Good morning, everyone. I'm Brian Vaccaro, the restaurant analyst here at Raymond James, and we're excited to host this fireside chat with the team from Shake Shack. Today, we not only have CEO Rob Lynch, we also have several members of the team, including Chief Operating Officer Stephanie Sentell, Chief Development Officer Andrew McCaughan, and President of Global Licensing Michael Kark. Thanks for your time today and welcome. We've got a lot to dig into today. I'm going to start maybe with Rob. You know, Rob, I'll give you the mic back. Maybe we'll just share.
Do that one.
Okay. But your team's been pulling a lot of levers to improve operations, accelerate menu innovation, and leverage marketing in various ways. Just high level, could you touch on some of the key wins in 2024 and thinking about 2025? You know, we'll get to the guidance in a second, but just what are you most excited about into 2025?
Yeah, you know, 2024 was such an interesting year, right? So lots of headwinds, lots of things going on. And we came out of the gate a little slow in Q1, barely achieving positive comp sales. And throughout the year, we just continued to pick up momentum. Our operating team, led by Stephanie, did an amazing job in 2024 and heading into 2024. And we started generating some leverage in the P&L. And we decided in the middle of that year to start investing that overdelivery on the EBITDA line back into growing the top line. And we got really excited about some of the initial results we saw. You know, Q3, we did almost 5% comps with over 2% traffic growth, and we continued that into Q4. And, you know, mid-November, we were really excited about Q4. And then, you know, we hit some really tough weather in December.
I always talk about not making excuses. If we've got consumer issues or challenges or supply chain issues, we find ways to solve it. I don't think we can turn the temperature up in the Northeast. So, you know, it was a low-traffic period. We still were able to deliver positive comps and deliver positive traffic in Q4. But what I'm most excited about at 2024 is we really built the foundation on which we're going to continue to grow this business, both top and bottom line, moving forward. Our operations are executing best in class. We increased our margins while also improving our guest and team member experience. And we're really just starting to scratch the surface on the productivity that we're going to drive into the supply chain.
You know, all of that is providing us with the investment necessary to go forward and really be competitive in this traffic, you know, share game that we're playing right now in the industry. So we're really excited about the foundation that we've built. We're really excited about what we're seeing on the marketing side. The other thing I just, you know, really want to highlight about 2025 and 2024 heading into 2025 is the work that Andrew has done on our development side. You know, this year, we committed to delivering a 10% decrease in our build costs. So last year, our average build was about, or two years ago, our average build was about $2.4 million. And last year, we were a little over $2.2 million. This year, our average build cost got under $2 million.
And that is without decreasing the quality of the work and the experience that we're building our Shacks around. So that, coupled with higher margins, Stephanie's team's developing and growing comp sales is only going to improve our cash-on-cash return. So great work on operations, great work on development. And then this year, I think everyone knows, you know, internationally was obviously a tough environment. Michael's team grew our international business this year, pretty much on pace with what we saw from our revenue growth in North America. And we're super excited about the ability to leverage our partnerships globally, both in the markets we're already in, as well as new markets to continue to drive a really profitable and margin-accretive licensing business.
All right. Well, you touched on it there for a minute, but just maybe talk about marketing specifically and some of the new initiatives there. Where are you seeing the most traction across some of the tactics you're deploying and any way to frame the ROAS that you've seen on your increased spend?
Yeah, so, you know, we're a little bit unique in the sense that we capture our marketing investment on our G&A line. So when you look at our G&A, it holds our marketing investment. So because of that, because we don't have a franchisee marketing fund that we're compelled to spend, because it's coming out of our P&L, we hold ourselves to a very high standard to make sure that we are getting the returns that we need on our marketing investments to generate profitable top-line sales. And, you know, we're kind of, we're just in the initial stages of really delivering a holistic marketing model. Historically, we've done promotions, we've done performance marketing, we've done, you know, kind of discounting in the past. This is the first year where we ever bought mass media at scale. And the majority of that is digital channels.
We, you know, we don't have a national footprint. We have a large footprint and ever-growing footprint. But we are investing in digital media that can target Shake Shack potential guests within five miles of every Shack that we have across America. So you're not going to see us on national television because that's not our model. We're not going to get the returns we need from that given our footprint. So we're investing heavily in targeted digital media coupled with some really strategic promotions. This year, we launched our 1-3-5 promotion in our app. And, you know, that can sound like just discounting, but it's not. It is a very strategic intention within strategic intentionality of not cannibalizing our core business. Our app represents less than 10% of our revenue right now, and we want to grow that.
And so we are investing in driving traffic to our app with our highest margin products. So dollar drinks , $3 fries, those are both profit-accretive even when we sell them at those rates, and they bring in new guests. We had over 50% increase in application or app downloads this year. So we are growing that digital footprint, and that really helped us in December. Our sales in December, when I mentioned the weather, those really impacted our in-Shack sales. Our digital sales were still very healthy, indicative of the demand for our brand despite the weather that impacted our walk-up traffic. And we want to continue to grow that digital footprint. We already talked about next year potentially launching a loyalty platform.
Every new user that we bring into our app today through this strategic promotion will lead to a built-in loyalty member when we launch our loyalty platform.
All right, that's great. And on the menu innovation side, you've obviously been working to accelerate the premium innovation and building out that pipeline the last year plus, but you're also running these price point promotions that are tied to this app and sort of customer acquisition. How do you strike the right balance along that barbell approach? And how do you see that balance evolving as you move through 2025?
Yeah, you know, that's the question, right? The million-dollar question. I believe, and I speak for my team here, that we have the best food in the business, and we are not ubiquitous yet, right? There are a lot of people out there who have not tried Shake Shack, and so when we run our promotions and we are incentivizing people to come in, it's not just trading down someone who's already tried Shake Shack and just giving them the same thing they were going to buy already. This is about going out and getting our food into people's mouths because we believe once they try it, they will completely understand what all the buzz is about and why we charge a premium price, so that is, we do that with a lot of intentionality.
And we do that both on some of our core products, but primarily on our LTOs. We want to be the culinary leader in this industry. We talk about being this beacon of hope in the QSR world, right? Where we still make food. We don't assemble food. We cook food, right? And we use fresh ingredients, and we use the best ingredients. All natural, no hormones, no antibiotics. Everything we do, we aspire to do the best in the industry. And so when you have that model, you want to get it into as many people as possible. So yeah, there is some promotion that goes on, but that's the intentionality behind that. And then as you think about, you know, our media investments, you know, that's new for us.
We're learning how to really support our LTOs while supporting our base business with, you know, an amount of funding that has traditionally been less than our competitors have spent. And that's why we're not going out trying to outshout the big spenders in the industry. We're doing targeted media with beautiful culinary photography of the food that we offer. Like right now, our Korean menu, it's like the most beautiful menu you could ever imagine with the colors and the culinary-forward recipes. So we are investing in making sure that everybody sees that because we believe it helps us stand out in the industry.
All right, that's great. Well, maybe we'll turn to some of the other team members, maybe over to Stephanie. On the labor line, you've driven significant labor leverage while also delivering improvements in speed and other guest sat metrics. Could you just dig into the key changes you made there? What are some of the guardrails to ensure you haven't cut too much? And are there opportunities for additional efficiencies?
Sure. Let me begin, Brian, by just stating how incredibly proud I am of what our operators delivered in 2024. You guys all know we guided to expand restaurant-level margins by 50 basis points. Coming in, we're actually going to double that in 2024, and what I would tell you, though, that was never actually the objective. The objective was really to double down and run fundamentally better operations. I would point to two really specific areas of the business where we leaned in there. The first is really around a far more disciplined approach to labor deployment specifically. When I joined this great brand 18 months ago, our restaurants were essentially running about 50% labor attainment. So essentially, that means about half of our restaurants were meeting their labor goals on a consistent basis, and so we put a lot of effort against that in 2024.
And if you fast forward to the back half of 2024, we're consistently running above 90% labor attainment, which is a credit to the team and the work that they have done. The other place I would tell you that we leaned in very heavily is just in the way we staff our restaurants. We had an opportunity to get better staff to ensure that we could deploy that labor effectively. And while there are certainly P&L benefits to that and reducing overtime and things of that nature, the bigger benefits are really around what that drove from a guest metric perspective as well. We actually have seen our guest metrics improve each and every quarter as we move through 2024. So we feel really confident that the model that we have built is giving us the foundation to continue to grow as we move into 2025.
Brian, just to shout out Stephanie and her team. The other thing that's really important, all that amazing work, and sometimes you think when you optimize labor that it's going to have an impact where it may not improve team member satisfaction, but Stephanie's team member tenure is twice as long today as it was a year ago. So not only are we delivering, she's delivering all these great results, she's also doing it in a way that is inspiring and engaging her team members, which allows us to retain them, which allows them to be better trained and better qualified to execute our model in the restaurants, which is contributing to some of the speed of service improvements that we're seeing.
On the supply chain side, you know, obviously Shake Shack's quality and flavor profile is a key differentiating factor for the brand. There's been a few changes in the headlines, including, you know, changes to the buns, some process changes on Chick'n Bites , maybe also some changes in beef suppliers on that side. Could you address just or level set each of these changes and sort of what gives you confidence these changes haven't or won't impact the flavor profile?
Sure. I think I would start with a couple key attributes or key priorities for us as we look at making any decisions within our supply chain. And that is the first is that quality will remain at the forefront of every decision that we make. We are a brand that was founded in fine dining, and those attributes will remain a key priority for us. The other is really around consistency and ensuring that we can deliver products, whether you are eating in New York City or here in Orlando, that are consistent from Shack to Shack. So with those two guiding principles, I do think that we have line of sight to some meaningful productivity within our supply chain. And I would point to a couple of areas. The first that we're super focused on is really centered around not being single-sourced.
Just, you know, 6 to 12 months ago, we were single-sourced on a number of ingredients and key ingredients. And that obviously presents a business risk that we are working hard against to mitigate. And while doing so, we are bringing some new suppliers into the fold. That is also bringing competition into our supply chain, which is a really great thing for a business output and a benefit to our P&L. The other place that I would tell you that is really important for us as we continue to develop our supply chain, excuse me, is to continue to really focus in on those areas of opportunity for us as well. You know, as I think about our opportunities to really drive synergy across our supply chain, I think, you know, remaining consistent with our suppliers and bringing those things in will be important.
The other piece, as we bring in some of that competition, what that is essentially generating for us as we bring in both new suppliers as well as expanding existing suppliers is that we're able to get a bit more competitive on the freight side of our business as well, and so while sometimes competition can be a dirty word, I think it's a really positive thing for our business, and it also ensures that we're spending less time in transit with our supply, which essentially means that product will be fresher getting to our restaurants because it is spending less time there and then obviously having a benefit to our P&L as well.
Okay. And I guess quantitatively on the supply chain side, is there any way to ballpark the annualized savings looking in the rearview mirror in 2024 or what you expect to achieve in 2025 and maybe qualitatively some of the biggest opportunities that remain over the next couple of years?
Sure. It goes without saying that this last year, we obviously had unprecedented high levels of beef inflation. The team did an incredible job doing a lot of work to mitigate that. And as I mentioned, with the restaurant-level margin expansion that we've seen, some of that certainly came from labor productivity and some on the supply chain side as well. So as we move forward into 2025, we are continuing to guide additional restaurant-level margin expansion, another 50 basis points, with a lot of that really coming from the supply chain in 2025.
Okay. Maybe just one more on kitchen equipment. The company's been testing new fry holders, grills, shake machines, among other equipment. What have you learned and maybe talk about some of the benefits to quality and consistency or any speed and cost efficiencies that they could yield?
Absolutely. This is probably the part that I geek out the most, love the most, and as Rob said, you know, we're a brand that cooks our food. We cook to orders. None of that is going to change, and so operationally, we need to think about the model a little bit different. We have to find process and equipment enhancements that can help us drive throughput and drive speed while also maintaining or improving quality, and so in the back half of 2024, we started rolling out some new fry equipment. Essentially, it allows us to hold our fries much hotter, almost 20 degrees hotter, and we're also working on a number of other pieces of equipment. Essentially, we need to remove a lot of bottlenecks because we do cook to order, so we have to find ways to get faster, so we're looking at things like oven technology.
We can cook bacon in six minutes so that we don't reduce the capacity of our grills while we're cooking burgers. We're looking at all sorts of other types of equipment as well that can not only improve our operation, but also open the aperture from a culinary perspective. You think about having ovens in the restaurant. There's a lot of other items that we could produce with that same equipment and maximize our capital that way as well. So super excited about what the team is doing. We'll continue to really test and validate that model as we move forward. And we could potentially expect to see some additional innovation coming in the back half of 2025.
All right, great. And I guess last one on that topic, Rob, you had highlighted optimizing build costs over the last couple of years. To what degree, and this is sort of an open-ended question, but just to what degree could a new equipment package eventually result in design changes that drive that number, you know, further optimize that number for you? And what does that do to TAM, etc ?
Yeah, I mean, that's already happening. One of the things I'm most excited about, and I'm sorry, I'm not trying to steal your thunder here, Andrew, but you know, Andrew and his team in collaboration with Stephanie have optimized our back-of-house kitchen design. You know, Shake Shack's model is different than the QSR model. There have been multiple iterations of trying to get what's the right model. This team, over the last 12 months, has done extensive testing on a ton of equipment and a ton of process and procedures. And we feel like we've got the kitchen model of the future. And that's going to start rolling out and showing up in the back half of 2025. So that's going to help us get better really in every way. The other thing that Andrew and his team have done is not just the back-of-house, but the format in general.
We have a smaller footprint format that we are really excited about both domestically and internationally. That's going to allow both company and our licensed partners to go into real estate we weren't able to go into before and generate the returns from a smaller AUV of a smaller footprint, right? So we're growing our AUVs with our drive-throughs. We're delivering consistent AUVs with our core. And smaller footprints are going to allow us to go in. And you know, it's not substantively lower AUVs, but you know, $3.5 million versus $4 million average, whereas the drive-throughs are $4.5 million versus $4 million average. That all allows us to keep our AUV constant while optimizing our footprint, maximizing our footprint, and going into markets we couldn't go into before.
We'll touch base with Andrew in just one second. But before we do that, maybe just a quick one on the 2025 guidance that the company just disclosed this morning reflects the store margin expansion. Could you just level set us to the degree you're willing or able? What does it reflect in terms of the company's commodity inflation outlook for 2025? And then also, could you ballpark us on what level of marketing spend in 2025 compared to 2024?
Great. So we're forecasting continued elevated levels of pricing on beef, not significant inflation in 2024 or 2025, but continued elevated levels. And we are forecasting some deflation on some of our other input costs. So that, along with the productivity that Stephanie's supply chain and operations teams are driving, allows us to feel really confident about our ability to continue to deliver that 50 basis points of improvement. As Stephanie mentioned, you know, we delivered over 100 basis points this year. So feel really confident despite that inflation that we can continue to improve margin without having negative impacts. In terms of our marketing spend, I want to make this like super point, this point really, really clear because I know G&A is a very big focal point for a lot of our investors. We have gained G&A leverage the past two years on the S&B line.
So we have been incredible. This team, despite the challenges, despite the reorg on some of these stuff, despite building out these capabilities, we have gotten more efficient on our G&A from a headcount perspective of both in 2024 and 2024. So the idea that our G&A is going up and that being a reflection on our productivity or our stewardship mindset just isn't the case. The increase in G&A is 100% an increase in an underinvested marketing capability. So, you know, we were under 2% when I got here. We're just over 2% now. We're going to float in that 2%-3% range. That's where we need to be. That's where we're going to be. And once we get all of this model built and all of this work done and we're seeing the returns that we want, that's where we're going to continue to stay.
And as we grow sales and grow revenue, we are going to get leverage on that G&A line. So I want to. That's a very different situation than a lot of our franchise competitors and even our larger company-owned competitors are in, where we're having to make this investment and it's reflecting in our G&A. I just want to make sure that that comes across really clear. We are going to get leverage in G&A as we get to a point where we have the right model in place.
Just to clarify on that, so floating in the two to three range, and that's about where you were kind of midpoint of that range in 2024, if I'm not mistaken.
Okay. Understood. All right, Andrew, with the two minutes we have left, and we may make this an hour-long fireside if that's okay with everyone. But Andrew, on the development side, maybe just to piggyback on a little bit what Rob was saying, maybe just elaborate on the new unit performance, also how you optimize the build costs and how you see that progressing wherever else you'd like to take it on the development side.
Sure. Thanks for having us. This is great to be here. Really, really pleased with the performance of our new units over the past few years from a sales standpoint. I think from a real estate strategy, we are continuing to penetrate some great markets throughout the country, open up a couple of new markets. We just opened in Buffalo, upstate New York, Oklahoma City. We had an amazing opening just in Q4, and we're just excited about the pathway forward to 1,500 across the board.
On the build cost side, I mean, credit to our team, our design and construction teams have just dug in, I think, utilizing our scale to find better strategies around procurement, partnering with our operations team on our back-of-house design, really leaning in on the front of house and just making sure we can still deliver that great Shake Shack vibe and experience, but just getting smart on the efficiency. So as Rob mentioned, the class of 2024 will come in just under $2 million, which is a significant decrease from 2024. And we've got a really good pathway moving forward for our 55- 60 units here in 2025.
Maybe you could just touch on drive-throughs specifically, something that's been optimized in recent years, I think. How do you see the number of drive-throughs as you think about the pipeline in 2025, 2027, et c?
Absolutely. We delivered our first true drive-through prototype this past year, which was part of the build cost decrease, and we've been working to optimize it, working with Stephanie's team, working across the board to make sure that we're investing in the right sites. And as Rob mentioned, we are seeing really nice accretive sales from our drive-through, so you'll see an upswing in the drive-through format as we head into 2027 and 2028 in terms of the total portfolio and percentage of our new classes. Just real quick, we also opened our flagship bar in The Battery. Just looking at sort of the full suite, as Rob mentioned, we've got tremendous formats that can really just find their way into various communities and trade areas across the country, and so we're excited about all the development across all the formats as well.
Great. Unfortunately, we ran out of time. We do not have time for an international question, but a sizable business, $800 million in sales, $60 million in revenue. It's worth.
Trust me, Michael's doing a hell of a job.
Yep, yep. Next year.
Next year.
Next year. All right. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it.