Great. So welcome, everybody, to our conference and to our fireside chat with Shake Shack today. My pleasure to have Shake Shack's CFO, Katie Fogertey, with us today. The growth story of Shake Shack continues to evolve, and there are a lot of things to be excited about. A strong start to the year, plenty of news in the back half of the year, and also into 2026. So, looking forward to our conversation in the next 35 minutes. So welcome, Katie. Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me here. Nice to see everybody.
Great. So why don't we start with kind of a quick recap of what has happened so far this year and into quarter to date? So particularly interested in what drove the acceleration in July, including the inflection into the positive traffic growth that you've seen in the month. So any insights there?
Sure. I would say the story of the year, really, as we're rounding out into the third quarter here, it's gone by quite fast. We had a lot of momentum coming out of 2024, and we did a lot on improving operations and kind of building up the very basic muscles around marketing, and then really coming out of the election, or sorry, inauguration, and into January and February, the industry broadly had weather problems. There were some shifts in the way that populations were on mobility patterns, and the industry broadly just came under more pressure, and we certainly were subject to that as well. We outlined to everybody our plan for how we were going to drive sales this year, and it's quite simple, actually. One, a culinary roadmap, and this is something that Rob Lynch, our CEO, has been very passionate about.
He saw this as a core opportunity when he came in about a year and a half ago. And he looked at the way that we had been rolling out culinary innovation across the company and saw a great opportunity to get much more structured about it, to get much more planful, thoughtful, and also test these LTOs and culinary innovation with our guests first. So we had a better idea of how they would impact our comps. And the great news is he's hired up a team that's very strong, and we quickly put into place an 18-month forward culinary calendar, and you're just starting to see the impact of that today. And that goes to our July comment, too.
We had run prior year without having that kind of muscle in place, and that structure. It was often kind of a rush to figure out what was going to be on the menu next. That was the reason why we ran Black Truffle for seven months. Great LTO, don't get me wrong. Everybody loves it. But we didn't really have any food news or newness to the menu. And that really could be seen in our comp trajectory in the first part of the year. So really what you saw in July was the momentum around our Summer Barbecue menu. We had a new shake, Dubai Shake, launched everywhere. And we started to test a little bit more around different ways to drive sales. We talked about this on earnings, really coming out at the very, very end of July and into August. We were investing more in media.
And that's the next leg of our growth here. So number one, well, even taking a step back, number one is solidifying our operations. And we've done a ton of work on improving our operations, getting tighter on scheduling, making sure that we have the great guest experience, that our order accuracy is up, that our wait times are down, that we're really humming on that side. Then taking that to the culinary side, make sure we have exciting things to serve our guests. And now it's about amplifying that through marketing and new media, which we started in August and are continuing into September.
Great. We'll delve more into all of those things. But for kind of last quarter, you did point to some pressures in some of the urban cities like LA, New York, and DC. Have these markets improved in July, similar to the general fleet that you've seen?
We are definitely seeing a much bigger pickup and shared gain and momentum in markets outside of New York and DC. And we outlined in our shareholder letter, there were a number of markets where we had at least high single-digit comps. And these are major markets. It's Denver, Colorado, Los Angeles. We have Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, just very, very broad-based. As many know, we have a larger concentration in New York and DC relative to the industry average. And there's really been some unique pressures in New York and DC, in particular around international tourism is down in these markets. Macro pressures in DC have also been kind of weighing on broader demand.
We kind of look at the health of the brand, the health of the company, our future opportunity ahead, which, by the way, 99% plus of our pipeline is in markets outside of New York and DC. We see just such great momentum happening and success from all of the strategies that we have to drive the business. Cycles turn, markets turn. We believe that we're also well-positioned to win when the macro turns in our favor in those two markets.
Great. So let's just delve into first the three priorities that Rob announced when he came in as CEO, was driving healthy same-store sales growth, building more shacks, and also improving profitability. So let's kind of delve into all of those components. Let's start by discussing some of your recent menu innovations. Fried Pickles is quite exciting, Summer Barbecue, Dubai Shake. How did these LTOs perform and impact traffic and check growth?
So a great LTO has a big halo around it, right? And they can be traffic drivers. Certainly, you want that to bring in both new guests and also encourage guests who haven't visited in a while to come back. They also can be mix drivers. And in the case of Dubai and in Summer Barbecue and in Fried Pickles, you kind of saw a mix of all of that. And that's really what we are getting at when we are testing these things with consumers ahead of time. We get to really see, does this particular product have the opportunity to be a mix driver? How much traffic will we expect to get from this particular item? How do we want to cadence this?
If we know that this particular item is going to drive a lot of traffic, how can we put that on the calendar in a way that we will lap something that already drove a lot of traffic so that we're smoothing out the comp on that side? Really, when I look at the culinary innovation that's coming, we have a new LTO that's coming next week. All of those things together just really give a great comp backdrop.
Great. You mentioned Dubai Shake is helping to attract some new guests into the brand. So what are some of the major differences in the demographics or spending patterns of those guests? How are you converting them to more regular guests? Yes.
Yeah. I mean, Dubai was a very exciting shake. This was a menu innovation. We actually have had several of these where it was born in the international markets, and we were able to port it over to the U.S. and have great success. Even our chicken sandwich was something that we had developed in our international markets and were able to bring it here, and it is such a great hero on the menu today, and with the shake, we're seeing guest acquisition, more digital app acquisition as well on the back of it, and it does tend to skew a little bit younger in demographics, and in particular, when we're able to drive our guests into our app, highest long-term lifetime value of a customer, that's a great way for us to continue to connect with that guest over time. That's what we're really trying to build here.
Yeah. These LTOs were coupled with some really compelling promotions, too. You had the Burger Month, you had the Father's Day promotion. And on the other hand, there were some concerns around margins and intensified promotions. So could you speak to that a little bit?
Sure. I mean, this is where having a good comp plan comes into play and why it's so important and strategic to running a business. But we strike a balance between our own promotions, menu innovation, and others. Now we have media as another arrow in our quiver to be able to drive the business. And on the topic of promotions, we've run a number of very successful promotions this year. Some of them have really upped brand awareness, have brought in brand new guests. One of the ones that I'm actually most excited about is our Dollar Drink promotion that we're running through our app and the massive app downloads that we're getting on the back of it. But all of that together is really to drive the business, bring in new guests, and then continue to connect with them and give them more reasons to come back.
The way that we have been structuring these promotions, though, has been margin accretive. And that's why you'll often see you can get this item with a particular level of spend, or when you do this challenge, when you come two times in a month, you'll get something as a bonus for the third time for coming back. And these are a small part of our checks. It's still kind of in the mid-single-digit % of our checks overall. And the industry tends to promote at a much bigger scale than that. But we're really happy with what we're seeing, and we're balancing it out with product innovation and media. And just even in July, we didn't have a promotion. That was just culinary driving that angle.
You'll see us flex in and out as we need to, balancing culinary innovation, media plans, and promotions, all to drive both top line and bottom line.
Without giving out too much, how does your new culinary calendar look like for the remainder of the year and heading into next year?
Delicious. Delicious. No, I'm really, really, really excited about all the things that are coming to the menu. Like I said, on the 9th, we will be launching our new LTO. And then you're going to see some side innovation around that. I don't know if anybody saw the post that we put out when Taylor Swift got engaged, but we do have some very exciting side innovation coming that we were able to tag on that very fun moment. And then we'll have additional menu items coming later this year and in test in various markets.
With all of this exciting innovation, can you talk about kind of the implications on advertising and marketing? You did mention exploring paid media. Could you walk us through kind of your approach here? And what are some of the key outcomes that you would need to see to scale the initiative in a more meaningful way?
Sure. So there are basics just to level set, we're not going to be talking about business intra-quarter. There's no change to our guidance, and we have complete confidence in our ability to achieve the guidance for the quarter that we gave on earnings. But to remind everybody, when we gave the guidance for the third quarter, we embedded a pickup in our G&A expense. And the level that we've guided to split over the third and fourth quarter evenly does reflect, especially in the third quarter, an increase in advertising expense, specifically around media. We are running a couple of campaigns right now. We're running one around promoting an LTO menu item, Dubai Shake. The second one was around our Dollar Drink platform. And we're really excited by what we're seeing on that front.
Both of those are two completely different verticals of how we're communicating and what that message is. But we are seeing that when we increase spend in that, we are driving the desired outcomes.
Great. So mindful of the fact that you guys are in early stages, you did launch kind of the early version of the loyalty program in early June. How does this inform your plans going forward? So long term, would this be an integral part of kind of the building customer loyalty as well as frequency?
Yes. So taking a step back just for everybody, if anybody's newer to the story, so Shake Shack does not have a capital L loyalty program like many of us think of when we think of stars and points and all of that. We developed an app in 2018. And as we have done more to build our connectivity with our guest base, we're rolling out guest recognition this year. We're going to have the ability to connect the piping between the kiosk, which we have in nearly all of our Shacks, and this is our largest and most profitable sales channel with our app. And we are also actively driving a lot of app downloads and really, really driving that channel because we view this as a strategic area of growth for us over the long term.
This year, we also started to roll out some added incentives for people to use the app. So one of them that you just kind of mentioned was this multi-visit challenge. And you might notice this in your app right now. I actually just won my challenge, so I'm very excited about it. But if you come three times in a month, you get a free burger. And that's my challenge. You guys might have a different one. We try to tailor them to the individual person to drive the desired outcome. But this is our approach of getting more and more targeted to help drive frequency. Frequency probably is one of our greatest opportunities out there. We don't necessarily have a brand awareness problem. A lot of people know about Shake Shack. A lot of people are very excited about Shake Shack.
I mean, just look at the way that we open up in new markets and new restaurants. There's lines out the door, and we have very strong AUVs. But where we see our greatest opportunity is in incentivizing people to use our app and to come back more often. And that is one way that we're doing it.
Great. So combos, you rolled it out in all of your 46 drive-throughs. What are kind of your early observations here just in terms of speed of service, average ticket, or beverage attachments? And what are some of the things that you need to see to potentially roll it out in other channels as well?
Yeah. So we have combos live in our 46 drive-throughs, which is really exciting. And we've been testing various iterations of combos over a couple of years now. And where we've landed on is a platform where it's very simple when you come up to the drive-through. We have digital menu boards at the drive-through. And we have, I think there's probably like six or eight options that make it very clear for a guest to come through and quickly order. And that's really one of our main objectives is to allow our guests to get through the drive-through as quickly as possible. What we're seeing on the side is we're definitely our objective of selling more beverages is being achieved. We're very happy there. We are having a higher order accuracy, in particular because we're not bogging down the kitchen with a lot of customizations on that front.
The team is just continuously getting better and evolving and iterating on this platform.
Great. So rolling all of this together, how should we think about price, mix, traffic as we think about this year?
This year. So we are very confident, again, in the guidance that we've provided for low single-digit comps. That pricing algorithm is called approximately 2% price in time periods where, as we're in right now, beef inflation is high. There are added pressures, cost pressures on the business. We might look to take a little bit more than that, but definitely not still being mindful to drive efficiencies through our supply chain in other ways. And then the remainder is traffic, obviously, and then mix through culinary.
Okay. Great. Let's move on to opening more shacks, right? So walk us through kind of your unit growth expectations in the second half of the year and into 2026. What is driving this acceleration that kind of provides that confidence in sustaining that strong momentum on the unit growth side?
Yeah. So I don't want to put words in Rob's mouth, but I have been working very closely with him over the past year and a half. One of the things that he's most excited about at Shake Shack when he came in here and still remains very excited to this day is this huge white space opportunity that we have. He very quickly realized we needed to make some big investments, not big investments, I shouldn't say big, some smart strategic investments in our development team to add more resources so that we could identify more sites, so that we could sign more leases, so that we could work on more projects. We have been, and he was very quick to do this right out of the gate. We have built a very solid pipeline.
We're already planned out through this year, through next year, and we're already signing 2027 deals, and really, without that foresight, we would not be in a position to accelerate our development here, and then when you take on, so part of it's about just getting more sites and making sure that they're the right ones. We've done a lot of investment over the past couple of years in data and analytics in order to really have a robust sales forecast and plan the development side, then when you think about what we've done on our unit economics as well from lowering the build costs, we're well on our way for another year of 10% reduction in our build costs this year. Our restaurant margin expansion story is incredibly strong.
Then you put on top of it what we are doing to drive sales in the business through media, culinary, and operations. It's a very powerful combination. It's a powder keg, basically. Really, the only limiting factor to our growth is our ability to train up enough leaders to run the next shacks.
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the new store productivity. How are your 2024, 2025 cohorts doing?
They're great. We're really pleased with the performance across the board for our recent shack openings. We have had some incredibly strong opens in new markets recently as well. I would say it's a pretty good mix across the board.
Any regional callouts?
It's really funny because also, if Rob was up here, he would also say that. When he started, his first day, he opened up a shack in Pittsburgh, first shack in Pittsburgh, and that's his hometown. He was very proud, had everybody out there. The sales on that shack are just absolutely astronomical. We've opened up in Rochester. We've opened up in Albany. Really, we've also called out there have been some drive-throughs that we've opened up in Arizona and California. These are the record sales openings that we've ever had as a company.
So when we think about also the health of the brand and the total addressable market, the fact that we are even today opening up Shacks that are not necessarily in Times Square, in Herald Square, in Theater District, and they are the largest Shack openings on record in the middle of suburban drive-throughs, it's just a very interesting dynamic that's going on.
So is it fair to assume that there's no real change in the sales transfer as you densify some of your existing market?
That pattern has been very consistent. Where we tend to see the most amount of sales transfer is on the delivery side just because if you have a shack here and a shack here, you might be pulling drive traffic from. These people tend to go this way, and these people tend to go this way, and never the two shall pass. But a delivery rate does not change. And so that is really where we've seen the biggest amount of impact. We've incorporated that in our planning process. And it's actually one of the core things that we go into when we have site development discussions. However, we know one of our greatest opportunities is to get denser in markets. And so you're going to see us continue to take priority markets and really attack that opportunity.
When we have a single Shack in a market, it's really hard to build leadership bench, right? Because there's no next step. It's really hard to get supply chain savings because you are just going to that one particular Shack. You can't transfer people around, and there's just not that flexibility versus in New York, it's so easy, right? If somebody runs out of something here, you can go over here and get it from here. This assistant general manager is a really, really strong performer, and we have a new opening, and we can just put them there. So that's really what we're going to continue to do, just get denser in markets. We're going to use formats as another opportunity for us to really open up the aperture and deliver more and more traffic growth.
And I know that we often think about comps, and that's a very important measure of success for sure. But in a brand like ours where we're growing so fast, we're growing sales by a mid-teens % every year. That's a lot of traffic growth overall.
Yeah. That's a good segue to my next question. So thinking more broadly about getting to that 1,500 TAM, right? You have some new store formats. Obviously, drive-through is growing faster. You have some of the smaller formats. You have the new full bar at the Atlanta business. So what are some of the incremental investments do you think is necessary to drive kind of a sustainable double-digit unit growth going forward towards that 1,500 TAM?
Yeah. I would say it always starts with people, and so we've recently welcomed a new Chief People Officer, Jamie Griffin, who has just really great experience. He grew up in the field, and he really understands what it takes to build a strong restaurant leadership culture, and he has been partnering hip to hip with our COO, Stephanie Sentell, and they are working on a lot of process improvement for us to really get solid and crisp and clear on building up more leaders, and that is our top priority for sure, is supporting our people, and then as we grow and expand, we'll continue to add more dealmakers, more construction resources on that side, but just making sure that we have a really strong bench of next up is critical.
Great. So let's talk about margins.
Lovely.
Yeah. So second half, what are some of the major pain points here? I know the continued beef inflation, broad-based pressure for everyone. You have some uncertainties around tariffs. What are some of the ways that you're offsetting the cost of sales pressure without having to take more price action?
Sure. I mean, the number one way that we have been and will continue to is through improving our operations. We have made significant strides, and still, I think if our team was up here, they are constantly seeing additional opportunities, both in how we're opening up new restaurants to how we're running our current ones, ways that we want to invest in some areas to drive more leverage, ways that we can be more efficient in other areas, so you're going to continue to see us really focusing on optimizing our operations, and I think it's also important to note that where we were coming from was just a much lower base where we didn't have a scorecard. We didn't have a way of holding managers accountable. We didn't have defined metrics.
So unwrapping this tool onto the organization has been a very big unlock, and we're just starting to see what can come from it. And then the knock-on impact too is just the benefit that we're seeing to the guest experience. So that at the end of the day, if you're not protecting the guest experience, if you're not building a better guest experience, you don't have a long-term frequency opportunity. So we are continuing to really protect that and invest there.
Great, so you touched a little bit on the labor side, the leverage that you had. But can you walk us through some of the major components of what drove that leverage and what's left on the table?
Yeah. So last year, Stephanie Sentell came in as our Chief Operating Officer. This is the first time that we ever had somebody run operations who had chain experience. Okay? We really had an operations team that was grown up through fine dining, and there was something that obviously built a really, really great organization. But it was really powerful to have somebody who had more of a systematic approach to operations, an ability to break down the components, the numbers, and put in place metrics that our managers could be measured against and then we can train against. And so she's been very thoughtful in how she's rolled this out across the organization. It really went live in the first quarter. However, with the sales disruptions, we did a good job, but we didn't have a steady glide path on that side.
Really, it was into the second quarter that you got to see the full power of this. We had the highest labor attainment on record last quarter. What does that mean? That means that the most amount of managers met their budgeted hours, scheduled the hours that they should have scheduled that quarter. This is accountability to the nth degree. We don't have to chase down people about their schedules anymore. They're on top of it. They view it as part and parcel to running a good restaurant, how you're running your shift. I do give a lot of credit to that. Then on top of it, it is also implementing the new labor model that really made sure that we had the right number of hours assigned to each Shack. Prior state, it was a sales dollar-based forecast.
It was, honestly, hadn't been touched since before COVID. And we had a delivery business, and we had multiple channels, and then we had menu innovation had changed. And so we were really left with running a company, running restaurants in a way with a formula just didn't quite fit. So we went to the drawing board. We defined something that met the format of each Shack. We gave more labor to those that have dining rooms. If it's a digital order, you don't need somebody taking that order. And we also put kiosks in a bunch of our Shacks. So we were able to refine on that side.
And as food court, where you don't have a dining room and you're doing a lot of very low labor lift items, like a lot of cold beverage, a lot of fries, you just don't need the amount of labor in those shacks. And in fact, we had a lot of shacks that were just over-scheduled on hours, and it was slowing them down. A crowded kitchen can actually really have a negative impact on the guest experience and on wait times. So that being said, we are at a really good point. We will continue to get better. You'll see us start to look at equipment optimization. This is a lot of what we're doing in Atlanta as additional ways that we can get better on that side.
But I have to give the team just so much credit for how far they've taken us with really just a great process and a great model.
Like you read my mind. I was going to ask about kind of these new kitchen prototypes as well as the equipment. Would these play a bigger role in the next three to five years in driving?
Definitely. We just opened up our first kitchen testing facility in Atlanta. So what that means is that prior to this warehouse, it really is a warehouse. We're trying to make it a little nicer than a warehouse right now, but it really is a warehouse. The only way that we would be able to test new equipment is to build a shack and put it in there, and then people would say, "Oh, it kind of worked," or, "It kind of didn't work." We had no way of lining off an area and moving around and trying to figure out how we could reduce the number of steps that our team members took each day. We just would build it and see if it worked. Okay? And that works when you have a couple of restaurants.
But at the scale we're at today and the scale we're going to be at going forward, we really needed better processes in place. And so we've hired some equipment engineers. We've hired some great people on operations as well as development and equipment to really help optimize all of this. The thing about kitchen layouts is that those are things that you will see the benefit of in two-to-three years, right? They just have a longer lead time. But I'm really confident in what they can do to reduce costs across the board. A better kitchen layout reduces the build cost for sure, but it also improves your margins in the restaurants because you use less labor because you're able to have a higher throughput.
Then the last thing that I want to talk about that we have been testing is just new equipment and optimizing our equipment and really asking the question, "Is there a better way of doing this?" That is the work that the team is in right now. That facility in Atlanta is a key enabler of that.
Great. You've previously mentioned that traffic is probably not a major driver behind that 50 basis points restaurant-level margin that you're expecting in the next few years. Could you kind of help us unpack some of the cost or efficiency initiatives, particularly in the supply chain as well as kind of at the restaurant level?
Sure. So what we've guided to is over the next three years, about 50 basis points of restaurant margin expansion. Obviously, we've been very well exceeding that target. But where we see a lot of that coming from going forward is actually in the supply chain. And our supply chain, we've been doing a lot of work on identifying opportunities for us to scale smarter, to really get the benefits of our scale, and to improve the number of suppliers that we have. We want to have more suppliers. We don't want to be single-sourced on items. And we want to just have frank negotiating with our suppliers and vendors to make sure that we're getting the fair price. And there's a lot of opportunity for us on that side.
We're using some of that to help offset the beef issues that we're seeing now and probably will see for the foreseeable future. But beyond that, there is a great opportunity for us to improve our total cost to serve and deliver on those margin expansion goals. And then the other thing is that you kind of did allude to it, but flow-through on incremental traffic from media is something that is not contemplated in that number.
Great. You've already had about a handful of hires, I think, this year already.
We're growing.
Growing. What are some of the notable observations or takeaways as they kind of ramp up in their roles?
So, a lot of things to tell. We're a really fun team, and we love to sit around and collaborate and talk about the business. And they're bringing outside perspective into the company. And it's just so great to have a fresh set of eyes on things. We often are attacking problems and opportunities that have been solved before, not always the same way, right? But having that perspective, the outside looking-in view of, "Oh, when I did this here, this is what we did. This is what worked, what didn't work," is one of the ways that we are really accelerating at a pace of innovation here. So, I am so pleased with the team that we have in place today. It's a really exciting place to be.
Amazing. That's a great way to end the session today. Thank you so much, Katie, for your insight.
Thank you for having me. Thank you, everyone, for joining.
Thank you.