalty and app. Yeah. So as I mentioned in my presentation, really there's two foundations being sort of rebuilt or enhanced, and the digital ecosystem is a parallel track, which is what you said, Darin. So we can do that without reliance on the POS system. Now, obviously, things get much more capable after that, right?
But we're already in process on the digital platform, the new app, the new website, and all of the infrastructure that supports that. That includes, you know, improving our loyalty programs. And so from there, as we've, as Ryan mentioned, we'll take that and also pivot that over and bring the Del Taco family into that, into that platform as well. 2024?
That's this year.
Yeah, this year, the app. The app at the end of 2024 will be released to Jack in the Box.
Let me, let me just share real-life examples of what some of that improvements are. So right now, it's not seamless when we do email offers or text offers to actually get people to put that item in the cart. They basically, we do a deal that is targeted, they have to individually go put that item in the cart. Now, we're gonna be able to, with the new modern build, when they click on it, I wanna bet that with that item will go in the cart. So it's more seamless, easier for the loyalty user to get that offer and the deal in their cart and redeem it. That's not seamless today. More enhanced, targeted offers in the app, knowing that this person has never bought desserts, how do we trade them up into desserts?
Or they're heavy desserts, they don't have one in their order today, how do we trade them up? Those capabilities will not require a POS. So enhancement of targeted offers is kind of the first stage that once we roll out the new app, we'll be able to put out on our systems.
Then two questions just on the company-owned margins. You talked about the expansion there. You know, one is, how much... I think it's semantics or the what you said was that 100% is available to company-owned stores of the initiatives that you put in place. Is that being realized? I just wanna try to make sure I understand what's already being saved at the company-owned stores versus what the opportunity is from that chunk.
Yeah. So I would say, of the, the initiatives, we're 40% rolled out. I think we talked about this when we were in ICR. That 40% is being realized now at company stores. This hasn't run rate fully through the system yet-
Okay
... because some of that is just new rollouts, but 40% of that has been fully rolled out and implemented in the company stores.
Got it. Got it. Great. And then the last quick one is, on the new company development, and you may have mentioned in the stores in Salt Lake City, that they're being run by the franchisee, right?
Yeah.
So, I just want to understand, maybe just to make sure I understand, is that something that's gonna happen across the new stores? Or, you know, how does new store development for the company impact the market?
Yeah, we, in Louisville, we're running ourselves, but we thought this was a unique opportunity. We had a great operator who we know, who wanted to develop alongside of us. We just sat down and said, "Hey, we're both looking at leadership costs. Why are we doing this when we think you're the right operator? Let's just let you handle Salt Lake until we get to a certain number of scale, and then we'll, we'll put a resource in place, and, you know, we'll continue to grow it, or we'll refranchise it." You know, we have both options, like Ryan mentioned. So that was just a situation where we're like, "Hey, this doesn't make sense. This is a better way to partner and grow a market." It just depends on the situation. So in Louisville, we didn't do that.
We focused on how do we both grow at the same time and put our infrastructure in place? Partly because that franchise owner and his son are gonna move to the market, and they're gonna operate the first couple stores because they have a great operations team already in California. So that's, you know, it just depends on the situation. But we did have a franchisee sign up for Louisville since - that's what I, that's what I was talking about. Yeah. Yep. Cool.
Yeah, I was just gonna ask on value. I know, excuse me, you talked a lot about potentially revamping the Everyday Value menu. Just curious when that might hit, considering that, you know, a large chunk of your store base is based here in California, and 2024 might be a pretty crazy year for pricing across the market.
It's still TBD, 'cause what we wanna do is make sure we get it right. The worst thing we wanna do is drive trade down and fall in a situation where we're trading down our premium guests. So we're working on it. We're reviewing the tests. A lot of these things are in test throughout various parts of California and some of our Arizona stores, I believe, as well. And so as we learn this, it isn't a must-do now. It is something we know we need to do to stay relevant, and so we're working through it and don't have a final day yet.
You know, if I interpreted kind of where you're going as possibly as we think about things happening in California, the AB 1228, we could move rapidly. We could turn that switch overnight. We wanna continue to tweak it, you know, and make sure we have the right value offering, but we could move very rapidly, and it's ready to go. But we just wanna make sure we continue testing to get it right. We have other levers that Ryan and the team have rolled out between the digital app offers, all the offers that we're doing. We see that being more relevant right now than the Everyday Value. That's where we're focused, and so, you know, that, that's where we're, our attention is today, or things like we've done, like $5 Jack Pack.
Those are things that have drove, you know, kind of that value guest. But we do have Everyday Value that we can pivot to very quickly, or we can roll it out very fast. We just don't think we need to right now.
Yes.
Our stance, you know, let's not run to failure, let's walk to success, and I think that's, that's how we're approaching it.
And because of our variety, we have a lot of assets we can turn on quickly if we need to, between Jack Pack, between Fan Favs Box, between the various price points. We have those assets ready when needed.
Anything else? Did we cover it all? We believe in operations around here. We're actually on time... almost, almost to the minute.
Correct.
All right. Darin, I don't know if you wanna-
I just really wanna say thank you for all coming out and spending time with us, and we really appreciate you coming to headquarters. Hopefully, you liked the, the products that you had today. We're, we're excited about them for sure, and-