Good morning and welcome to Papa John's Investor Meeting today. I appreciate those who have been able to make the trip in here to Atlanta to our Restaurant Support Center and also for those watching virtually at home. I am Stacy Frole, Papa John's Vice President of Investor Relations, and wanted to make sure that you are aware right before the start of this meeting we did file the presentation as an 8-K with the SEC, and for those in attendance we did email a copy of the presentation to you in a PDF so you have easy access. It will be, because it is available on our website and because this meeting is being webcast, we do consider all content to be broadly disseminated. And now, to keep our lawyers happy, I'm going to read a little bit on our forward-looking statements.
We want to remind you that comments made during this meeting will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements may involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. Forward-looking statements should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statements noted here on the presentation and the risk factors included in our SEC filings. In addition, we will be referencing information from independent industry organizations and other third-party sources including publicly available websites. Please be aware that the data and statistical information in this presentation may differ from information provided by our competitors or from information found in current or future studies conducted by other independent sources.
Today's meeting, we're excited to bring to you. Today wanted to just take the opportunity today for Todd to have, he's been here for about 100 days, an opportunity to provide some additional insights and background on the business and also meet some other members of our management team, so with us today we'll have Todd Penegor, our President and Chief Executive Officer. We have Ravi Thanawala, our Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of International. We have Jenna Bromberg, our new Chief Marketing Officer, and Kevin Vascone, our Chief Digital and Technology Officer, along with Joe Sieve, our Chief Restaurant and Global Development Officer. The agenda for today is Todd's going to kick off the formal portion of the presentation providing his insights on what he's learned so far in the first 100 days as well as the opportunities that we see going forward.
Ravi's going to dive a little bit deeper into some of the financial information and background insights that the investment community has been asking about, and then finally we're going to bring up our other leaders for a fireside chat where Todd will have the opportunity to ask them some questions before we open it up for broader Q&A with Todd and Ravi, so with that, and then that will conclude the formal portion of the meeting, and for those in attendance here in Atlanta we'll then move upstairs to taste some pizzas from around the world, so with that, let's get this meeting started. Thank you.
We are Papa John's. We exist for the joy of food lovers everywhere, and our mission is clear: to be the best pizza makers in the business. We'll do it by doing it better. Making pizza with quality ingredients, making sauce with hand-picked vine-ripened tomatoes, and fresh, never-frozen original dough. Dough that was made better and kneaded by hand. By real people. Better people. People who care about making better food, making better communities, and making each other better, too. Because better people make better products. Better people innovate better, anticipating the future to make every part of the pizza experience better. Looking ahead, this is the beginning of a transformation for our brand and our business. We will command attention by showing how our pizza craftsmanship is truly an art. We'll put Papa John's at the heart of more occasions, bringing more relevance to our products than ever.
Above all, we will make better food. And we'll turn that food into fandom. Better ingredients, better pizza, Papa John's.
Good morning, everybody, and I really appreciate everybody making the time to join us here in person and online on the live stream. That video right there is the essence of what this brand is all about, right? Built on quality, really at the moments of joy and a lot of fun moving forward. You'll see as we start to bring this brand to life over the next year, we will be leveraging so many of those themes moving forward to really bring it to life in a big way to connect to the consumer differently. You know, we're really looking forward today to spending some quality time with all of you.
I'm a little over 100 days in, really talking about the state of the Papa John's business, where we are today, but importantly where we see some of the challenges and the opportunities to drive our business moving forward. You know, it has been a pretty crazy 100 days. I've really been blessed that this team had built an unbelievable 100-day plan. I've been out in restaurants across the country, probably been in 25, 30 restaurants. I've been to the U.K., spent some time with the team there. Been in the US, was down for another board meeting in Chile, was able to order some pizza and spend some time with our franchisees down there and went through my restaurant training.
I got a long way to go to be one of the best pizza makers in the business, but I learned a lot by spending some quality time in the restaurants with our teams. Importantly, I learned a lot from our franchise community out on a listening tour. I spent a lot of time with our supplier partners, making sure we're leveraging the best of them. I spent a lot of time with our agency to really make sure I understood this business. It's different than the hamburger business. The pizza business is different, but it's fun. It's unique, and we can be at those moments of joy where folks have memories forever. It's a great opportunity in their business to actually get this thing jump-started in a hurry. You know, so it's out in the QCCs, you know, it really is a blessing to have a supply chain, right?
I didn't have that in my old brand. I got a great leader in Kurt Milburn. It's an asset that has a lot of opportunity to even drive more volume through it. We're not going to talk a lot about it today, but it is one of those assets that when you think about a manufacturing and distribution to get food to the restaurants when it needs to be there in a fresh system, it is a strategic advantage for us. So, you know, as I've been going around the globe, the one thing that's been very clear, whether it's in the Atlanta restaurant support center or in Louisville or in Milton Keynes, there is a tremendous amount of passion for this business from our employees and a tremendous amount of passion from our franchisees across the globe.
Now, if I think about what I really want you to take away from today, and I'm going to start building a lot of this out over the course of the next half hour or so, you know, there's several things that I want you to latch onto, and it really starts with our number one priority is to create great experiences every single day in every restaurant for our customers and also for our team members, right? We got to set our team members up for success, and that's an important thing to do, but ultimately, it's all in the purpose of driving a strong restaurant economic model.
If the restaurant economic model's thriving, franchisees, the company will reinvest back into their people, will reinvest into technology, will reinvest in some of the much-needed reimaging over time that we need on our storefronts, and then ultimately drive some new builds, so that's where that focus is right now and you can see the core elements, right? We got to focus on our core strength. We got to invest to amplify our brand promise. I'll talk about more of that in a moment. We got so much great data in this business. We got to continue to leverage the data and better connect to the customer moving forward to really make sure that we can connect and drive frequency and even more loyalty in our business. We've got some work on the tech stack, right?
We're going to have to continue to invest in the tech stack to really drive some operational efficiency and growth. Really proud of the team I've been able to build. We've been working hard. Had some great talent here that I've been able to inherit. Some different thinking, some really strong folks to really help me understand this business. And I've been able to bring in some new talent, right? Kevin Vascone joined me from Wendy's and Domino's before. Having Jenna Bromberg on board, thinking about how we're going to market our brand differently, bring it to life in big and new and unique ways and in different media forms. It's going to be fun. This is going to be a great journey with that team. And there's a lot of signs of early progress, and you'll hear those during the course of today.
The good news is we're in a really good position with our balance sheet and with our assets to be able to invest in growth as we move into the future. I'll hit a lot of these during the course of the day. We'll circle back on it, but if you're trying to get the key takeaways, it's right here on this slide. You know, ultimately what we need to be, and our mission's pretty darn clear, we need to be the best pizza makers in the business, right? Very simple to say, very hard to do and execute day in and day out. It starts with living and bringing our values to life day in and day out. I've inherited these values. They're great values. People first. Everyone belongs. Do the right thing. Innovate to win. Have fun.
If you can't have fun in the pizza business, you know, I don't know what business you should be in. This is a really fun business, and if you're having a bad day in the office, just go out into one of our restaurants and spend some time with our teams. You'll be inspired and energized, and I am every time I get out and work with our teams in our restaurants. You know, we are a brand that's been around for a long time, right? We've been in existence for a little over 40 years. We've been a public company for a little over 30. You know, if you go back to where we started when we became public in 1993, you know, we had about 400 restaurants in North America, about 7,000 team members across the globe.
We were doing at the time about $170 million of system-wide sales. You know, today we're closing in on our 6,000th restaurant. We have over 100,000 employees and team members across 50 countries in the company and franchise restaurants. More than 80% of our revenues still are generated in North America, but a big opportunity for growth across the globe. You can see where we're driving a lot of our revenue through the commissary and with our company restaurants that we own and operate. It is a brand that's been through a lot. You guys all know it. You've been following us for a while. If you think about the last seven years, right, we had a founder challenge. We had some leadership changes. We rolled into a pandemic. We rolled into an unbelievable inflationary environment.
We had some more leadership changes and we had some international disruptions with all the conflicts out there. But one thing has stayed true through all of that time, right? This brand has been resilient and our team members and our employees have been super resilient. And this brand is still strong and thriving with a really good core to build upon as we move into the future. You know, this is a really important point because the brand is strong. This brand is not broken by any stretch of the imagination, right? People know us for better ingredients, better pizza. They just don't understand why we're better. And we're going to show them. We're going to bring it to life in our restaurants. We're going to bring it to life in our messaging.
We're going to make sure that not only the original generation that grew up with our brand, but the next generation feels great. Because customers do connect Papa John's to quality. It does start with quality. It does drive value for the money. We need to have a good value proposition on the menu and we'll make sure we got that right balance moving forward. It's a brand that people want to talk about. Every time I got a Papa John's shirt on, people stop me. They want to talk about the brand. They want to talk about how cool the pizza business is. I feel that, right? As we're out there recruiting for talent, people want to be part of the Papa John's journey ahead. That's a pretty special spot to be.
And as I said earlier, we are at the center of so many fun and memorable events. That's why pizza actually sticks in people's minds. We're there for celebrations. We're there for great events. We're there when people are having fun watching the ball game. We can be at the center of memories and we can create some loyalty and affinity to our brand. And as we like to say, a lot of fandom to how we want to bring Papa John's to life. You know, we are a very values-driven, people-first culture, as I talked about. And that's one thing that's been true from day one in this brand. But what's been really important for me as I've recruited new talent and we've brought a lot of good talent in further down in the organization, it's a team that wants to win together.
And I got a leadership team that has a lot of fun together. I got a leadership team that challenges one another. I got a leadership team with some ideas that are new and different for this business. And I got some folks that have been around the restaurant industry for a long time. It's a great combination to make sure that we are truly an all-star team and we're working to win together to drive this business moving forward. And that's needed for where we are in our journey because we have to move at pace, right? We have to move a lot faster than we have in the past to bring things to life in a big and different and unique way. And the good news is we're being recognized for all the good work that we're doing.
We're working hard to make sure we connect to the communities that we serve. We continue to give back. And importantly, we connect to our general managers in our restaurants, right? We got 600-plus team members that accessed our Dough & Degrees program. And those things are important because what we really need to continue to do is make sure that we know what we're in service of. And that's our general managers and our teams and our restaurants, right? We have to make sure that we're setting up our GMs for success. And that's why we were called originally when I got here, the Atlanta hub, the Louisville hub, Milton Keynes hub. We changed that immediately. We're the restaurant support centers. We're here to serve our general managers. And we got to get back to our core to be the best operators in the business.
And that's been the message that we've had strong and clear to the franchise community and out to our restaurant teams. And they're feeling it. They feel like we have their back and we got a lot of work to do together with them moving forward. You know, our footprint has grown. As I said earlier, we navigated a very dynamic environment over the last seven years. But during that time, we opened 1,000 net new restaurants, right? That's a lot of restaurants. And we still have a lot of opportunity ahead. You can see we've got strong footprints across the globe. Almost 3,500 restaurants here in North America. You know, Latin America, you know, almost 750 restaurants. The U.K., a lot of great work done on that business to really set it up for long-term success.
If you think about Europe and the Middle East, another great opportunity to continue to build on the footprint that we have. We also have a strong presence in Asia-Pacific, and we'll talk about international really becoming a big part of our growth engine as we move forward. You know, a lot of folks talk about this brand, and when they talk about the brand, they say, "Oh, Papa John's, you're number four in the U.S. or you're number three globally." Well, it's important to really understand we are a super regional brand, and when you look at this map here, you know, you can see that across the Eastern Seaboard, and really looking at it, 11 of our top 15 markets, we're a number one or number two share, right? We have a tremendous amount of relevance in those markets, and we can play from a position of strength.
And as I look at this map, it really drives a ton of infill development opportunities across the markets where we already have a strong brand presence, where we know we can provide more access to our brand, both for carryout and delivery by infill buildout. You look at some markets, we're number four, and there's some great markets, you know, Dallas, Houston, LA. We know we can invest to start to improve and steal some share in those markets. And then you look at the rest of the map, and there's a lot of white space opportunity. So as you think about where our growth can come from, I would say focus on infill first and foremost. We can really do some fortressing as you see how this map is laid out.
But there's a tremendous amount of infill opportunities to leverage existing franchisees, bring new franchisees into our system to build up this business. Because if we win in markets, we'll win in regions, then ultimately we'll win in countries and we'll win globally. And that's the journey that we're on. You know, if you look at some of the strengths and opportunities, right? And you know, there's a lot of challenges that the brand has and there's a lot of opportunities, but we're in a really good position with a strong foundation to build this brand upon. And in a recent survey of Papa John's customers, it just amplified where we are on the journey, right? The good news is customers value us for quality, taste, and flavor over our peers. So that's our core, right? We're founded and driven on quality.
You know, our opportunities are how do we return to being an industry leader on consistency, right? We have to make great pizzas with every single visit, with every single delivery, with every single order experience. And we've got opportunities there. And on the latter, you know, we do have a ton of opportunities on the whole order experience, right? What do we need to do with technology? You know, what do we need to do to continue to revamp the user experience in our app? How do we actually upgrade, you know, the website for ordering? What do we need to do to make sure we got tracking for all of our restaurants? You know, we have a lot of opportunity.
But the good news is those are all opportunities ahead that can drive the heck out of our business and allow us to truly differentiate our experience with digital. And you can see there's a lot of folks that say that there's no difference among peers, especially on technology where we're a little bit behind. We can win their hearts and minds in a hurry by upgrading our digital experience in a hurry. So three big opportunities, one to build upon, one that we need to get better at and really drive some consistency. And then ultimately a lot of work to do on the technology to catch up and then leapfrog the competition to really connect better to the consumer base moving forward. You know, as I've spent those 100 days out in the market, I have always loved this brand.
Part of the reason I took the phone call when I had the opportunity to come back is Papa John's has been my go-to brand for a long, long time. That has been in my veins. But I also knew that there was a strong team here that I could latch onto and build up from. And we had a great board that was very supportive on the journey to help us really think about how we want to transform this brand. And so I spent 100 days traveling the globe out there in the field, spending time with everybody as I talked about a little bit earlier. You know, I do see that passion for the pizza. I do know that we're ingrained and built on better ingredients, better pizza. And the quality-based growth can deliver long-term profitability for us.
You know, the combination of having some really experienced leaders and some really new, cool leaders that are bringing some different thinking to our brand is a pretty special combination. And a team that works well really together and is really connected at the hip in everything that we do. You know, we do have strong brand recognition. We've got a good customer existing base that we know we can drive even more frequency with. We've got leading share positions, I just said, in many, many markets. And we are maintaining a very strong and resilient balance sheet, which gives us a lot of optionality to make sure that we are investing in growth for the long run in this business. So we're in a good spot, right? And if you take anything away, this brand is healthy and underneath everything that you see on the external side.
It's a great foundation to build upon to really figure out how we bend the trends and start to build this business out for years to come. You think about the journey ahead, you know, so what does all of this mean for us going forward? You know, we do have that strong foundation to build upon. Importantly, we have a good understanding of where the near-term opportunities are, right? We know where the opportunities are. We've refocused our resources. We've refocused our investment to really attack those opportunities to start to bend the trends and create some confidence across our system that we are going in the right direction. That's what's exciting about this business. Because you think about where we need to go and what we need to do, it really comes off of this very simple recipe for profitable growth.
And none of this is rocket science, right? The centerpiece has to be franchise profitability, right? It has to be anchored in operational excellence day in and day out. You know, what we need to do then is really think about how are we talking about our core product in new and unique and different ways? How do we bring innovation to life only from Papa John's? And then how do we amplify that message and invest in technology to better connect to our consumer? And how do we make sure that all of that between our food and our technology really helps differentiate the customer experience? And then ultimately, we got to make sure that all of our franchisees have a growth mindset. And that's just in the domestic business. And there's a tremendous amount of growth there.
And then there's just a ton of opportunities to continue to transform international. And I'll talk about all of that in a moment. So let's start with our focus on core product and innovation. You know, what we need to do, and this started upfront with the mission, is really get back to being the best pizza makers in the business. Papa John's is built on quality, better ingredients, better pizza. But I'm hearing that we may not be consistently delivering on this promise day in and day out. I saw it in a survey. I see it when I'm out in the restaurants. I see that with my personal experiences. We've added a lot of complexity over the last many years, right? We've brought a lot of product on. It's driven some short-term sales. It's brought in new users.
But it's not driven the frequency that we need, which a core pizza can do day in and day out. And we're going to have to look at how we simplify the operations in the restaurant to have our GMs back, to make sure we get back to making great pizzas with every single experience. And we get rid of some of those rhythm breakers over time. And we'll pace and sequence how we need to do that. But you'll see that there is a big theme on simplification in everything that we're doing. And as I said, new offerings actually bring in customers. But great pizza drives frequency. And we got to get back to driving great pizza with every visit to drive that frequency and the connection to our brand. And you know, to get there, there's some interesting facts.
And some of this stuff hasn't been shared before. But being the best, you know, we do have to focus on the core. And if you think about, and here's some new information for you, because this probably helps set up the story a little bit, around our crust type. If you go back to 2019, medium and large original crust made up about 75% of the crust type orders. But if you look at where we are in 2024, medium and large are just over 50% due to all the new innovation and the other products that we brought in the restaurants. So we're not getting as much repetition to make those great pizzas fastballed down the middle as we should be. You've seen our calendar already get adjusted this year as we've really focused on the core, both on the premium and the value side.
And those are things that we just need to take a hard look at because there's a lot of rhythm breakers. You know, as I'm working in the restaurants, we're cranking out a lot of great pizzas. And then all of a sudden, some unique product that was put out there, some unique topping, we got to go searching for it. And it takes us away from making a great pizza. So we're going to have to find the right balance. And don't get me wrong. We're not moving away from innovation by any stretch of the imagination. We got some cleanup to do in our restaurants. We got some reps to do to make sure we are the best pizza makers in the business.
and then we got to layer in new, unique, different innovation only from Papa John's, first starting with innovation around the core and then thinking what else we need to do to really drive the whole customer experience in our restaurants. And we'll find that right balance. Because pizza continues to remain our core offering, right? We will stay focused on how we go out and simplify our menu offerings to get some of those rhythm breakers out. And the work is clear. It has to be a balance between the core and the innovation. And as I said, you know, that innovation, that driving has to be consumer-led. It has to be insight-driven, and it has to be occasion-based. So the one observation I had in this business is we put a lot of stuff out in the market. We had some insights.
We may have had some consumer insights. We may have had some market research insights, or we may have even had some occasion insights, but we didn't put that all together to really have one true north of where we needed to go hunt with all the innovation and what we needed to actually bring to life in our restaurants. We're really working hard to take all of the insights and analytic capability, put it in a center of excellence, make sure that those insights are really driving everything we need to do around revamping the core and everything we're going to do about bringing innovation to life in our restaurants, so we're working through all of those very, very quickly. It's going to be the tenet of everything we do as we move this business forward.
You know, as you think about the foundation for success and being the best pizza makers in the business, you know, there's three big work streams that we have going forward. And it does start with setting our GMs up for success. And the one thing that I did notice as we get out in the restaurant, we got a ton of oven variability. We're going to have to get out in all of our restaurants and really take a look at our oven calibration. We're going to have to look at our bake times. We're going to have to look at our temperatures to make sure that our teams are set up for success to make pizzas consistently and accurately and with quality every single time. And that'll be a big work stream to set the foundation as we move forward.
That may be we got to slow our ovens down a little. That'll be a much better crust bake. Actually, it helps us then drive even better food forms on a lot of our sides. Our chicken sides would cook better at a little slower bake and opens up the world to a lot more innovation if we just have a little bit more time to bake in our restaurants. So we're working on that right now. We're going to continue to make sure that our investments are really driving our consumer perception to determine a level of differentiation that needs to be out there from Papa John's. We're going to have to evaluate our customer experience to quickly adapt to what we learn from all of that true north work and what those insights are, and then we'll innovate by truly prioritizing key features.
We'll stay disciplined as we move forward, and the key will be that we'll be disciplined, and that really summarizes our first priority. You know, our focus on core product, our focus on innovation, and our next priority is really about amplifying our marketing message, and you've already seen some early wins. You'll see the renewed focus on quality and value. It'll be the foundation. You felt and seen some of that in the video, and that's where we need to go to really amplify our message, and I'm really excited that Jenna has joined us. If you start looking at her background, you know, she started to set up some of the social media team over at Pizza Hut. She really got to amplify the message over at Carter's through non-traditional channels.
And we have that opportunity to move forward to tell our story, to tell our story around quality in unique and different ways and make sure that there is a great value perception for our business moving forward. And we're going to bring it all to life with a challenger mindset, right? We have to punch above our weight class. We have to have a fighter brand mentality. And we have to play the game different to show up on different and unique stages to tell our story, to stand out from the competition, to make sure that folks connect to us a little more often. And then we had talked a little bit as we were going through earnings that we were investing a little bit more into the fourth quarter.
There's about $4 million of incremental investment that we made out into advertising on behalf of the system. It was really around talking the message around our core. It's paid dividends, right? It helped us have one of our best and biggest Halloween nights ever. We showed up really well on the Tyson Paul fight with that incremental advertising. We put some money to work to actually amplify our message differently on the loyalty program. We leveraged our great asset in Shaquille O'Neal and went out with a Shaq Pizza Rich Quick campaign that has been one of our most organic spots ever. We'll talk more about that a little bit later to connect to the next generation of consumer and why our loyalty program is different and it's better to drive more frequency moving forward.
But what was important is we put some of those investments back out into the market. It really allowed us to have a discussion with the franchise community to encourage them to spend a little bit more locally alongside of our national advertising. And we're continuing to have discussions around how do we get the right balance between local and national with the franchise community. But it also had us partner with the franchise community to increase our tech fee. So our tech fee was increased a few months back by another 25 basis points to provide the fuel to go invest in the technology initiatives that we talked about earlier. And I'll talk about it a little bit more in a moment. And it allowed us to really invest to go fast on a few things and really leverage our data to personalize offers.
And we had some early wins on Papa Dough, right? What we knew when we got here is we've been sending out a lot of blanket messages for a while. It hadn't been personalized. And there was a huge opportunity to send something out different. We had a lot of loyalty members that had not reached the $75 threshold. So we had a targeted message that went out to those customers, supplemented them with a little more Papa Dough to get them in the money. And we saw an immediate drive in behavior when we did that. That gave us the courage to go out and revamp our loyalty program, which I'll talk about a little bit. And we're seeing some early wins from that loyalty program right now. In fact, I'll give you one tidbit.
When folks were ordering in our loyalty program, originally two in ten customers were actually ordering with the loyalty program with Papa Dough. We're now running at about five in ten. So half of our customers are now using Papa Dough to order. That's encouraging and an early sign of success with some of the investments that we put out there. And we know we're going to have to lean into some investments to get this thing moving in the direction we need as we go into 2025. You know, the investment in the brand is improving our consideration, right? As you look at this chart here, it's great to see that our consideration set has continued to improve throughout the year. It did trough. We have built back.
You know, having an always-on message with Papa Pairings on the value side, having some great premium innovation, New York Style XL at $10.99, and coming out with Shaq-a-Roni at a nice price point. Our value perception is improving, and it's improving quickly. And that's a journey. And our consideration set has continued to improve. And these are good indicators of where our business can go into the future. And our brand health is strong, but we know we still have a lot of opportunities. You know, here's some additional results from our brand tracker work that we do. We're seeing gains in the funnel in the top three: aided awareness, familiarity, trial. Those are all really good things. But really important for this brand in the long run, we're seeing increases in recommend being most pronounced with the millennial generation.
You know, the younger generation is pulling for us. And we're actually seeing our Gen Z actually in our consideration set quite strong. You know, what we need to do is drive frequency. We need to connect to them in unique and different ways and go tell our story a little bit different to that next generation of consumer to bring them in more often. But we start with a really healthy base, right? That consumer is pulling for us, and they like us. So if we focus on being the best and we amplify our marketing message, our investments in technology will have a key role to support to play all of this success moving forward, which probably brings us to our third priority beyond the brand and amplifying our messages. And that is really investing in technology.
And really lucky to have Kevin come out of retirement a second time to work with me and the team to really bring this great business to life. And we start from a really great spot. We have so much good data that we can leverage and amplify even better to connect with the consumer, not just in journeys, but more personalization over time. But as you think about where Kevin and team want to go on the tech side, it really starts with agility, right? We have to simplify and evolve to an omnichannel experience. You know, that's a big focus of what we're trying to do, but with a huge speed to market.
As you can see in some of the things that we're doing and getting a loyalty program out there quickly, having some CRM pilots going out even this month, we are moving speed to market at a pace that we haven't done in the past. We've improved a ton of digital experiences. I'll talk about that and kind of the user experience here in a moment. The loyalty program, as I just said, has been a big success and things that we're moving forward. It's just in the early innings. We know this is a marathon, not a sprint. You know, the intelligence side, as Kevin said, as I brought him in, I asked him my early observations, 30 days in, what's the biggest asset that we have here in Papa John's? He said, it's our data.
We have clean and very high integrity data that has just been underutilized, and let's go out there and utilize and amplify this data like crazy, and we brought some partners in that we've worked together with in the past, started to bring this to life in a big way, and in the spirit of literally 45 days, you know, we've got some personalized CRM pilot tests that are going out in the market this month with more to come as we move into January, and then importantly, you know, we got to have resilience across our system. Whether you're ordering on the app, whether you're ordering on the web, whether you're in the restaurant on the POS, we need to make sure that the stable technology is there, so no matter how you order, it's reliable, it's consistent, and you don't have any challenges with it.
We got to make it even more seamless and all of those experiences for our employees and for our customers. Kevin's working through all of that with the team and partnering with the leadership team to bring that to life. You know, as you think about where we're going to start to invest as we start to drive our business on the capital front, you know, if you look at our plan, you know, we currently anticipate spending, you know, similar in 2025 to our four-year average. We're going to reinvest a little more into the tech front. You know, we're focused really on revenue-generating activities. We had a technology roadmap here when Kevin joined. We completely turned it upside down, right? We're now pacing and sequencing it against things that matter the most to drive revenue and drive profit.
That's where those resources are being put to work. You know, getting the tech fee raised by the 25 basis points helped provide some of the fuel to do that. And it's allowing us to reinvest, not just in the consumer-facing activities, but also in our tech stack. And if we can get some of the removal of our tech debt out of the system, you know, our maintenance costs will decrease and we'll become more efficient in how we operate moving forward. And Kevin's brought a different mindset on how we're going to operate in the technology arena. We're going to be more agile. We're going to lean in. We are going to move faster, as I said.
So he's really shifted the resources around within the team and is in the process of recruiting some great talent to really make sure we can bring to life all these technology initiatives in a big way. So moving to our fourth priority, it's really around differentiating the customer experience. And, you know, as I said a little earlier, you know, we did a lot of work right when I got here to make sure that we had a better user experience within the app. As you guys know, we moved Papa Dough to the front page. We kind of simplified the flow and the color scheme. And more than a third of our sales are now coming through the app. It's now our largest ordering channel. And with that refresh that was rolled out in July, we're seeing a more than 50% increase in conversions, right?
So this is a much more engaging experience. And we know we still have work to do. We're going to continue to evolve. Kevin and the team are working to figure out how we get repeat orders in, which is really important in this business that'll probably come to life sometime in early January. So we're really excited to get that out there. It'll reduce click time and order time by about 50%. But we are seeing a lot of successes. As I said earlier, not a marathon, or it's not a sprint. We're on a marathon. But what's really cool about this business is we're a delivery company with a ton of data. And the opportunity is to leverage this data different and unique than everybody else.
Yeah, a lot of pizza companies have a lot of data, but not a lot of folks in the QSR space have this kind of data when you got 85% of your business coming through digital channels. That's pretty incredible. You know, if you think about where we went on delivering loyalty rewards and the moves and the changes that we made, when we went on the journey, our goal was to develop and launch a program structure to deliver the rewards that our customers deserve, right? We wanted them to become more engaged. We wanted to drive more unique brand experiences. So we were working to evolve the Papa John's rewards program to move from a transactional experience to more of a relational experience. And the best way to have a relation is to earn something faster.
We know we got work to continue to do to really make the loyalty program even more engaging in the future. But this was a fast first move. And you heard some of the benefits that I talked about a little bit earlier. But you can see that what happens is the customers can convert these rewards a lot faster. You know, we talked about this in the past. You know, it took literally three orders to get to $75 to get $10 off on average. You know, our average customers only come in four times a year. So so many folks were never getting all the way there to earn their full rewards.
By just having the same discount and actually getting you $2 off when you hit a $15 threshold, which actually happens almost with every order, you're earning something immediately, which drives frequency, which gets you involved to come back quicker to get that all-important second purchase and that third purchase. And that's where we have huge opportunities. We can acquire a lot of folks into our program, but getting in second and third is the opportunity. Because once we get into the fourth or the fifth, we perform really well. So these are things working to make that happen and to do that in a hurry. So very excited that we've made those changes. And what it's really helping us do is helps our value perception, right?
If you're getting a discount, as a loyalty program has its privileges by being a member in our loyalty program, it does feel like value for the money changes dramatically, but more targeted, and then we can use that data to actually really leverage that consumer even better to drive frequency and incent them in different ways moving forward, so as we look to, you know, improve our core product proposition innovation, you know, we've got a lot of stuff that we've been doing on technology. Everything that we're doing needs to drive sales. It needs to drive transaction growth. So what we need to do is really be focused on bringing more customers more often into our brand to have healthy sales growth, really transaction-driven versus check-driven, and when those things start to happen, the franchise community gets excited about where the future of the brand is, right?
A brand's only successful if you're bringing more customers in more often, and Ravi will talk about it in a moment. Every customer that we bring in, there's a high variable margin for that customer, so we are focused on driving transactions that should drive more coverage for the franchise community to want to invest back in the business, and it'll get our franchisees really excited to get into our business, which brings us to, you know, how we need to work to evolve our franchise base, right? We've got a lot of great franchisees in our system. There's probably a lot of new information on this chart. You know, we got about 411 domestic franchisees that we work with. You can see we've got all sizes from small to large. Everybody has a role to play to build out this system.
Overall, we got about 500 franchisees if you get into our international business, including the local. 80% of our top 20 have development agreements in place today. We just got to make sure we continue to have them adhere to the development agreement and commitments that they've made. We know we have a role to play to make sure the economics are strong. And we got to continue to partner both with the large and the small franchisees. My sense is over time you'll see some evolution of this franchise base. There could be some healthy turnover. There could be a little consolidation. But we're here to serve as franchise leaders, everybody across our system, to really make sure that folks can scale up to put themselves in a great position for success. Today, we're just under seven and a half units per franchisee, you know, about 15-year average, 10-year.
So we got a lot of newer folks into the system, but we got a lot of long-tenured folks in the system too. And we really need a growth mindset to think about how we're playing this game for the next five and 10 years, not just playing this game for the next quarter or two. And that starts with driving transactions if you're playing a long game. And, you know, we know that we have an asset base that has gotten old and tired. And we're not going to get to that immediately. We've got some of our capital budget set for 2025 to go test and learn in company restaurants on the business case for reimaging. And we've been having discussions with the franchise community of what that could mean as we go into 2026 and beyond for them.
But as carryout becomes a very important part of our business, infill opportunities become an important part of the business, we have to make sure that we got our best face forward on our storefronts so we're not old and tired and beat battered, so we're working through all of that with the system right now, but as you think about the system, you know, it's been a great journey for our system over the last five years. You know, you start to look at this chart, you can see that our AUVs had stair-stepped up nicely from 2019. You know, we're running at a very healthy, you know, AUV at the moment of almost a little over $23,000 per restaurant. We've stepped up during COVID, but we held all this business, right, so we're holding these AUVs.
Probably been a little too built on check over the last few years. Needs to be more built and more balanced with transactions, and you'll hear that our whole focus is bringing transactions in. That's why we stayed so consistent in the back half of this year with the calendar that I talked about earlier with Papa Rewards or Papa Pairings on and a premium message at a good value point. We need to bring in those customers. Because one thing I know for sure, if you bring in more customers more often with great operators, they will find a way to make a lot more money. We'll find a way to trade them up. We'll find a way to actually continue to bring them back a little bit more often.
And the more transaction growth that we have, the more opportunity that that creates for the confidence in the future of our brand. That's important, right? That folks have the courage to reinvest back into their business. But we also have a supply chain set up between the commissaries and distribution that can absorb all this volume very efficiently. And the cost to serve with each new restaurant that we open along the way is relatively low because the fixed asset base is there. And we have a tremendous amount of opportunity to leverage that even better as we move into the future. You know, if you think about where we are across our system, right, there's a few buckets here, right? You know, we got a lot of great existing franchisees and spent a lot of time with those franchise leaders and out in the markets in the field.
What we're really trying to make sure is we identify who has that growth mindset, who are we going to really partner with to really leverage the growth mindset. Then the folks that are on the sidelines that don't have that mindset, we have to have some really tough discussions around what their role is in the system to continue to help us grow and amplify our great brand, right? We are really looking at our whole franchise community and where they stand in the spectrum. We want to win with the winners. We want to have some good discussions and coaching with the folks that need to be a little more growth-focused to get them on board to drive the business. You know, we're seeing that play out in all the discussions that we've been having across the board.
You know, from a corporate perspective, you know, we still have in the domestic market, you know, we run about 17% of the fleet in the domestic market. And there is an opportunity in this business to refranchise select markets moving forward. You know, it creates a great entry point to scale up existing franchisees that really have that growth mindset. Gives us a great opportunity in the entry point to bring in some new franchisees. And we got a lot of interest in folks wanting to come into the system that are in other concepts. It's a great way for them to balance out their portfolio. So focused on great operators with access to capital. But the pizza business is a cool business. And a lot of folks want to get into this business.
And what we're starting to see is a nice pipeline of new franchisees that we're vetting to make sure we can bring some new blood into the system. And, you know, some of those folks can build their way in. And, you know, if we do some select refranchising, some can buy their way into the system. So we're working through all of that at the moment. You know, if you look at where our footprint stands, you know, relative to our couple of largest competitors, there is a significant amount of opportunity for us to continue to build this brand out. Differentiate on quality. Make sure folks understand the value for the money with a good price point and a high-quality experience. And make sure that we bring it to life in big and different ways. So this is the opportunity ahead.
Clearly a big opportunity in the U.S., both infill and white space, as I showed on the map a little bit earlier. We have a presence in a lot of markets already. So it's not like we need to get in new markets, but a great opportunity to scale up in the markets that we're in. We're going to be smart about it on the international front. You know, we may have to do a little retrenching in a couple of markets like we did in the U.K. to make sure the economic model is strong, to go a little slower, to make sure that the economic model is working to go faster. You'll hear Ravi talk about that in a moment. We're working hard to stimulate all the growth by getting the economics improved. Clearly, we got to get the margins up.
But importantly, we got to get the build cost down. And we are trending at around $500,000 today for a build cost. But remember, there's a bell curve around that. We've got a lot of folks actually building restaurants less than $500. And we have some above $500. But we have work still underway to continue to figure out how we optimize our build cost to really make sure we got a compelling economic equation for the franchise community. And it's pretty strong now. Without incentives, it's under a four-year payback. With incentives and leverage, it gets even better. And we know we have opportunities to make it even stronger to stimulate more growth in this white space over time. And what I would like to do is bring Ravi up to stage. So I don't want to steal his thunder.
But as we started talking and I got involved in the business with Ravi, you know, one of the things we knew we had to do is go a lot narrower and deeper on the international front and really figure out how we created scale in the markets that we're in before we went out and planted new flags and really build it off of a strong foundation. So Ravi's had a lot of experience in the past internationally. Spent a lot of time helping clean up the U.K. market, which was before my time, that put us in really good stead. But what I want Ravi to do is kind of spend a little bit of time walking you through kind of your thoughts on how we're going to go on the international business.
Thanks, Todd. I'm really excited about the international business. This is a long-duration strategy.
We believe our international business can and should be a material profit driver for the company going forward. We have the right to play from a brand standpoint. We have a great quality product, but we need to do it in a sharp and narrow and focused way. The countries represented on this page by only nine represent more than 50% of our system-wide sales and 50% of our existing restaurant count. We are focused on two key factors as we pick which countries to focus in on. The first is where we're strong. The second is where there's meaningful opportunity and a growing GDP. When I look at the first column, refocus, we have been focused in on resetting the U.K., and we're in the middle innings there.
Our team was actually just in China recently talking about what are the real opportunities to sharpen the consumer proposition and sharpen the economic model, and that is a long-duration strategy to win in the key cities in China, and jumping to the next column of grow, markets like Spain, our weekly average sales are over $15,000 a week. We're only in 95 restaurants. There's so much opportunity there. Markets in the sustained bucket, Chile, Peru, well north of $15,000 per week WPSA. We're also growing at high single digits or low double digits in system-wide sales there when you look at the results year to date. We have opportunity to continue to be market leaders in these spaces, and we see meaningful opportunity for the long term, and then we have some opportunity to ignite as well, but these nine countries can represent meaningful growth.
So while we have 50 markets, these nine countries can play an outsized role in the near term to drive system-wide sales and truly lean into the global brand we are and can be even bigger.
I love the narrow and deep focus. And I know you're reallocating the resources to really be focused on this while we're still servicing all those other markets that we're in. And it's a tremendous amount of growth opportunity to really scale up these markets. But before I step off stage, I just want to make sure that I really thank Ravi. It's been a challenging year for this brand.
Ravi stepped in with a lot of leadership change, took the interim CEO role, helped me actually get the earnings expectations right as I stepped into the role, I think on day two, to give us the ability to invest and test to grow this business. And he's been an unbelievably great partner to me on my learning tour. He's been a great partner to the team. And I know everybody across the system has a lot of respect for you, Ravi. So thanks for being a great thought partner. Looking forward to the partnership. And with that, I'll let you do your thing and then turn it over to the financial overview. Thanks, Todd.
Over the last four or five quarters, I've had a lot of opportunity to spend time with individuals in this room and on the webcasts.
I wanted to start by a commitment that we are going to get deeper into the fundamental drivers of our business and why we're optimistic and bullish about our prospects going forward. I have five key takeaways that I want to unpack over the next few minutes. First, there is meaningful opportunity to continue to improve the unit economics for our franchisees. That is priority number one for me every single day when I wake up. Second, the variable profitability of our transactions is high. And it's clear that as we drive transactions, we will gain share of voice with the consumer, share of stomach, and importantly, leverage in our financial model for our franchisees. Transactions are the lifeblood for development opportunity for this brand. The third, Todd hit on our top 15 markets. 11 of them, we are actually number one or number two.
We believe that there's still more share to take in these markets. Also, corporate restaurants make up about nine of those 15. So as we think about the refranchising opportunity to bring in growth-minded, development-driven, and long-term partners, we have an incredible opportunity to continue to expand in the brand and continue to take share in the top 15 markets. If we expand that to the top 25, it gets even more exciting in terms of the development opportunity. Our leverage ratios are solid. We have good liquidity. We are well-positioned to invest in the brand to grow. And Todd talked about a couple of those areas. Invest to drive consideration and share of voice. Invest to drive a focus on quality and ensure we are driving frequency with our core product proposition. Innovation plays a critical role in driving new consumer acquisition.
Our core proposition drives long-term profits, frequency, and attachment to the brand for the consumers, and our brand is resilient and strong. I want to take a moment and unpack our four reportable segments, but really focus in on two. On the left-hand side of the page is net revenue for our segments, and on the other side is our profits. Adjusted operating income for our North American franchisee business and our North American commissaries represents 75% of our adjusted profits. These are highly durable, steady growth businesses. They actually grew in profits from 2021 to 2023, and if you look at year-to-date results through Q3, these segments continue to grow. One of the core questions I get from this community often is, help me better understand the G&A base of the company. A couple of things that are unique about Papa John's. We have over 500 corporate restaurants.
We invest about 80 basis points of system-wide sales for G&A to support the corporate restaurant business. We invest another 80 basis points of system-wide sales to support our North American commissary business. So I hope that provides a little bit of additional context of, at a high level, the financial model of Papa John's as it exists today. Let's spend a second unpacking comps. And I'm going to hit on a couple of different derivatives or layers of the comp base. First is if you look at our comps on a three-year stack from 2021 to 2023, strong double-digit three-year stacked comps. On the two-year, okay, low single digits, still in line or slightly ahead of industry peers. However, over the trailing couple of quarters, we've fallen behind.
And we've done a lot of reflection on why and what we need to do to get back to taking market share and winning consumers' hearts and minds. I don't know if we've ever gone this deep with the community, but we wanted to decompose what is happening in ticket versus transactions over the last couple of years. During the pandemic, in 2020 and 2021, a healthy mix of gains and comps from ticket and transactions. The narrative changes in 2022 and 2023. The innovations we launched drove ticket. However, it did not drive frequency in our core product. And as Todd talked about, our original crust actually lost share of our total sales. We lost focus on transactions. And we see a meaningful opportunity through some deliberate actions to regain momentum in transactions.
As we see high variable profitability in each one of our transactions, we know when we sell to the consumer and they eat our core product, it drives frequency. So why did transactions start to fall off over the last couple of quarters? Simply put, our price value got out of balance. So the way to read this graph is the red is inflation. And the two green bars are effective pricing increases for corporate and franchisees. So when I zoom back out and look at a two-year stack for at the end of FY24, pricing will have outpaced inflation by six points. We made a very deliberate decision in Q2 of 2024 as we saw our consideration not as high as we want. We needed to recenter ourselves on improving the value perception in order to gain back into the consideration set and start to drive frequency again.
And that's exactly what we did. And we started, as I talked about on the Q3 call, started to see sequential improvement in transactions. And as Todd shared, we started to see our consideration improve. And we don't think we're done. We think that there's more consideration to go get. We think there's more share of stomach to go get. And we know we can do it through winning in our core product proposition and layering in, at times, the right strategic innovation that drives consumer acquisition. So one of the key questions that I've gotten over the last couple of months is, what is it doing to the margin profile of the business? So I want to share with all of you some new data in terms of what our sales mix actually is.
So what all of you probably see in your social feeds and what you're watching college football is our national promotions. It cuts across all of the United States. It actually represents only 25% of our revenue for an average restaurant. 75% of our revenue is done through e-deals, through our regular menu price offering, and our aggregators. All of that 75% of revenue can be optimized from a pricing, a bundle, a margin profile at a local level. This allows us, through a national promotion, to win the consumers' hearts and minds, be in the consideration set, land the right value proposition, and then use the balance of the wheel to optimize margins. And let me tell you a little bit more about what food cost looks like and feels like within this pie chart.
Food costs for the national promotions the last two quarters has been around 34%-36%, and our e-deals, based on locale, based on cost structure, somewhere between 32% and 35%. Our regular menu price and aggregator business, it's actually mid- to low 20s, so while the national promotions have gotten more aggressive from a food cost standpoint, it represents only 25% of our revenue, but plays an outsized role in driving digital sessions and in the upper part of the marketing funnel. From a fulfillment standpoint, which is on the other side of the page, and what I mean by that is how we serve the consumers. Three core ways we serve the consumers: carryout, first-party delivery, and aggregators, and by aggregators, I mean Uber Eats and DoorDash and players like that. Really healthy balance between all three.
What I'll also share is when I look at variable profitability on a dollar basis and look at the results for the last couple of months, our variable profitability is actually highest in our aggregators and in our carryout business. So we are still creating more flexibility for our franchisees to optimize their pricing models and lots of different levers for them to use all three of these channels of fulfillment to get to the right consumer proposition and the right franchisee economic model. So I want to spend a second and go a little bit deeper to talk about what's happening within the quartiles of our domestic franchise restaurants. So first, let me orient everyone on how to read the page. Each of the columns are quartiles one through four. Quartile one is our top quartile. Going down the side are a couple of key stats.
I'm actually going to start with the bottom line, which is called average product margin divided by ticket. What that is, is effectively revenue minus food cost for an average transaction. Each of our transactions generates more than $19 in terms of product margin. That is substantial variable profitability that driving a focus on transactions will absolutely lead to leverage in the model and absolutely will lead to us winning with the consumer and improving the unit economics. Second key point, food cost. It's next row up. I'm going to start on the total column for a second. Year-to-date through P9 or through Q3, 28.1% food cost. The food cost obviously oscillates throughout the years. We don't change pricing every time commodities move a couple of pennies. Q1, food cost below 28%. Q3, slightly above 29%. We need to take a balanced approach to our pricing standpoint.
But our food cost currently is slightly over 28%. That's including the more aggressive national promotion offers we've had over the last six months because we see substantial value in driving frequency in our core product proposition that something like Papa Pairings does extremely well. Top quartile. Top quartile over $31,000 in the average weekly sales. Pretty strong performance. What you also notice is that the food cost is actually slightly higher. What we find is when our franchisees invest a little bit of margin to drive frequency, to drive great quality products, it generates a flywheel of ongoing transaction growth. What's also interesting, not on the page, but I think it's important to share, is there's a healthy mix of urban, suburban, and rural locations in that mix. And what I mean by rural is actually less than 6,000 households within the delivery zone.
So that gives you a little bit of context to think about what that means. I'm sure where all of you have questions is actually in the fourth quartile. How exposed are we in the fourth quartile? Let me give you a couple of stats that may be useful. 75% of these restaurants in the fourth quartile have been open greater than 10 years. Second, only 95% of them are actually owned by franchisees at the three restaurants or less. And third is 41% of them are in rural locations. It's a different economic model. It's a different service proposition. And as I explained in the slides before, we have lots of leverage. We provide the franchisees to optimize their business to meet their location type and what the needs are for those consumers in those markets. Most frequent question I get, tell me about franchisee profitability.
So we want to unpack a little bit of this. Joe Sieve, our Chief Restaurant Officer, who I'm connected at the hip with, and I have been working on harmonizing franchisee profitability. We've always had access to franchisee profitability. What we're doing is systematically looking at franchise profitability month by month and doing it in a harmonized way that gives us such a rich data set that we can append to consumer analytics that is undoubtedly going to help us to unlock smart consumer-facing strategies. This is a subset of data from 2023. 25% of our franchisee base, comp franchisee base, and think about it as we've excluded non-traditional stores, excluded small towns, so clean traditional locations. $1.25 million in AUV. The FDD says we're about $1,190,000. So we're in the zone like $50,000-$60,000 differential. The EBITDA is 12%, $150,000. Similar question to the slide before.
What does it look like for the top quartile? What does it look like for the fourth quartile? Top quartile, meaningfully over 15% EBITDA rates. Fourth quartile, mid-single digits profitability from an EBITDA standpoint. So I hope this provides a little bit of context of we believe that a focus on driving quality transactions will lead to higher franchisee profitability. And this concept works across all community types. And we see meaningful opportunity to take share over the long term. And a key strategic benefit we have is our balance sheet is strong and healthy. We have three times leverage and appropriate levels of liquidity. We own more than 500 corporate restaurants. And we have a vertically integrated supply chain that, as we take on additional development, will drive more fixed cost leverage. And we'll continue to drive better and better unit economics that way.
Over the last five years, we've also returned about $850 million of value to shareholders. My number one focus right now is investing to grow. And investing to grow comes across a couple of vectors. We see an opportunity to drive more consideration and be more top of mind for our consumers. Todd's unpacked where we're doing friction fighting across our technology stack that will improve conversion rates, that drives to more transactions. And then lastly, we put the franchisee economic model front and center. We are looking for those opportunities that are going to help us and help our franchisees to simplify their operations. We're an 11% market share business today. Our top markets that Todd showed on the map at 15%. And if you start to look even deeper within those, there are actually a number of those that are in the 20+ range.
That shows that this brand, if we put focus and market ourselves well with great quality product, there's meaningful market share to go take. So with that, I'm going to invite Todd and Kevin and Joe and Jenna up.
What up, guys? Thanks for that. Thank you, Ravi, for sharing. A lot of factoids in there, but a lot of really interesting factoids that are informing kind of the strategic choices and the focus that we have. And most importantly, driving transactions, there's a lot of profit that we can generate with each and every transaction. So thanks, guys, for all coming up on stage. I know some of you know some of the team, and many of you don't know a lot of the folks as we get some newer folks. But blessed, as I said a little bit earlier, to have Ravi as a key, strategic partner.
He's been at the helm a little over a year now, great retail background. I'll let him talk a little bit more about himself in a moment. But one that really thinks about this business different and challenges to think about what we really need to do to really drive this business and push it forward. So a great partner, not just to me, but to the rest of the team. And I know a lot of that tenacity came from all your time at Nike and other retail before that. To the right of Ravi, we've got Joe Sieve. Joe's got a great background on a couple of fronts, coming over from Inspire Brands, a lot of development and franchising focus. But importantly, he spent a lot of time at Domino's, not only on the corporate side, but as an operator and a franchisee. And pizza is in his blood.
He is the consummate pizza maker. I learn something every day that I'm in the restaurants spending time with Joe, and he is really loving the focus on making sure that the GMs are at the epicenter of everything we do when we get back on our front foot to be the best pizza makers in the business. To his right is Jenna Bromberg. Jenna, brand new, four weeks. She probably feels like a grizzled veteran. She spent time in a restaurant, spent time out listening, but she does bring in a new and unique perspective to our business. If you look at her background, she was at Pizza Hut, helped set up all of their social marketing team there.
She worked for none other than Kurt Kane back in the day, who helped take some of those great ideas and helped us build that out at Wendy's at the time. But as Jenna grew in her career, she got to do a lot of things different to allow us to punch above or allow her to punch above her weight class at Carter's, really leveraging other channels to bring to life the brand in unique and different ways. We're really excited to have her on board. Then Kevin, I guess you're three and a half months in. Thank God I got him out of retirement a second time. Clearly, he must get through his honey-do list pretty darn fast. But an incredible journey for eight years, a little over eight years at Domino's.
So I thought Patrick Doyle and the team came to help transform what we needed to do on technology at Wendy's while we worked together. And really excited to have him back partnering and working with this entire team. I'll probably start with Jenna and you, Kevin, as the two newbies on the team. I'd be really curious to hear you guys talk about what attracted you to the brand, why you're so excited to be here. And then I'll turn it over to Joe and Ravi. You guys have been here a year, two and a half years to really talk about why you're so excited about the opportunity ahead for the brand. So we'll start with you, Jenna.
Yeah. Well, there's nothing quite like the energy of the pizza category. And I would say from day one in this organization, it's really felt like coming home. And it's exciting because think about it. You've got great brand, great leadership team, great data, great technology guy. It's really a marketer's dream. And what's really been interesting about the first 30 days on this brand is there's this passion and grit and true commitment to quality that's in every corner of this organization. And you see it a little bit on TikTok, on all those dough spinning videos. But that excitement and that passion is real. And it's ingrained in the DNA of this brand. So it's really exciting.
Well, Todd, I took the interview because we'd worked together before and you're a great partner in helping me drive technology at Wendy's, especially in the Gen AI area, but I actually took the job because of this leadership team. The passion, I mean, Jenna just said it so well. There's so much passion for being in the pizza business on this leadership team, both here and the leadership team that's not on stage. Passion for the product, making a great pizza, making the best pizza. Passion for the brand, and there's just a really compelling team to be a part of, and then Jenna joins us, and it's like a 10X. If you're a Google person, you know what a 10X experience is, and she just amps it up. I mean, her passion for the pizza business and her passion for making a great product.
And then one of the things we share is we both have this maniacal passion for the consumer. And I think it just pulls through. It pulls through the whole team.
No, two great additions, and it feels like we've all been here a long, long time.
It does.
Because the folks that have been here have been so welcoming, right?
Yeah.
And so engaged to help us get entrenched in the business. And I'll finish with you, Joe. So I'll go over to you, Ravi, just some of your thoughts and your passion for the future and what keeps you so excited about where we're going on this journey.
Yeah, I am really excited. And when I think about myself and what really excites me is I spent a lot of my athletic career as the sixth man. Slightly undersized, had a scrap, had a hustle. And I love being able to bring that mentality to a challenger brand because that is just absolutely fun. And then when I think about what's unique about this model, being a retailer, I've never lived in a world where I have 85% of first-party data. Yeah, the sort of testing that we get to do and the sort of testing we did over the last six months would have taken me years in my old category. And that just allows us to be so much smarter in our investment thesis. And then when we're ready to scale, we can hit hard.
Yeah, great. And over to you, Joe.
I mean, it's a couple of things. You all summed it up. I mean, pizza is fun. How can you not have fun working at pizza? And pizza is different than other QSR, where pizza is more of an art, more of that craftsmanship. We're not assembling something, but there's hands-on working with the fresh dough and building that product with the fresh ingredients. And that passion is felt across this team throughout the building, but also you really feel it out in the restaurants with our franchisees and our managers. And so I think that's what's really exciting. The other part that I'm excited about is the potential Papa John's. And this is the reason why I came here. For me, it was a little bit like Jenna said, coming back home to pizza.
We all have some of that pizza sauce in our veins. And this leadership team that we now have assembled today really excites me. The people we have across the organization really excite me. And we have some amazing franchisees around the world. To kind of touch on some of the sports analogies, and Ravi definitely is an athlete at core and a competitor. And I think we have that across us. But I think about, regardless of who your team is and who you like, I mean, we got Brady to come out of retirement. And then Bo to get Gronk. It's like, how can we not win with this, right? The other thing, too, is having been with another similar brand. I was there during a similar turnaround and transformation. And we now at Papa John's are approaching 6,000 locations globally.
So I have a little bit of a vision of what the runway looks like for us and where we might go beyond. So that's what really excites me.
Joe, I know and I love your passion, and I get to feel it every day in the restaurant. I know from day one, right, when we renamed the hubs to the restaurant support center and went out and spent a lot of time with our GMs in that focus, you were energized beyond belief, and we've done a lot of work over the years, right? We had a back to basics, which became back to better 1.0 and quickly went to 2.0, but if you think about what we need to do to be back and be the best pizza makers in the business, there's a lot of good things we did along the way that we can build upon, and there's still opportunities ahead.
Why don't you talk about what you're proud of kind of with Back to Better 1.0 and things we're working on in the future ahead?
Absolutely. I mean, I think the thing about Papa John's is to remember that this brand was built on a fanaticism around quality. It was built on a fanaticism about being better: better people, better product, better service, and better image. And we are now leaning harder back into that. We may have gotten a little bit too far away from that over the years and the pandemic. In late 2022, we launched a back to basics initiative, which we branded as back to better. And again, that was focusing on that original foundation. Part of the back to basics were what are those four core Big Rock objectives that we're going to go and execute against, knowing that when we execute against these four Big Rock KPIs, that success would cascade down into other KPIs across the organizations. So that was what we called the four Os.
The four Os were orders. How do we capture every single order and every transaction? Out the door times, which is our service metrics on getting the customer their product. Overall customer satisfaction. And the fourth O is optimization, is while we're driving top-line sales and transactions, ensuring that we're optimizing that unit-level profitability and unit-level EBITDA. The four Os drive frequency, which drives top-line sales, drives unit EBITDA, franchisee profitability, then drives reinvestment into the brand through net unit growth. Net unit growth drives shareholder return. Core themes that we're focused on right now are operational efficiency and franchisee profitability. We are currently in the process of executing an initiative around menu optimization and how we balance that with some of the operational complexities that Todd had touched on.
Over the last number of years, we've had a number of limited-time offers, and we've added a lot of new menu items to the menu, so as we go through this with a data-driven and very much in collaboration with Jenna and her team, what is our core menu so that when we're executing on our core menu items, we can do it flawlessly and with that quality integrity that we're so passionate about, and then beyond that, how can we innovate and make sure we have those right credible products that will drive transactions?
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Joe. When you and I were in the restaurant the other day, you helped really illuminate that need for that operational efficiency. You showed me some of those rhythm breakers and how it really does take some of the focus away from making the best core product in the business, and we've got to balance that excitement around innovation with that operational efficiency and that focus around the core, so as I get deeper and deeper in, with every day that goes by, you and I are working really, really closely together around innovation with intention, and Kevin, you said it, right? We have this maniacal focus on the customer. We have all this amazing data and making sure we are innovating to bring new customers in, but doing it with intention around the occasions and the consumer needs states that really matter.
I love the partnership and the passion. And speaking of passion, Kevin, you've been here three and a half months. It's great to see the energy that you have for this business and the excitement. I got to see some of it in the hamburger business, but now I know that your true passion is the pizza business. And I would be really curious for you to share some of your early observations, why you're so excited about the future, and a lot of the work that you did to refocus the organization on really driving technology that's going to generate revenue and profit.
Yeah, no, Todd, I'd love to talk about it. I love to talk about technology, as you know. But I got to start with my number one observation: it feels like home. I mean, Joe said it and Jenna said it. If you've been in the pizza business, coming back into the pizza business is a lot of fun. But one of the reasons it's a lot of fun is it's a very consumer-facing business. So like Todd, I've been on a maybe not a 100-day trip because I've been here 100 days, but I've been out talking to a lot of people, talking to franchisees, talking to team members, talking to technology providers. But I think most importantly, talking to consumers. That's one of the things I love about being in this business: there's a lot of pizza consumers, and they have a lot of opinions.
And some of those pizza consumers are my family. And for those of you who get criticism from your family, it can be pretty brutal. So literally, every weekend when we order Papa John's pizza, I get a performance review for my two teenage daughters. And the takeaway from that is we've got a lot of work to do. Our customer experience across all demand channels is not where it needs to be. And that's a fact. And you saw it in the survey. You heard Todd talk about it. Quite honestly, if you use our app, you know that. And my daughters know that, so they'll continue to remind me. So that's the kind of balance there. But the good news is we have a really strong foundation. We have a strong technical foundation, and we have a really strong data foundation.
What we need to do is take all the passion that Joe has in terms of making a great pizza and turn it towards our consumer experience and build out an omnichannel experience. Why do we need an omnichannel experience? The pizza consumer today is very sophisticated. Quite honestly, QSR consumers are so much more sophisticated post-COVID than they used to be. They don't just want a good app, right? We have an OK app. They want a great app. They want a great website. They want a great experience when they call the store. They want an integrated loyalty program, right? They want all of that. In order to do that, we need to use the data we have, and we need to improve, quite honestly, all of our user experience to really build this omnichannel.
But again, as I said, the good news is we know what we need to do. Now we just need to get on about doing it.
Yeah, the good news is, Kevin, you and the team have a great vision on what needs to get fixed, what's going to matter most, and how does it actually connect to the consumer even better moving forward. And you did make a comment around data, right? And I was.
I'm not sure what that was.
I made the comment on stage earlier. Just we've got so much great data.
Yeah.
It seemed to be the one thing that you got in here literally a week and a half in that you were most excited about. Why don't you really talk a little bit about the data and the opportunity to leverage it and partner with Jenna to utilize it?
Yeah, no, I think we literally are sitting on a gold mine of data. And for the data geeks and the quants in the audience, we have this phrase now for those of us who roll around the data all the time. The data is the new oil, right? And oil powered the last industrial revolution. Data is going to power this industrial revolution. And the reason we have all this data is we're at our heart, we're a delivery company. So for the last 30 or 40 years, people have given us their name, their address, and a phone number. And then with the digital age, in addition to all that, now we know what they ordered, when they ordered it, how they paid for it.
So we can take all of that data now and start to build this omnichannel experience that is actually relevant to the customer, right? And is actually unique to the customer. And that's what's really going to power, I think, this transformation. The other thing is Todd talks about agility and speed. One of the reasons we're going to be able to move so fast is we already have that. So many of our competitors are trying to build this rich data repository. We're already sitting on top of it. But let me give you a couple of examples, too, because some of this is somewhat theoretical on how you use the data. The two primary ways we're going to use data to drive this business, one is decision quality data. Ravi talked about it when he talked about us rebuilding or restructuring our loyalty program, right?
That wasn't a fluke. That was a scientific approach to how to build a better loyalty program. In partnership with marketing and finance, we sit down and we restructured our loyalty program. Another example of it is in personalization. I think we all talk about personalization when it comes to the data, well, Todd alluded to this. No, next week, we are actually going to see some of our first CRM campaigns going out that actually have custom segmentation that looks at the segmentation of our customer and targets them with offers that are going to resonate with them. And last but not least, and there's more stuff in the pipeline, but the last one we can tease today is in January, you'll start to see favorite order appear on all of our ordering channels. And again, we need the data to be able to present that.
But when Jenna logs on, she'll have the opportunity to say, "Just give me my favorite order," which I think is about 80% of our orders anyway. That'll cut the time in half to order, literally cut the time in half to order. So I'm really, really excited. We got a bunch of other stuff in the pipeline, and I think we're going to be able to hit the accelerator pretty hard.
No, and what I love is not only the partnership that you have with Jenna to leverage this data and think about how we bring it to life differently than we have in the past, but the partnership with Joe to think about what we need to do in the restaurant. And we've got the intellectual curiosity hound right here that's always challenged us to look at things differently and look around the corners. So it's a fun partnership across the board. I know, Jenna, you've only been here about a month now. I'll take a page from the analyst, probably a three-part question for you. A couple of things. One, you came in. Really, the reason I wanted you to join this team is we've talked about having to challenge your brand mindset, punch above our weight class, be scrappy.
Your background lends to that, so I'll have you talk a little bit about that. Would also be curious a little bit of your thoughts around the Better Get You Some campaign? We know that we have a way to tell our story a little bit different, and I know that you can bring that to life. And any other early observations you have as you've been stepping your way around this place at fast pace over the last four weeks?
Yeah. Well, as Joe said, first of all, there is a fanaticism around quality all across this business. And what's great about that is consumers know that to be true. They know us for better ingredients, better pizza already. And that's an amazing foundation to build on. And as Joe and Kevin and I have been spending some time together, we've identified some opportunities to really own that and bring that to life for consumers. If those inspiring experiences all of us have had when we've gone into our restaurants can come to life for consumers, I think it will resonate beautifully. And that's my job to figure out. But more than that, if we are after becoming the best pizza makers in the business, we've found some ways also and identified some ways to make our core product more craveable.
So combine that with doing some cleanup on menu optimization. I think we have a little bit of work ahead of us, but lots and lots of opportunity there. And as it relates to Better Get You Some, I think that was a true consumer insight and a true category insight. I would say that the execution and the timing didn't quite resonate the way that we'd hoped. We talked a little bit about this already, but we got out of position on value a little bit. When we launched that campaign, we also missed the opportunity to really land why Papa John's. We missed that opportunity to talk about the fanaticism around quality, the excellence of our core product. So you're going to start to see us coming back to that in our communications and really owning better ingredients, better pizza.
Now, Better Get You Some may come to life more in our cultural activations and social activations because that insight and that fanaticism is still real across the category, but you're going to see much more comms about quality. Now, as it relates to being a fighter brand, what a joy to be in this business and to have the support of this team who really wants to play that game a little bit differently. We have the tremendous asset of being a high recognition brand, a brand that a lot of people are familiar with and can easily recall, but our size allows us to be super agile and move at the speed of culture. To me, being a challenger brand and playing that game differently in comms means activating in culture in interesting and disruptive ways and really winning in social.
The behavior of the consumer has changed pretty substantially over the last 10 years. They're not necessarily tuning into prime-time programming on linear TV as much, but where we really have an opportunity is to stop that scroll on TikTok and disrupt the feeds in new and interesting ways to break through. So being a fighter brand also extends to how we support our franchisees to own their local trade areas. And playing that game differently is something that Joe and I are really focused on. Joe, do you want to talk a little bit about how we're thinking through that?
Sure. So I mean, Papa John's is a franchise model. We're a globally recognized brand. However, we are owned locally and operated locally by our franchisees. We are going to continue to increase the support and resources that we provide our franchisees so that they can dominate in their local communities. What's really awesome is we're seeing this from a lot of our franchisees, franchisees getting back to how they originally built this brand by owning and being involved in their communities. What we call this is that they're leaning in by, we call it owning your magic mile around your restaurant or being the mayor of your community. So people think about you when it comes to local sponsorships, community involvement, but more importantly, about where they're going to buy their pizza.
So Joe, I mean, to bring that all to life, we have to get that balance right, too, around where we're spending nationally, where we're spending locally. We're having those discussions right now with the franchise community. We can do it a bunch of different ways on how we might want to go retrade some of the things that we agreed to in the past. But we also got a great super regional presence where we know we can go put some money to work that will drive the heck out of our business. So super excited about the partnership and making the appropriate investments from our side as well as the franchise side to grow this business. One thing, Jenna, you started talking a little bit about playing this game different and stop the scroll.
We had a little bit of fun a couple of weeks back with a little extra dollars that we put to work to bang the Shaquille O'Neal Pizza Rich Quick campaign to life. I know the team started that before you got here, but that's a great example of how we can play the game differently. Why don't you talk a little bit about that?
Sure. So as the team talked about earlier, we made a change to our loyalty program to allow consumers to earn rewards faster virtually on every purchase. And instead of communicating that message through a big TV campaign, we decided to do something a little bit differently where we paired up the lovely Shaquille O'Neal with a big-time TikTok creator named School of Hard Knocks. If you're familiar with him, he's the guy who stops people on the street in New York City and asks them how they got so rich and what they did for a living. So between Shaquille and this influencer, they communicated our message in this real interesting, engaging way that was endemic to the platform. And in about two days, it became our most watched video ever on our organic social media channels with about 2.2 million views.
So what that told me was a couple of things. One is consumers are highly, highly engaged with this brand. If we hit the right message in the right medium at the right time, magic can happen. So there's lots of opportunity there, and I'm really encouraged by that. But secondly, we're seeing the results. Clearly, the message broke through. As you heard from the team, we went from about 21% dough redemption on loyalty orders to about 50% in a very short amount of time. So super encouraging there.
Very cool stuff.
Yeah.
Let's circle back a little bit. Joe, I know you were talking. And ultimately, what we need to do is provide more access to our brand. We got a lot of white space. We got a lot of infill opportunity. You've got the global hat on on the development front, driving the heck out of North American development, partnering with Ravi on international. Why don't you talk a little bit about the opportunities ahead on the North American growth and then flip it over to Ravi to talk about the international and your partnership?
Sure. So North America, what we're focused on right now is a very surgical and targeted development approach in North America. We're very eager to continue to grow with our existing franchisees while also bringing in some new franchisees, as Todd had touched on. The good news is right now we have a lot of franchisees that are interested in building new restaurants and that are actively building new restaurants. We know as a brand, and Todd's touched on this, that we can win in target markets. We're currently winning in number one in certain markets around the world. And we know when we win in specific markets, we can win in the next market. And then in aggregate, that equates to winning in the U.S. and ultimately winning globally.
We continue to bring down the cost of our startup and our build-out cost for new restaurants with an intense focus on franchisee return on investments. As Todd had mentioned, how do we continue to bring down that payback time for our franchisees so that there is that value proposition? We're also investing in our processes, our teams, and resources while also improving the tools that we have to improve market planning and site selection so that we're building the right locations in the right trade areas with the right format and make sure that we're set up for success. We currently have a development agreement that was previously announced, and we'll continue to explore more strategic potential development opportunities in very surgical target market specifics in 2025 and beyond. On the international front, Ravi and I worked very closely together this last year, and it's been a fun year.
We really learned a lot about our international business and what was being done and really how do we better understand it and how can we create a better strategy for future growth. So right now, for the near term and going forward, as Ravi had touched on, we are having a much more surgical focus on target markets. The emphasis right now is on strong openings of Papa John's, whereby maybe in the past there was more of a focus on the global stage of signing big development agreements, entering new markets as quickly as we can. We're going to continue to enter new markets, but we're going to do it around the globe with very thoughtful, deliberate, and strategic intentions. And so I think with that, combined with what Ravi had touched on, that's what we see from a growth standpoint.
Yeah. I think you really summarized it well, Joe. Maybe a few things that were really top of mind for me. Quality development is what matters. Quality development yields system-wide sales growth. It yields strong franchisees. And I'm really focused on the markets where we have strength today. And I touched on a few of them: Spain, north of $15,000 in WPSA. Chile, north of $20,000. There's a lot of growth and opportunity still in markets like Peru and Spain, where we know we can drive meaningful growth. And one of those locations will generate meaningful profitability for our franchisees and for Papa John's. And there are other markets such as KSA and the UAE, which are delivering in Korea that are delivering meaningful system-wide sales growth. So we can take a handful of countries and have a lot of runway.
It allows me and the team to really focus our resources because we believe taking concentrated bets will drive outsized returns for our franchisees and for Papa John's.
Now, I'm looking forward to the journey ahead as we continue to recruit new franchisees, lean into our growth-minded franchisees, scale up the markets that we're in. There's a lot of opportunity ahead for our brand. And I look down, we got a couple of minutes to go. So I've got probably a lucky strike extra question for Ravi. I'll put him on the spot. I think it was day two. We walked in, we decided to open up our range on operating income a little bit wider when we guided at coming out of the second quarter earnings because we wanted the latitude to go out and test and learn. And we had a lot of stuff in flight that we were already testing and learning. We knew we wanted to lean in to potentially incrementally invest to support our brand, even in advertising off the P&L.
Why don't you talk a little bit about some of the things that we did along the way and some of the successes you've seen and why that's encouraging for the future?
Yeah. Thanks, Todd. And one of the benefits of the CFO being the interim CEO is you get to test things. And we had to be patient in terms of what are the right investments to go make. And at the end of Q1, I was pretty deliberate that we were going to go out there and patiently test against some core ideas. One of them was resetting the value proposition. What we found from our Papa Pairings offering, it drives repeat transactions. It drives frequencies. And we're seeing transactions sequentially improve as we progressed through Q3. And as I talked about on the Q3 earnings call, we saw that carry on into October.
The second is when we tore apart the consumer data and looked at what was happening to purchase cycles. What we found is that our purchase cycle relative to industry benchmarks was 7-10 days too long from the second to third transaction. That was the foundational insight that helped us to define this simple tweak to our loyalty program, but so impactful. Now, we have a reason to talk to consumers after almost any transactions. They have a reward to give redeem. That was really impactful. And we saw that in the results that from our loyalty program, going from like 2 out of 10 loyalty consumers redeeming to now 5 out of 10. We know we're impacting the consumer psyche by doing that. We are communicating value.
And by the way, we did that without actually changing the overall discount rate of our loyalty program: 13.3% before, 13.3% in the revamp. But we shortened the distance between a transaction and the next transaction. Third thing we saw, when we advertise our core product proposition, consumers buy more of our core product proposition. It drives frequency. We believe that these insights are all long-duration strategies that drive strong variable profitability per transaction and will allow us to take market share over time.
Clearly, we know what we need to do to bend the trends in this business. We've got the insights. We've got the actions. We've proven it out. Now we're leaning into it. And I'm super blessed to be able to go to battle with a team of the caliber of all of you. It's a team that works hard. It plays hard. But it has a lot of fun together. I know you guys have each other's back. And it's going to be a great journey and a great run ahead. So thanks for your time up here today. Why don't we get ready to move to Q&A? Why don't you guys step off? Ravi and I will do that. But just a couple of quick thoughts before we get into Q&A because I do think it is important to come back to the slide on where we started, right?
Some of the key takeaways and ultimately, it is around creating those great experiences in every restaurant every day with every visit. It's about becoming the best pizza makers in the business, setting up our teams for success so they can create a great experience for our customers time and again. We're going to lean into the core. We're going to continue to amplify and invest to drive our brand a promise and bring it to life different to connect to the consumer to drive transaction growth moving forward. We're going to leverage the heck out of the data that we have. There is so much great data. We know we can connect different to change behaviors moving forward. We'll continue to lean in and front-run some investments on the tech stack.
I think I said earlier, 25 basis points increase in the tech debt was actually 50 basis points increase, so we've got the fuel there, and we may have to lean in and front-run some investments moving forward as a brand to continue to bring that to life. You just got to see the team. There's others that are on the team sitting in the front row. It is a great, talented team that works really well together. There are a lot of encouraging signs of progress. Ravi just got the hit on him. We had a great way to close when I got to squeeze in that last question for him, so thanks for taking that on, Ravi, and we've got the balance sheet and the flexibility and the optionality in this business to bring it all to life, so we're excited about the future.
We know where we're going. We know what it's going to take. And it's a journey. But we've actually planted a lot of great seeds to drive the heck out of this business for years to come. It is going to take some investment. It's going to take a little bit of time. But we know what we need to do to bring that to life. So with that, what I want to do is transition into Q&A. I got a lot of folks in the room here. So as you put your hand up, introduce yourself, introduce your firm. I know we've got folks on the line. I think you guys are monitoring questions on the line. So we'll do the same on that front. But let's get into the Q&As.
Okay. Great. Thank you, Peter Saleh, BTIG. Really appreciate you guys hosting. This was great. And appreciate all the incremental details you guys provided today. Very helpful. Ravi, can I ask on the fourth quartile that you were highlighting a few moments ago? That seems like a pretty big opportunity to move those units up through the ranks to the third and second quartile and the economics improving there. Are those units in any way geographically challenged? Are they more West Coast, more particularly Northeast? Is there anything particular about those units that keeps them from moving higher? And then what, if anything, have you guys identified that you can do to help those franchisees kind of move up that curve?
Yeah. Thanks for the question, Peter. So while I don't have specifics on geographic spread, what I'll tell you is those restaurants have smaller household counts and smaller density in terms of population size. So that is absolutely a core factor. And second, if you look at our natural geographic spread, we do have a heavier bend towards the East Coast. In terms of moving up from quartile four to quartile three to two, a couple of things that we see is that when pricing is slightly out of position from the value proposition, it seems like it's great in the near-term margin. Over time, it is hurting frequency. So when we think about what we need to move up from quartile four to three is making sure we have a really compelling carry-out offer that meets that consumer's value proposition needs and has got to consistently run.
Second, all the amazing work that marketing and technology is doing to sharpen personalization. We have template-based email and trigger-based push notifications that are right from a price point standpoint to reach that specific consumer. Third, we believe that in these more rural markets, the GMs have to truly be the mayor of their town. They have to work that magic mile really hard. It was really simple things that we've been testing over the last couple of months that we actually went back and did direct mailers for some markets to find lapsed consumers. Really positive impact. We've been working on simple toolkits that can be deployed at a local level. Foundationally, our consumers have to consistently know that they can get a great quality pie at a great price point from Papa John's.
But I think that's the key. We have to be scrappy, Peter, in the local markets. I mean, our best markets are our franchisees that are engaged in the restaurants. They're out in the communities. They're going to the schools. They're going to the apartments. They're going to the offices. They're putting the door hangers. They're going back to the old-school stuff to go fight for transactions. And that's where we can leverage our field marketing team and really make sure we drive some insights to get out there and provide these toolkits to actually connect to those communities and drive folks in. We will always be a national brand. So we'll think national, but we got to act local, right, and really be that great pizza maker in that town to drive folks in at a great value.
Maybe to add on just a little bit to that is when we put our restaurants in the hand of fantastic operators, it usually leads to improved sales comps. Being in the restaurants and actually being the mayor makes a really big difference.
Absolutely.
Thanks. Brian Bittner with Oppenheimer. I want to echo Peter and say thank you for having us and all the incremental disclosures, as he said, that many of us have never seen are really nice to have. I thought it was really interesting how big your carry-out business is. Almost half of revenue. It's clearly your largest source of revenue by a lot. And I think we all probably assumed that it was smaller because you don't talk about it as much as your largest peer that emphasizes it consistently, kind of talks about it probably more than any other part of its business. And I'm just kind of interested in maybe why you don't talk about the carry-out business more moving forward.
As you shift to this value strategy, we all know that the consumer views within pizza carry-out is probably the best value play just given it's more inexpensive and all the rest of it. Is there anything you can do, given how big your carry-out business is, to drive the consumer their increased traffic by using it as a value lever in your messaging?
Yeah. So a couple of thoughts. One, we will be a lot more transparent because you guys needed the transparency to understand some of the strategic choices that we're making and where we can lean in to drive this business and drive profit for the system. Our carry-out business is a super important part of the business. And it was a leaky bucket, right? When you think about one top carry-out under $20, we had work to do. And before I got here, the team started testing some different local offers to drive some more folks in. We will talk about it more because it is value. It does drive a lot of opportunity to drive the profitability of the restaurants. And you have great integrity of pizza when you're picking it up and bringing it home, especially if we've got the density we need.
Our opportunity is, especially when you look at that Eastern Seaboard, how do we actually fortify and densify some of those restaurants so we have more access to the Papa John's brand? That's part of our challenge that we have a lot of restaurants that are out of the way from the consumer. And we have a lot of restaurants that look a little old and tired when you show up on the carry-out front. So we got to make sure that we're infilling. We got to make sure that we over time renovate some of those restaurants. We will talk. And then we got to have the right price points, the right deals. And that's where you have to have national messages, but you have to go execute locally.
We have to get this balance right between the national spend and the local spend and having co-ops out in place and making sure that we got a field marketing team partnering with our teams in the market to bring to life those great carry-out offers. Any other thoughts?
Maybe three things to add. One, it's 47% of orders, not revenue. So just want to make sure you got that stat sharpened. The second thing is we believe and our thesis is that driving carry-out orders, it's fundamental to unlocking development opportunity. Lower cannibalization rate on carry-out, substantial opportunity to continue to take share allows us to infill faster. The third, and this part's a little bit unintuitive, I think it's important for all of you to understand. The food cost is actually higher as a % of revenue on carry-out. But the flow through to profits all the way down to variable contribution margin is actually higher than delivery.
So as we just unpack the business in terms of consumer trends, the power of our economic model, our objectives from development, what is clear is that carry-out is going to be a critical part of how we're going to drive the business forward. And it's going to help us to inflect not only comps, but development opportunities and franchisee profitability.
Next question.
Nick Setyan, Wedbush. One of the things that has surprised me this year is the continued growth in the third-party aggregator channel given the context of heightened focus on value by the customer, a competitor going into that segment. And so kind of how does that, I guess from your perspective, how does that jive with the whole incremental value focus by the customer, et cetera? Why is that channel continuing to grow? And at the same time, I think you talked about the improvement in carry-out and delivery in October as some of the value messaging has become more aggressive. Has that actually impacted the continued growth in the aggregator channel? Is the aggregator channel continuing to grow?
I'll give some thoughts. So, no. I'll let you go. Well, let me start. I guess there's a couple of things, Nick. One, if you look at because we've been so first-party for so long in the pizza business, we are relatively under-penetrated still by and large in third-party. So, there's an opportunity for pizza to continue to grab more share within the third-party aggregators. We got a lot of great offerings at good price points and a lot of good variety and quality base so we can bring folks in time and again. And we've held up quite well there. And the third-party helps fill in a lot of the spaces where we don't have drivers on roll, right? You start to think about kind of the lunch day part where we're not staffed up with drivers.
You think about the late-night day part where when we hit the big rush hours on a Friday or Saturday night where we got incremental delivery to actually get the pizzas to folks faster. I think that's why it's held up so well in third-party. What we want to do is continue to drive folks back into first-party, right? At the end of the day, that's the Holy Grail. That's where the data is. The best experience should be in first-party. That's why we're going to make sure that we can track every delivery across the whole system quickly through the course of next year because we don't do that today. We only got about a third of the system that actually tracks the whole order, which feels very antiquated relative to the competitive set with how it's out there in third-party. But we have a good offer.
And it complements our business in some of the areas where we may be capacity constrained too, where third-party helps build out some of the first-party business we have. But sorry, I jumped that one on you.
No, totally. A few other key things to put out there. So as Todd talked about in terms of our marketing and brand awareness, we over-index in terms of brand trials, recommend with Gen Z and M illennials. If you actually look at the composition of consumers that are in the aggregators, we see a trend towards those demographics. And those demographics really like us. So as consumers are moving that way, we believe we're taking more share in that space with them. The second thing we would say is our team spent a lot of time obsessing the algo and how to win and compete really well in the space.
As pricing is fairly dynamic by our competitors in terms of the promotions that they're running and what their pricing is, we're maniacally focused every single day, every single week to make sure our position within the aggregators is really compelling, and third is while we wouldn't necessarily categorize ourselves as shifting to value, we're saying that we are focused on making sure people understand our value that we offer today and that we offer a great quality pizza, so the Papa Pairings has been on our menu for a long time. We're just now consistently marketing it. That is making a meaningful difference to allow consumers to recognize that we offer a great value.
Thank you. Brian Mullan, Piper Sandler, thanks for everything today. You talked about how some of the menu innovation in recent years might have helped with new customers, but then maybe added complexity to the stores. It looks like Stuffed Crust has become a significant part of sales. Maybe Papadi as is not as much. Can you just talk about both of those products? Did they both add complexity? And if so, is there a way to reduce that complexity with those products at all? And would you be willing to eliminate products if it made sense? And if you're going to do that, how would you go about offsetting any short-term sales loss potentially and what you'd be playing for?
Yeah. So what we're really looking at is cross-section. So we're looking at all the SKUs, all the movement in the restaurant, right? And anything that's really low volume is an opportunity to take a hard look at. Ultimately, we're going to go out and really do some research, consumer-led, insight-driven to make sure we know what matters most to the consumer in our restaurants. We know we got a lot of toppings that just don't move very much on our core pizza that some of those things can come out of the restaurant. We know we leaned in hard on that Papadi as lineup. It probably got a little too broad and too many different offerings on that out there. So we're going to have to look at how we simplify. And there's a great insight there, right? Handheld, on the go, more single-serve.
You have to figure out how we do it operationally efficiently, and that hasn't had as much flak as we'd hoped. Had a great spike along the way, but we're going to look at the whole menu. We're going to think about what needs to come out. We'll pace when it comes out to really drive the focus on getting back to be the best pizza makers in the business. You'll see some of the innovation in the near term will come in really focused on the core of the pizza first and foremost because we got the insights on what we need to do there, so we bring those new innovations in, and it'll give us an opportunity to pull some stuff out, and some of those innovations may stick on the menu as other things come out.
And then over time, as we start to really build up kind of the insights on all the occasion-based opportunities that we have, we'll think about what other things should come into the restaurant, but do it in a really operationally efficient manner. I mean, there's things like our desserts. Folks will say, "Man, that's a low-margin product." Well, it's a very easy product and a high-paying profit in a hurry, right? We're just dropping it in the oven and running through. We got to figure out how we remix and rebalance that whole menu to really set our teams up for success. And then ultimately, what we have to do, there are so many things in our restaurants that are still very old-school in a lot of respects around manual, how we check in inventory, how we manage labor, how we manage ordering.
All of those things we can figure out over time how we automate so that we can then get focused on getting folks back on the make line, back to making great pizzas, and that'll allow longer-term to maybe add a few things back in on these incremental occasions, but we got some other work to do first to make sure that we got the time on the make line, not the time doing all the other tasks that we're doing in the restaurant. I don't know who's controlling hands, but there's a lot of hands going up, which is good.
Ella Ji from Stifel. Thanks for the question. So I want to ask, so the improvement in conversion on the app and the website have been mentioned several times today. And I'm just curious if you can provide a little bit more color on any additional opportunities you've identified in terms of the changes you can implement to continue improving conversion rates. And also, can you help us understand how simple or complex the paths of the implementation could be?
Yeah. Why don't you start on that one, Ravi?
Yeah. Thank you for the question. So a few things that we've identified. The core thing we want to make easier, there's lots of ways to accomplish this, is reduce the number of clicks it takes from the time you open up an app or go to the website to when you purchase. There's a very direct link between conversion and that activity. So as Jenna and Kevin and Joe and I spend time together, that is the core of what we're obsessing. And I think Kevin touched on a few things in terms of being able to open up the app and say, "Favorite order, click it and purchase." That's going to reduce the number of clicks by 50% in order to purchase. That will lead to conversion-driving activity. That's an example of something that's in the near term in front of us.
Second, we are in the early stages of revamping what our templatized CRM personalization approach is going to be. That's another example where more compelling offers through push notifications and emails will drive a direct link to conversion. The third thing that we're looking at is in cold state, and what I mean by cold state is when you don't have a relationship with Papa John's and there aren't cookies that tell us exactly who you are, being really sharp on what are we going to say to you that gets you to either become a member or to convert. But what I would say is we're not looking for a waterfall approach to launching some new app or website, but taking a very feature-based approach, which is a tried-and-true methodology for consumer-based companies to continuously improve conversion.
That's really we continue to look at kind of clicks, how fast can you order, how easy it is to order. I mean, Kevin's lived this in his past. And we got a whole laundry list of things we can pace and sequence, and especially in the app. And we got to make sure that the web is just as easy. Those cold state offers are really important when you don't have somebody in the loyalty program to have a compelling deal when they flip into the app. That's a tactic. But we got to make sure that the web and the app feel very similar. And we've got a lot of opportunity to really harmonize those two experiences. And Kevin's working through some tools to do that, do it very efficiently and very effectively moving forward. So those are just continued opportunities that we have.
The more that we can go out and amplify and talk about a new loyalty program to bring more new users in and get people more engaged, all of that insight will actually help us direct us to where we need to go to take the friction out because we're going to hear it in a hurry from all those extra customers coming in.
Maybe the last thing I would add is we're not taking home run cuts at these app changes or web changes. We're constantly A/B testing, so we're putting different variations of an idea out. We're studying that, and then we can make a call on what the winner is, so that meaningfully increases the hit rate as we roll out new features that is going to yield conversion upside.
Good morning, I get your hand up higher.
Good morning. Todd Brooks from Benchmark. Thanks for the color on Intern ational as part of today's presentation. Wondering if you can help us balance that focus on the core nine markets and more of a focus on quality and higher volume openings. And at the same time, look at the non-core international markets and maybe some of the growth that happened during the pandemic to understand what's that attrition that happens in those markets so we can start to get our mind around a core unit growth rate for the international markets for the next couple of years.
Yeah. I'll get Ravi. He'll go narrow and deep on all of this because that's the strategy, right? But there is this S-curve in any market, right? And you get in and you got to create some scale. You got to create some presence. And when you got a brand established and you're focused on that scale and awareness, there is a tremendous opportunity to accelerate growth from that platform. And we just got to be really diligent about getting those platforms set. Some markets we have it and we can build upon it. A few others that still need to be built out. And we planted a lot of flags along the way. And we're going to have to nurture some of those flags. Feel good when we got pretty good healthy when we don't have a lot of cleanup around the system.
But Ravi, I know you spent a lot of time. And this is the other half of your world beyond being the CFO. So I don't want you to talk about it.
Yeah, so first, the nine countries are our core drivers of growth. But that's not the only nine countries that we will have across the globe. We don't expect that we're going to be meaningfully closing countries or territories. However, if there are stranded restaurants and stranded cities in some of these global markets where we're not showing up as the global brand we want, we are taking a hard look at that. They're not meaningful contributors to system-wide sales. They're not meaningful contributors to royalties. They're not brand building. We are taking hard, thoughtful looks at that. But ultimately, we don't see that as a material impact in the near terms to our financials as PJI. We actually think about it as taking a long-duration approach to driving a global brand based on quality that we can win with, and that's exactly the work we did in the U.K.
The U.K. is a stronger franchisee base and a better operating model now than it was a year ago or 18 months ago. And we just had a team out in China and taking a really hard look at what are the cities we really need to win in. Are we focused in on that magic mile or magic two kilometers in those markets? And it's really helping us to put some frame around this. The last thing I'll say is markets like Spain, for example, we're in 95 restaurants doing $15,000 a week. There's meaningful development opportunity from a system-wide sales growth standpoint in markets like that. And there's a handful of those markets I was on that screen that Joe and I are connected at the hip to make sure we're finding that artful balance between development, market share, and long-term brand health.
What's really cool, Todd, when you get that base right, and we're seeing it now in the U.K., right? We've built a stronger franchise base. We've got the restaurants that can really contribute and grow and have a great brand presence. It gets the franchise community re-engaged and excited. And not too long ago, they voted to increase the national ad fund contribution in that market. They want to get back on their front foot. They want to play to win. Ravi and I were over there. We saw some great innovation. It's a great blueprint there that we can continue to leverage in a few other markets to be definitely a lot easier because it's not a company market like we had to work through in the U.K.
But really encouraged about what we can do and how quickly we can transform some of these markets to take a slight step back to build a stronger foundation to really drive some accelerated growth into the future.
Thank you. Jim Salera with Stephens. It sounds like there's a lot of opportunity to start the flywheel spinning by driving transaction growth. If I disaggregate that and take some of what Jenna was talking about, these wins using alternative media and driving new visibility for consumers, does the technology stack need to catch up before you can drive meaningful transaction gains given that that's where this media is going to be interacting with those consumers? Or can you still drive incremental transactions and then kind of catch the tech stack up with it as you scale?
Yeah. And you can absolutely run them in parallel. I mean, we've got such good news since Kevin set up on stage. There is a lot of good stuff within our tech stack today. We know it can be modernized. We know it can be cleaned up. And we'll lean into that into the future years. But the core and the base and the data has got so much integrity, we can leverage the heck out of it to actually target, communicate, and connect, and really bring the brand to life in unique and different ways. And as we said, when you start to think about millennials and Gen Z already having us in the consideration set, we give them even more reasons to believe on the quality and kind of our farm-to-fork aspects and the pizza craftsmanship that we have in the restaurant.
I mean, I was inspired about the fun and the energy that our teams have on crafting great pizzas day in and day out. It's really driving a lot of the work that you saw in the opening video and will drive some of our ad stuff that we're going to do into the future. That stuff matters to that next-generation consumer. And being on the platform where their eyeballs are and getting them engaged matters a ton. And I watch how my 27, 25, and 19-year-old interact, right, and what they're watching and where they're engaging. And you find a lot of great influencers. You find some cool stuff around collaboration opportunities. You can drive a lot of this business in a hurry. And we're going to step back and take a look at that with all the data that we have. But we can do it in parallel.
It's not like we got to sequentially build. We can work it with pace. And the team's doing just that, both in technology and in marketing.
And I think the proof point is actually Q4. We spent an incremental $4-$5 million to get after, putting dollars against our loyalty program, investing incremental media dollars around Halloween. And things we saw was like Halloween was one of our top days ever from a sales standpoint. We're seeing the highest organic views on our launch of loyalty. We're seeing meaningful in conversion rate improvement from the app refresh we did earlier in this year. And we believe that this loyalty change is going to drive conversion rate opportunities. So it shows the yield potential for this brand with targeted, thoughtful investments. And I think Q4 is a little bit of the test that we've been doing over the last six months that targeted investments will yield transaction gains for this brand.
All right. I have a question online that I'm going to throw in here real quick from one of our virtual viewers. They were asking how the Four-Wall EBITDA has trended over the past four years.
There you go. I'll turn that one over to you, Ravi. Take a look at your slide.
Yeah. So a couple of things I want to talk through. One, I'd probably refer everyone back to going back and looking at the corporate restaurant trajectory over the last couple of years. Specifically, on the corporate restaurant, and I referred to this on the Q3 earnings call, is that our corporate restaurant profitability on a four-wall basis was flat Q1 to Q3 this year as it was in the prior year. It peaked in 2021 as we were at the peak of the pandemic. But we've done a really nice job of holding the run rate in 2023 versus 2024. And obviously, there are dynamics that play out throughout the year. In the beginning half of this year, food cost was quite low as we had favorable commodities trends. We saw that elevate a little bit in Q3.
More broadly, though, what we would say is we go back and look at what happened in 2022 and 2023. We got to our comp gains to ticket while we lost some transactions. Where we see the meaningful opportunity go forward is variable profitability from transaction gains. And transaction gains in both carry-out and aggregator are very, very accretive to the model.
Great. Thank you. We have time for probably about two or three more questions. So Lauren's working hard.
Thank you. Jim Sanderson from Northc oast Research. I just wanted to go back to the discussion on international. I think you reported a meaningful step up in CapEx, though the dollar averages are the same. So can you walk through what you're intending to invest in and how you think that will stimulate or ramp up growth internationally based on that accelerated investment?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. And as I've spent time in the U.K. and looking at the tech stack and looking particularly at their loyalty program and their app performance, I see there is consumer friction to take out of both their app and web experience that will meaningfully improve their conversion rates. So we are taking in an approach in terms of looking in the U.K., looking for those clear opportunities to improve conversion and flow-through in that market. Secondly, we are data-rich and consumer data-rich in the U.S. I want to continue to make progress in the international markets that we have a richer understanding at product-level detail, better understanding of the sales composition in that business because I do believe that the richer we understand what's happening with the consumer and the product mix across the international markets will be key.
The third and important part is how consumers across the world want to engage in loyalty programs is very different. There is no single playbook on a global scale for loyalty. The Chinese consumer versus the Indian consumer versus the consumer in the U.K. had different expectations on what loyalty is, and we have a big opportunity to invest alongside with our franchisees in very thoughtful and surgical ways to accomplish that.
Yeah. Technology and data can drive the heck out of this business. So we're going to have to lean into some of that internationally. We'll lean into that here in the U.S. We talked about the tech fee going up. We may want to front-run some of this stuff. Ultimately, we'll get that back over time because we know that's a great way to unleash and unlock a lot of incremental transaction growth and then leverage the data to drive the frequency into the future. So we know that's a great growth avenue for us. And Ravi talked about leaning into some of these marketing investments. Those have actually driven and helped bend some trends on what we've been seeing on sequentially transaction gains as we talked about coming out of the third quarter. Those things are important.
We're going to have to figure out how we do that and do that in concert with the franchise community to make sure we got that balance right between the local and the national spend.
Hi, Lauren Silberman, Deutsche Bank. Two-part question, follow-up on the marketing side. So one, it sounds like you guys expect to shift back to some local marketing. When Papa John's made the decision to go all national at the beginning of the year, I think one of the reasons was because national was more efficient given the breadth of local co-ops. As you shift back to a balanced local approach, how do you improve the ROI of those local dollars? And then second, from an investment standpoint, do you expect franchise marketing contribution to go back to the 8%? And any thoughts on how you're thinking about corporate contribution beyond the $4 million this quarter?
Yeah. So a couple of things, right, as you think about the rebalance and the retrade. We're having ongoing discussions around what's the right mix between kind of the 6% national and local being optional, right? Remember, in the old days, it was 5% national and 2% or 3% depending on your franchise agreement on what they had to spend locally. There is absolutely efficiencies to drive national advertising. And we've unlocked a lot of those. We found some great partners. Our partners got some great tools. We're going to continue to make sure those dollars amplify really well on a national basis. But we are a super regional brand. And we need to have a balance around how you actually really talk about this brand on a national scale, but then go execute and bring it to life in unique and differentiated ways in the local.
So, we're going to have to find the rebalance. We're actively having discussions with the franchise community on how we retrade that. Don't know what that ultimate answer will be. And we can either do that on a national rebalance, or we can do that on that super regional rebalance because we know if we want to go co-invest in a lot of those core number one or two share markets, we can spend and drive a lot of incremental sales in those markets. So, we're working through those things. As we work through that thinking and we align with the system, we'll bring that forth as we start to provide some guidance in February on how that game's going to be played. That's why we're not prepared to provide any guidance today because we're in the early innings, right? We're working to retrade some of that.
We're getting smarter every day with these investments and these returns. So we'll be better positioned to give you some good guidance at the end of February when we get to get back together. But we just swung the pendulum too far, right? There's a big role for national, but pizza is inherently local business. And you got to go out there and fight as a unit and not have one franchisee with one message on one side of town, another on the other, and the rest of them in between just kind of drafting off of one another. And it doesn't give us a chance with a co-op not in place to go out and talk and partner to make sure the national message gets amplified with the local message. So it's an opportunity to go back and fix. And I think our franchise community understands that too.
Anything else, Ravi?
Maybe two data points I would add is as Todd showed that map of those top 15 markets, it represents 40% of our system-wide sales in the United States. We have 15% market share in that space. We feel like driving incremental transactions in some very key markets can unlock market share. It can unlock meaningful development opportunity and leans into our strength in terms of the markets we're winning in. And we think that there are other markets beyond the 15 that could fall into that bucket. But it's pretty incredible to think about those 15 markets represent 40% of our U.S. system-wide sales.
And to your last point, how much are we going to invest into next year to really drive this? Too early to tell, right? We still got to work through some of the retrade. We still got to understand where our marketing dollars are working the hardest. But as we work through the next couple of months, we'll come back. We probably have to lean in a little bit to spend a little bit more to really get ourselves in the consideration set even beyond what you've seen earlier today. And we're confident that it drives a return. We've seen that. Ravi talked about it. That $4 or $5 million we put to work in the fourth quarter has really helped us start to bend some trends.
And we're going to have to continue to make sure we get that appropriate pressure into the market as we work to invest and transform this brand for years to come.
I mean, Halloween was our highest day of sales ever.
Thank you for the question. Isaiah Austin, Bank of America. Just looking at the slides on pricing, just one thing that jumped out is in 2023, just franchisee pricing was way further than company operated. And then just with the percentage of sales that come from the base business, how does that influence your strategy for taking price and why you would take price just going forward? Thank you.
Yeah. So we are going to be really focused in making sure that we are driving meaningful transaction gains for the long term. So that's number one objective when we think about how do we make sure we're thinking about the business the right way. The second thing is we need to make sure our brand health scores stay in a relatively healthy spot. This is a long-duration business. So there are moments and times where commodities may move against us. I think we have to have the appropriate patience as a business that we're taking a long-duration view on our pricing, our value proposition, and make sure we're winning transactions. What is important is that we are providing more transparency, more clarity to our franchisee base on how to think about their business go forward. So we're bringing in more consumer data into the conversation.
We're talking about frequency with them and making sure that we're getting a little tighter and more aligned on our strategy, but fundamentally, this is a great category, and it's a great category for the franchisees to drive profits in, so if we stay transaction-oriented at healthy enough margins over the long term with great unit economics, we will win if our brand is healthy.
I think there's some opportunities. I mean, with the tools we have, there's opportunities for some strategic tactical pricing. I mean, those two words don't quite work together. But that's the way I look at it because you can actually put in some pricing and then selectively discount it back to actually better connect to who the consumer is to make sure they see value for the money because you got different channels. You got different businesses. Ravi laid it out. You got to think about your pricing architecture in the context of all your channels to really make sure you optimize that and still have a great value perception.
Yeah. And maybe an example of how we've made this really come to life is what's unique about our loyalty program. You get to decide what you redeem your Papa Dough on. We don't tell you you have to get cheesesteaks or a free pizza. That may not be what you're looking for in that moment. So we are able to communicate value in our loyalty program in a way that gives the consumer their ability to choose. And we think the consumer has the right to decide. And that is going to be very powerful in terms of how we're able to mix value, quality, and drive preference with the consumer.
All right.
Final question.
Thanks.
Alex Slagle from Jefferies. And thanks for everything. I had a question similar to Jim's earlier, but you have all this focus on driving frequency and the rewards program changes. And I mean, I guess operationally, the guest experience, getting that right, you want to bring people into those first few experiences are really good. I mean, what are the things that you can really create change in quickly? What's the priority there? And then maybe what do the incremental investments look like that you might need to step that up?
Yeah. So if you think about our business, I mean, we've had—you saw the transaction declines over the last few years. So we got a lot of capacity in our restaurants to drive a lot more transaction growth without putting an undue burden on our operator. I think a lot of what we need to do in the short term is just get back out. We haven't been out and touching a lot of our restaurants. We've been doing a lot of mystery shops lately to make sure we understand where we stand. We've got a restaurant assessment process that we're bolstering with a little bit of investment, but not a lot to make sure we can touch all our stores on a regular basis to get out there and truly coach, and we got work to go out and retrain folks.
I mean, we put spinners into the restaurant as an example very quick during COVID to survive and hadn't really even trained folks on how to utilize it to make the best pizzas. And we're circling back on all of that. Joe and the team have got a very solid plan to do that. But what we need to do, and this is the one, we're in the pizza business. And the oven is everything. And we got a lot of different ovens, a lot of different ages of ovens, a lot of different settings on our ovens. And what we really need to do is do some work here first to understand what is the optimal bake time, what is the optimal temp for each and every oven that we have in the system.
Is the gas pressure coming in appropriately along the way to bring that all to life? That is job one. Because if we can get that right, then we can actually make sure that we're making really good pizzas every time. Because if you got that not right, it's really hard to do, right, to overcome it. You see it. Every restaurant I've been in, they're tweaking the time or tweaking the temperature a little bit. It needs to become super consistent. Not a lot of incremental investment, but a little again. We're going to go out and survey all of our restaurants, get that right, partner with the franchise community. We're all in on that one, right? We know we need to make sure that we got the right oven settings to make the best pizzas in the business.
So working on that, a little bit of investments. But I would not say that when you start to think about our G&A and what we're investing in, we can reallocate a lot of the resources that we have to shift to the things that matter the most. Anything else on that? No? Well, great. Well, I know you guys stuck with us for a long time, those on the line, those in the room. Really appreciate your time. I'm glad we got together. I mean, it's been an incredible 100 days for me. It's been great working with this team. As you heard today, we know where our challenges are. We got a lot of opportunities ahead. We know where we need to go to invest, to fight, to win, to bend trends. And we're doing exactly that. This business won't completely turn overnight. We know that.
But we know we can continue to sequentially drive improvements in this business by leaning in on things that we talked about during the course of today. And when we get you all back together on our fourth quarter earnings call, after a few more discussions with our franchise community, a few more discussions with our board, we'll be able to put it all together with all the learnings that we've gotten in the back half of this year from the test and learn on how it comes together around our guidance on same-store sale growth, how it comes together on our development goals and what we need to do. And ultimately, how does that translate into profit and cash flow? So that is coming in short order. That's only a couple of months out. We got a lot of work to do on that front.
We'll continue to tell the story as we see some things happening in our business when we get together with many of you at ICR in January and another good touch base at the end of February. So thanks for your time. Those in the room, we get to go upstairs. I know the folks in the culinary and the kitchen are very excited. We get some pizzas from around the globe. Nothing better than talking together over breaking some bread and catching up. Unfortunately for all those in the livestream, maybe you just got to go down to your local Papa John's and order some pizza today. So thanks, everybody. Appreciate the time.