Are they saying start?
No.
Is that the start?
Hold that stop for a second.
Okay.
Stop.
Great. We will start. We're at time. I want to thank Papa Johns for being here today. We have Todd Penegor, CEO; Ravi Thanawala, CFO. I appreciate you guys being here from Papa Johns. So I guess we'll start. Last month, you hosted an investor meeting at your Atlanta headquarters, where you shared new insights, provided thoughts, Todd, on your first hundred days as Papa Johns CEO. Can you remind us on some of the initiatives that you're focused on for 2025, as well as the longer term?
Yeah, no, thanks, Lauren. I think, first and foremost, to start was to really put my team in place. So as I joined Papa Johns at the beginning of August, we had several openings, and we had to build out the team. It was great that Ravi picked up the international business, fits his skill set really well, had Joe Sieve expand responsibilities to pick up global development and really share some of those best practices, and then made some really good hires. Brought Kevin Vasconi in. Kevin spent three and a half years with me at Wendy's on the technology front, had a great run for eight years at Domino's. So it's second nature for him on all the opportunity that we have from a technology front. And then just recently brought Jenna Bromberg in. And Jenna's a next-generation marketer, thinking differently.
So you'll see us evolve our media mix and really get focused on the quality attributes that really set our brand apart. But what our focus really is, is how do we really become the best pizza makers in the business? What do we need to do operationally to train? What do we need to do within our restaurants to simplify the lives of our general managers a little bit, whether that's technology, whether that's SKU rationalization? We're working on all of that. We're looking at the pace of innovation to bring some news in, but we're also looking at renovation because we know we got some work to do to really drive kind of the flavor profile on our cheese and what we're doing with the dough and some of the toppings.
So we're really focused on telling our story in unique and different ways to stand out from the competition. That's job one. It is really all about the food and getting back to our core: better ingredients, better pizza, period, deliver on that promise day in and day out. We have a lot of opportunity on the technology front. So Kevin is a godsend being hired here. We've got a ton of pure data. We just under-leveraged the data. So we got a lot of testing going on CRM, a lot of one-to-one communication, pilots in place, and we're starting to see all of those resonate with the consumer. So that's been a big focus, trying to make the experience a lot more frictionless. We've revamped our app.
We still got some work to do, but moved Papa Dough up front, revamped our loyalty program, made it quicker to actually earn rewards. So we're starting to see folks immediately earn $2 off their next purchase because your threshold is now 15. Not that you get bones back to a specific product. You got cash, so you can use it how you want. So it does help our value proposition over time. And we'll continue to push that piece of the puzzle, right? We got out of position on value, and we're working hard now to make sure that the value perception is there from Papa Johns because we've always had it. Loyalty program helps. Having Papa Pairings on a more regular basis is certainly supporting the business. And then making sure that on the premium side, we got a good sharp price point.
So we've been doing that along the way. And then we're looking at a few other things. We're looking at our company footprint. We're looking at where some system optimization, some healthy refranchising could play a role within the portfolio. At Investor Day, we talked about our really core strength from Indianapolis down into Louisville, Nashville, and Atlanta. That's our core market. That's where we can be a great brand steward. We'll look at the other markets to see which ones stay in the portfolio, which ones should evolve, because we do need to bring some fresh blood into the system. We need a growth mindset. We need folks thinking about the longer term. So we're going to work through that piece of the equation. And then as Ravi picked up the international business, I know we'll come back to it. We really focused on going narrower and deeper, right?
We're in 50 countries, but there's a handful and a half that really are going to be impactful, and that's where we're going to spend our time, energy, and effort. So we're going to do all of that. We will work to front-run some technology along the way. We will make investments. We will have to work to retrade kind of the local national advertising mix. We've got a little out of position with local now being optional. We're a super regional pizza brand, and you do need that local support to complement the national advertising. So those are the things we're working on in the near term. We've been pleased to see a lot of early wins and a lot of early success, and we'll build on that momentum in 2025.
That's a great overview. I'll start where you ended in terms of the incremental investments. You invested about $4 million, I believe, in the fourth quarter towards marketing. How are you thinking about incremental investments that might be necessary across marketing, across tech, other initiatives, any franchisee support that you're thinking about?
Yeah, really not from a franchise support. This is really trying to play some offense. So we do know that we got to catch up on the technology front, and we did increase our technology fee, digital fee earlier or later last year. We know we got some opportunities to kind of lean in and front-run. It'll come off of our balance sheet, and it'll be CapEx, but we can recoup it over time through the technology fee. So it's more of a timing element of how we get at this stuff a little bit faster. The piece where we're really trying to work through, and Ravi can tag team a little bit with me, is really what incremental marketing investment we might have to make during the course of this year?
And that is really in the spirit of how do we retrade kind of the change that was made early last year to go to 6% national from a 5% national ad fund, and then moving from a 3% local to an optional local. And when we got rid of, when we made local optional, all the co-ops went away. And not having the co-ops to be able to actually put the franchise community together in the communities that we serve, have the company sitting around the table, is a big miss in a business that is a very regional business, especially pizza being so localized. So there may be some investments that we're going to have to front-run in some company markets to stand up some of those co-ops a lot quicker to go prove a strong business case as a strong brand steward moving forward.
That's where some incremental investment may need to take place. There could be some things around evolving our media mix as we start to think about moving away from just pure linear, where we mainly play to think about what is the voice of Papa Johns as we have a digital voice. We had a lot of fun in my days at Wendy's, so we need to evolve to connect to the next generation consumer, what we might need to do in search. But where we really want to put the incremental dollars to work is to really go prove out the business case that having a right mix of spend, local, and national really drives this business.
Whether we can retrade all of that and get the entire franchise community moving one direction early, or we go front-run it across a lot of the company markets to go prove the business case, we'll figure that plan out over the upcoming months. As Ravi reminds me, incrementally spending in the company markets is probably our best investment in return.
Yeah, maybe two things I would add is we're focused on sustainable functioning growth. We're making meaningful investments on the technology front, and we're seeing that come to life in our digital experience. We've invested over the last six months on improving our value proposition. We're looking for the ways that we're looking to drive accelerated growth from here, and we want to do it in a really planful and thoughtful way. And our share of voice could be higher, and we think our share of voice being higher for a period of time will pay long-term dividends for unit economics with franchisees.
Great. Todd, one of the things that always stood out to me with you at Wendy's was franchisee relationships. I'm sure you've met with a lot of franchisees since you've joined. Can you just talk about the sentiment amongst the franchise base, how you assess the health of the franchise system?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's part of my 100-day plan. I spend a lot of time out on a franchise listening tour. I spend a lot of time in the market with the team. I spend a lot of time on stage at the Papa Johns Franchise Association meeting, taking on a lot of questions and getting a lot of feedback. The entire system has my cell phone number, so I get a lot of texts and a lot of emails and a lot of phone calls on a regular basis, and the system is cautiously optimistic about the future. They're excited about the team. They're looking for continuity of leadership. They're feeling good about the folks that we put in place to lead the brand forward.
They know we have to go chase transactions a little harder in the near term because they know if we can get more customers to show up more often, we can actually drive and trade them up and drive some profitability in this business. That's by and large the bigger part of the system. I'm feeling that way. We got a few folks that have priced a little more aggressive and have had a lot of margin that are feeling a little heat as we chase transactions in the short term, but that's a vocal minority, not kind of where the majority of the system plays. But by and large, I think there's a hope and optimism of the future. They do know we need to retrade kind of the local national because they do feel the pressure that having the local co-ops and the local spend in place.
And we just have to work and spend a little bit of time to regain their trust. There was a lot of stuff that was retraded early in 2024 that just didn't play out the way they thought it was going to play out during the course of last year. Lots of change during the course of 2024 with a lot of leaders coming in and moving on between Rob and then Ravi and then I. So it's now just building the reps and the comfort that we know what our true north is. We're consumer-led, insight-driven in everything that we do. We do the appropriate rigor on test and learn before we put stuff into the marketplace. And then we go find that right balance around premium and value. But importantly, we get back to our roots, right?
We get back to being the best pizza makers in the business and focus really on better ingredients, better pizza, and make sure that stands out from the competitive set. I know, Ravi, we've been looking at a lot of the financials and where their balance sheets sit and where the P&L has been in the back half of the year, especially. Why don't you comment on that?
Yeah. So first, in the front half of the year, we saw strong profitability in the business as we saw benefit from commodities, and we were continuing to stay on the premium strategy. So when we looked at the results through the first three quarters of the year for corporate restaurants, which is a pretty good proxy for what's happening in the system, four-wall profitability held up fairly well and was effectively flat to the prior year. We've been making specific decisions in Q4 where we actually traded out some ticket in the quarter as we reset the loyalty program in the spirit of driving long-term growth with consumers and value perception. So we took a little bit of margin hit in the quarter, but that made strategic sense for the long term.
I think more broadly, when we think about the franchisee community, there's a number of long-duration franchisees that have been with the system for a long time. They've seen the cycles. What they do know is this brand is highly resilient. The category is highly resilient. And when we execute well, we win consumers' hearts and minds. And we were recently with the Executive FAC and some of our longer-tenure franchisees that we can execute better. And that was an unprompted comment from them. And I think that speaks to a lot of the culture that Todd's bringing to the organization that we can be the best craftsmen in pizza there is, and that's going to pay long-term value for us.
Great. Let's talk a little bit more about the North America business. You guys reported yesterday comps down about 4%. What did you see as you moved through the quarter? I know there were some initiatives that you guys were working on. Just talk through some of that.
Yeah, I'll start. I mean, we saw some nice sequential improvement in our transaction trends. You got to look at it month to month. You had a lot of shifts on where holidays fit and on the calendar. But overall, the trend has been good. And it's been a lot of the initiatives that we put in place. We did some test and learn with some small CRM pilots around how we would change behaviors with folks in our loyalty program that really gave us some quick insights to evolve the loyalty program from the $75 threshold to get $10 a Papa Dough to the $15 to get to same discount rate. But a completely different mindset, feeling like you're always earning something. You always got some cash that you can use on your next purchase.
And what we really knew is we can actually acquire a lot of folks to get into the loyalty program. We can get them to get their first purchase. Our challenge was on the second and third because once we got them through the second and third, the fourth and the fifth, we are on par or even better than the industry. So what we needed to do is make sure that we were getting that quicker bounce back. And now that we're leveraging all the data and we've had a bunch of work on CRM pilots that we've been putting out in the fourth quarter, we can really communicate to make sure we got those targeted offers to get the consumer through that purchase cycle into that second offer, into that third offer. And we've seen some early success.
Those things between kind of the loyalty program revamp, some of the messaging that we've been doing on CRM, really having a balanced calendar, Papa Pairings, which has always been on the menu. We've had that on a regular basis on air. Even on the premium side, we had some really good price points where we played the game on New York Style XL, where we priced on Shaq-a-Roni. Now where we started the year with $9.99 any, really a focus on our core pizza being those best pizza makers in the business, getting the reps in on making great pizzas every time, but getting folks to show up and then trade them up. Now we've got the optionality to add a few extra dollars as you change crust types, add a few extra dollars as you put the toppings on.
So we're really working that a lot to make sure we get back into position on value. And we're seeing our value perception change in the consumer's minds. They're starting to understand there is value from Papa Johns. We'll have to continue to build that as we continue to chase transactions for a little bit. But we're starting to see some positive trends on that front. Anything else, Ravi?
Maybe some specifics that would be useful that we saw particularly carry out transactions continue to sequentially improve as we move through the quarter. Second, with the loyalty change, now north of 70% of all transactions are resulting in a reward for the consumer, which is a very meaningful move in terms of embedding in the consumer's mind that you get an amazing value with Papa Johns. Third, we continue to see conversion rate upside happen in our app, and now our app is actually our largest platform, which allows us to reach consumers in a very, very targeted and specific way, and then lastly, what we're seeing is on or around major holidays, our business is spiking really, really well, and we've been highly encouraged in terms of how we perform at those key events.
So what we're definitely finding is when consumers are together and they were thinking about having pizza, particularly on an occasion like around New Year's Eve or around Halloween or around Christmas, they're thinking of us and they're disproportionately thinking of us. So we're really encouraged to keep our foot on the gas to win the consumers' hearts and minds. And incremental transactions are so profitable in this business. And there is capacity in our restaurants that having a transaction-driving mindset, we think, is a recipe for long-term, not only better unit economics, but it will unlock development opportunity.
That's great. It's great to hear that momentum is building. I think one of the top questions that we get is when do comps turn positive again? So any thoughts on when we can?
That's a great question. We still got to provide guidance for 2025. But if you kind of look at what we're comping over in 2024 and the initiatives that we have in place, it will be the tail of not an annual plan for Papa Johns. It's really going to be about the sequential improvement across the quarter. So you will see things build throughout the year. I would hope by the time we get to the middle of the year, we start to see things turning positive with all the initiatives that we have in place. That's my opinion. That's kind of my lead charge with the organization. But how are you feeling, Ravi, as you think about the plans and the initiatives underway?
Yeah, and to your point, we've had multiple initiatives that have already been put in place and then now we're building. For the quarter, for Q4, we were down two in transactions. Reminder, that includes a holiday shift in the prior year. So you got to neutralize for the impact of New Year's Eve timing shift. But fundamentally, we're down two in transactions and down two in ticket. We don't think down two in transactions is likely that unique in the industry. We purposely made decisions in terms of ticket decisions to ensure we were improving our value perception right now because we think that's really relevant. We think with the change in loyalty and the work we're doing with CRM, we are investing right now to make sure we're getting more consumers into the Papa Johns system.
We have a way to engage them, and we think that's going to set ourselves up for the long term, and to Todd's point, 2025 is not about an annual number. It's really about the progression over the course of the quarters of how we're inflecting this business.
Great. You talked a bit about value. I know you're kind of evolving the value strategy given just how much messaging there is out there in the industry. How are you thinking about Papa Johns value proposition and that value strategy going forward?
Yeah, I think a lot of it is just making sure folks understand there is great value from Papa Johns. First and foremost, having the loyalty program restructured just drives value in and of itself, right? There's a great amount of value when you're getting cash rather than just another product offer through the loyalty program. Having an always-on message on something on the value side, it's Papa Pairings today. And my sense is Papa Pairings will evolve to make sure it's kind of renewed and fresh during the course of the year. But it is a key price point, and the consumer understands that, and it's a frequent consumer for us. But then making sure as we focus on the core on the premium side that it's at a sharp price point at this point. When you think about our national promotions, they're only about 25% of our business.
So it's not like we're really driving the heck out of margin deterioration. This is a fine balance around making sure the value perception's there, drive transactions in. And then importantly, where we're missing it is really complementing on the local basis. And we'll make sure that we can get as many co-ops stood up during the course of 2025 as we can as a lead in the system to really prove when you get that balance right, you can really drive the heck out of this business. And those are the things that we're really focused on as we go into next year.
One of the priorities that you talked about is that focus on the core. How do you balance the focus on the core while also complementing it with innovation?
Yeah, I think the first start is we've made our restaurants really tough to operate. I spent a lot of time going through my restaurant training. We've added a lot of SKUs over the last couple of years. We put in a lot of rhythm breakers, and we'll take a look at some of the lower-moving SKUs, pull them out of the restaurant. Some of the rhythm breakers may have to come out over time, but those are running some good volumes today, but what we'll have to do is think about them. How do we sprinkle in some great new-to-the-world innovation around core that gives us the cover to take some of this other stuff off the menu?
Because what we really need to get back to being, as I said earlier, is the best pizza makers in the business and really talk about the story around pizza craftsmanship and our story around why we are truly better. When you think about six core ingredients in our dough and you think about farm to fork and the sauce and our vegetables and kind of the made-from-scratch and energizing fun environments that we create in our restaurants, we have to bring that to light for the consumer. The consumer knows we're better. They give us credit for it. They just don't know why we're better.
And we're going to go back out there and make sure they truly understand that, but make sure that we're not out of position on price because we know we got a lot of work to do to really execute better at the restaurant level. We spend a little more time getting out into our restaurants, spending time rating our franchisees. We're spending more time training in the restaurants. We had a Back to Better 1.0 initiative that we probably didn't fully complete the playbook. So there's things like spinners that we put in the restaurants that we hadn't fully trained our staffs. We're going to go back and do all of that so we can pay off the promise with strong messaging that we have.
Great. Shifting to international, one of the bright spots yesterday, return to positive comps. Can you talk about what you saw? Share anything across different markets.
Yeah, what we talked about at our investor meeting on December 12th was high degrees of focus on nine markets that matter most. And what we saw over the course of Q4 is in our core markets, particularly in LATAM, we saw strong performance. And what's unique about the LATAM market for us is we are QSR leaders there. We've penetrated the consumers' hearts and minds. They know why we're better from an ingredients and taste and quality standpoint. And we've continued to show really strong results there. The second key thing around Q4 for international is we saw the Middle East recover. And we saw meaningful improvements in terms of the comp run rate there. Prior to the last 12, 14 months, the Middle East had been a meaningful contributor of both comp and net development. And we've seen that business recover.
If any of you have been out to that part of the world and seen how the brand shows up, we show up in a premium way with a great product proposition. We have offers and a menu that really speaks to the consumer. In some ways, we see a lot of opportunity from what we're learning from the Middle East and some of the work we're doing from a renovation standpoint in the U.K. We're taking those learnings and applying that playbook across the world. As Todd's mentioned before, narrow and deep is our focus. High consumer centricity, focus on the markets that matter. We're a $5 billion consumer demand brand. A few markets for us can make a world of difference. We're excited for the potential for the international business, particularly in these top nine markets go forward.
That's great. On the unit growth front, you guys announced that you exceeded 6,000 restaurants this year, came in above guide for both North America as well as international. Where do you guys see the beats in terms of the unit growth, and how should we think about the unit growth?
I'll start. I mean, we did build some new muscles. So the team's been revamped in the development front. We had a strong incentive this year in 2024, but the incentive will remain strong into 2025, even though it steps down a little bit. But what we're really seeing is the unit economics improve dramatically. We've talked a lot about trending down to that $500,000 investment posture. Work is still due to get it even below that. But the economics are improving. Working through the whole process is improving with our team, the partnership with the franchise community, and the excitement about being out there in front of running some of the things that we want to do to drive this business. Folks want to make sure that the restaurants are open.
But we took a hard look at what had to be closed during the course of the year, really making sure it's not easy to close restaurants because a lot of restaurants that just need a little love and attention rather than close or a new owner. So we're being cautious on how we actually manage the closure approval process and do it with discipline. But any other thoughts on development for Ravi?
Yeah, focus on speeding up the time from LOY to opening is good for the development number this year, but more importantly, shortening that window is good for the unit economics and the cash on cash payback. So I think the team's done a really nice job of focusing on that exercise. The second thing is when I just take a step back and look at the development pipeline, the team is highly focused and dialed. And when I look at the development pipeline for 2025 at this moment in time versus where we were a year ago, the development pipeline is actually stronger this year.
So we're not ready to give guidance for 2025, but this focus from the team of making sure that we have the right number of projects at construction plus to permitting plus to LOY. The team is continuing to make sure that we're supporting the franchisees. And there are a number of long-term strategic growth franchisees that see the potential. And they're continuing to invest, and they want to acquire, and they want to build. So when I think about the business longer term, we're improving unit economics. We're driving down build cost. Our strategic franchisees are still growing and wanting to acquire. And we think this notion of investing to drive transactions is a winning formula for a really durable category.
Great, and we are at time. Todd, Ravi, thank you so much.
Appreciate it. Thanks for your time on the Papa Johns story, everybody. Have a great morning.