Terrific. Good morning. I'm Dennis Geiger, Restaurants Analyst at UBS, and I'm pleased to be joined on stage by Rob Lynch, Shake Shack's CEO. Also, in attendance, Alison Sternberg, who runs investor relations. Shake Shack is a modern-day roadside burger stand with over 400 domestic locations and over 230 international locations. Shake Shack maintains one of the industry's largest growth opportunities behind a robust global unit development opportunity, a focus on digital and menu innovation, and a margin expansion story, even in an elevated cost environment. With that, Rob, thanks so much for being here. We appreciate it.
Thank you, Dennis. I'm super happy to be here.
Great. Terrific. Let's start. Shake Shack had another really strong year in 2025, off to a very strong start again in 2026. Strength across both the top line and the bottom line. Could you kinda first talk about the top line momentum in the U.S. that you've been seeing and how you're thinking about maintaining that top line momentum going forward?
Yeah, for sure. It's been really exciting to see the business's resilience, given the type of weather we've had the last three months. I keep saying I wanna stop using the W word, but it just keeps coming back and coming back, especially with our footprint as it sits today. You know, I might surprise you by saying the most foundational thing driving our top line performance is our operations. We have spent an inordinate amount of time building an operations capability that, you know, it shows up a lot on the margin, the bottom line. What people may not necessarily always take account of is operations are the foundation of sales growth.
If you send your guests to the restaurant and you have a throughput issue, obviously that's costing you sales at that moment, but it's actually costing you more in lifetime value of that guest because the time that it's gonna take them, the experience they're gonna have is gonna decrease their frequency. We've seen that a lot on our business in the past, where we open new restaurants, we have this huge clamoring, whether it's in New York or now in our new markets. Huge number of people show up, and they have an experience that they love the food, but it took them 30 minutes, especially when we started opening drive-throughs. The biggest unlock for our sales growth has been our operational improvement.
You know, there's the process improvement, but there's also a lot of other things that we're doing that are gonna continue to be a solid, sustainable growth engine for us. You know, I talk about some of the right now we're developing new packaging. You know, this brand went through a really tough time in the pandemic. Everybody did in the short term. For this brand, which was dine-in only back then, they had to make a lot of tough decisions just to survive. I give them all credit. I think there's some talk of us taking some quality out because, you know, we've improved our supply chain or taking labor out.
Well, a lot of that, a lot of things were done during the pandemic for this brand to take some cost out because the margins got impacted in such a bad way. We're actually looking at everything across our supply chain and our operations to deliver the absolute best quality we can possibly deliver. We're actually adding cost in a lot of regards, packaging being one of them, ingredients being one of them. Another, you know, time. We're so focused on decreasing our speed of service, yet we increased our cook time on our fries, you know, 15 seconds just to make sure that they're crispy and golden brown because fries used to represent 30% of our guest complaints, and today they're less than 10%.
I tell you all that and because it really is the foundation and the sustainable part of baseline volume sales growth. You have bad operations, you can't grow. You know, I can tell you probably what the question was more focused on, like the marketing and stuff, and I'll talk about that. You can only invest in marketing when you have confidence that those investments are gonna deliver returns. It's not just about driving foot traffic that day when you turn on an ad or you send out a promotion. It's about the lifetime value of that guest. We're comfortable in our operations, we are delivering great margins. Now is the time where we can make those investments with confidence, and we are making those investments. We're making them across a lot of different platforms.
You know, paid media, first time ever we've done top-of-funnel media. Really, all the marketing that has been done at Shake Shack in the past has been very low-funnel conversion type of marketing that is really just about search and getting people with an offer to come in and trigger it that day. Like, we're actually investing in creating the positioning of the brand in the marketplace because we believe that we are an N of one. Like, we believe you know, I used to talk to my friend who ran Chipotle for a long time, and he'd say, "Rob, you know, we're an N of one. We don't compete with anybody." I may not have that point of view, but we really believe that we have the best food in the world, and we are a different experience.
When you go to a Shake Shack, you feel different than when you go to traditional QSR. We believe that if we bring people in, we take care of them, they're gonna come back, and it's gonna create lifetime value. That, that's all about the top-funnel media. The biggest thing that is driving our traffic right now is our one-three-five promotion in our app. People are like, "Well, you know, is it the right guest? Are you just buying the traffic?" Like, it's absolutely the right guest. Our app adopters are our highest lifetime value adopters. They have the highest frequency, they have the highest check average. We are leveraging our highest margin items. When we promote drinks at $1, fries at $3, we're still making money on that.
It may be a little bit margin dilutive, but it's profit accretive. We're making penny profit while bringing in people into our most valuable ordering channel. I'll tell you, I've been in marketing for a long time. Can't believe how effective it's been. Our traffic on our app since we launched is up over 50%. You know, the guests that are coming in, this is what refutes the idea of like these are just value users, you know, that you're buying. Our guests that are coming in, we're already seeing a significant increase in frequency. 900 basis points increase in frequency since we launched this in the app.
you know, it really is about the foundation of operations, and then you layer on these things to bring in people to a great experience with great assets, and that's the recipe for long-term sustainable sales.
Terrific. A lot going on, and I wanna unpack some of that, Rob, but that's a great start here. Let's focus on innovation, menu innovation. You've done a tremendous amount since you joined the brand. Maybe can you comment on Shake Shack's LTO strategy for those in the audience that maybe are a little bit less familiar, already seeing very good success with that strategy. Perhaps, you know, anything on the high level on how extensive that menu pipeline is for 2026 and beyond.
Yeah. You know, I mean, Shake Shack has always done LTOs and has always been about culinary innovation. I mean, that's been kind of their bread and butter. I know that everyone, you know, loves the burgers, and that's our core. But Shake Shack has always been a culinary-forward, recipe-driven innovator. Part of that is because everything we make is made to order. When we bring an LTO, when we bring culinary innovation, it's not as disruptive to the assembly line because we don't necessarily have an assembly line, right? It's a lot harder for some of our larger-scaled assembly line, assembled food, QSR competitors to do innovation because it has to fit in their assembly line. When we launch innovation, I learned this at Taco Bell.
That's where I started in the restaurant business, where they were launching 12 LTOs a year, fast cycle innovation. Never seen anything like it. You know, I started at Procter & Gamble. We did a lot of innovation. It was nothing like Taco Bell. I took that model, I brought it to Arby's. We turned Arby's around with innovation. You know, we're doing that here, but we're not doing it at the same pace. Like, we're launching big protein, big sandwich innovation three or four times a year. Some of those are gonna be evergreen, tried and true, like we have the Korean menu in right now, which always does well for us. The truffle's always gonna be something that we bring back on a regular basis. Some of those are gonna be new to the world.
We've got a new-to-the-world innovation coming in Q2 that I am so excited about. I cannot wait. This would be in webcast, right? So this is public domain, so putting it out there. We do supplemental innovation. I call it supplemental, which is such a weird word, but it's not like the focus of our LTO. It's amazing when you hit that right what it can do because there's a lot of incrementality in that supplemental innovation. I'll use the Dubai chocolate shake as an example of that. That was something. I was actually in Dubai, and they brought it out, and they're like, "Look, we've built this thing. It's kinda." I'm like holding it, and I start cracking, and I'm like, oh my.
As a marketer, I was like a kid in a candy store. Now we've taken that innovation, and we've built a whole platform around it, right? We have the True Love Shake for Valentine's. We're gonna have an amazing Halloween crackable shake. Those are not gonna be the thrust of our LTO calendar, but they're definitely complementary, and very incremental. Then lastly, what I'll tell you about product innovation, you know. I'm the first to admit when I screw up, and I screwed up a little bit in Q4. You know, we launched Big Shack, which was amazing hit. We had sold a ton of them. I was like, "Okay, great." Like, when I launch innovation, I want it to be a mixed benefit, right? I want people trading up.
That reduces your need to take pricing. When you can get people to self-select out of lower priced things into higher priced things because they want to versus charging the same people more for the same stuff, that's a very healthy model. That's been my model my whole career. I launched the Big Shack and huge demand for it, but I priced it at $10 and did that for a reason. $10 is kind of a threshold. I wanted everybody to try it. We're so excited about it. I anticipate a lot of people trading up from an $8 single ShackBurger, and that would be mix accretive and profit accretive. What we saw was that we had a lot of people trade in from the Double.
We, you know, our Double prices range anywhere from $10 to $14. So we had a little bit of mix dilution in December because of that. You know, I learned from that. I should have learned it 15 years ago and shouldn't have made that mistake. Moving forward, like, our intention is to bring premium innovation across the shakes, across the beverages, across our sandwiches and burgers and proteins and sides, where we're gonna allow people to self-select into premium products, which will drive mix benefit, which will further decrease our reliance on pricing. You know, I just wanna make that point now. We are doing everything we can to improve our value equation. You know, I've always thought of the value equation as, you know, V equals benefits over price. That's what P&G teaches you, right?
Here, I talk about it as value equals EH over price, enlightened hospitality. Everything in enlightened hospitality goes into that numerator. Whether it's your product quality, whether it's your culinary innovation, whether it's the hospitality that we deliver, that all goes into that numerator, right? Obviously, the denominator is price. We are doing everything we can to be as fiscally disciplined corporately in our supply chain and our operations so we don't have to take price. We took less price last year than we've taken in the last five years. You know, we talk about it as 4%, and that's kind of what the base increase was. We also increased our promotions and our discounts, the battle for the traffic in that industry. Our net pricing was actually only 3%.
This year, we're talking about kind of trying to get to about 2% with net pricing would probably get us down and around 1%. We have been able to mitigate, not only mitigate the highest level of beef inflation that we've seen in 20 years, while taking less pricing. We've actually drove 120 basis points of margin growth last year. We are gonna stay disciplined in our operations. We are working hard on our supply chain, and we are gonna hold on our pricing while delivering all these additional things into that numerator to improve our value equation and take share from the competition.
Terrific. I want to pivot for a minute, just as you talked about the price piece there and the mix. Just again, maybe for a reminder for those that are less familiar, how you think about that breakdown of the comp going forward between the traffic and the price and the mix, sort of what the target looks like for you guys going forward.
Yeah, I mean, we have a long-range guide of low single-digit comp growth. You know, I didn't come here to do low single-digit comp growth. Like, we aspire to do a lot better, and we're working every day, but that's right now where we see our forecast. You know, the composition of that comp is, call it 1%-2% pricing, 1%-2% mix improvement, and 1%-2% traffic. So if all those hit on the high end, then we have the greatest year ever. If all those hit kind of on the low end, then we deliver kind of our 2%-3%. You know, if I can take 0% pricing, I will. Now, that being said, we have pricing power. We have not seen significant traffic decreases when we've taken our pricing.
We took pricing back in December, and you know, we have really strong traffic in Q1. You know, we have a great deal of confidence in our ability to take pricing if we see other unforecasted inflation. We're doing so much in our supply chain right now that you know, we have a plan to mitigate all of this beef inflation. If people could take something away from this, hopefully you take it all away. You know, one of the biggest bear cases for our stock right now is beef prices. I would tell you that that's the biggest bull because we've mitigated all of the beef inflation. We've delivered margin growth while dealing with all of this inflation.
Anybody who's been in this business long enough knows they're called commodities for a reason, right? They go up, they come down. As the supply goes down, the prices go up. The supply goes up, the prices go down. I don't know when that's gonna happen. You know, I don't know what the next war is gonna be. I don't know what screwworm's doing in Mexico. I'm not down there on the border kind of checking that out. Like, I do know that at some point, there's gonna be incentive for ranchers to raise more cattle. It's right now if they can do it. As that happens, the beef prices are gonna come down. We are gonna flow all of that through.
Now, we're gonna make decisions on how much of that we drop into margin and how much of that we reinvest in top-line growth because I think there's a huge amount of continued potential in driving our top line. These last three quarters where we've grown traffic, the first time we've grown traffic for two quarters in a row, in the back half of 2025, I think since 2021 when everyone was growing traffic because there was $7 trillion to be spent. You know, that is a testament to the marketing that we made, and we're just, like, dipping our toe there. You know, it's the least amount of marketing I've ever had to work with in my career, but that's what makes it kind of fun and interesting, right, is trying to figure that out.
As those beef prices come down, we're gonna have a great opportunity to determine do we continue to flow that into our restaurant margins or do we reinvest that back into the business.
Let's talk about marketing maybe because that was a big, you know, kind of initial focus last year as you ramped that some and great results in the back half of the year, as you mentioned. How do you think about marketing as far as leaning in more on the marketing side? What's the potential longer term as you think about the marketing opportunity for the brand?
You know, we have to earn it. Like, marketing is a privilege, not a right. You know, we have to grow our revenue and grow our profit in order to have the investment. We don't have a franchisee marketing fund to go out and spend, right? It comes straight out of our P&L. Every dollar I spend has to deliver returns. Those may not be, like, returns that day, but returns on bringing in people who create lifetime value, right? We look at it from top to bottom. Some top funnel stuff that has lower return on advertising spend today but can create greater long-term returns and looking through the funnel at the conversion cycle and where we do things to drive traffic that day.
You know, the other thing about the marketing is, you know, hits my G&A line. I get tagged with this, you know, G&A growth guy, right? Look, once again, this is an amazing brand that Danny started and built this beautiful thing. The fact that this company persevered through the pandemic is a testament to the leadership in place at that time. We also need to recognize that it, while it scaled with the people who kinda built the company. It didn't have a lot of the processes and capabilities and infrastructure necessary to get where we aspire to be.
My G&A line is a reflection of investments in operations, which we have gotten 100x return on, investments in supply chain, which is, you know, making the year for us this year with the beef prices, investments in marketing, which is driving our traffic, investments in tech. I mean, we have an unbelievable CIO that has changed the game for us. I hired him, it's been about a year now, and he is a get things done. You know, a lot of tech people are like, "Oh, it's gonna take so long. Oh my gosh, it's gonna cost so much. Oh, we don't have the resources.
We're gonna have to not do this to do this." This person is like, "Show me the problems, and I'm gonna show you how tech's gonna solve them." We've invested in our technology platforms and our people. Yeah, my G&A is inflated versus when I got here, but we have built the foundation, we've built the model. I committed in the last earnings call that 2026 will be the last year that that happens. We have the plan in place. We will start to get leverage in 2027, and we will continue to deleverage moving out as our revenue grows even faster and we hold and don't have to build out these incremental capabilities. I tell you all that because marketing is a function of G&A.
You know, right now we're planning for it to be between 2.5% and 3% on a run rate basis. If we see that we're getting great returns, it'll probably be up near 3%. If we see that we're getting less, it may drop below 2.5%. That's kind of the target. The amount that the marketing will grow every year will be dependent upon the amount of revenue growth that we drive. The thing that makes me really excited, sorry, the thing that makes me really excited is we're gonna drive a lot of revenue because the number one driver of revenue growth is new store openings. You may have a question for that, and we can get deeper on it, but, like, we're gonna open. We opened 45 Shacks last year.
It's the most we've ever opened in a year. We're gonna open up 55-60 this year. That'll obviously be the most ever. It's just gonna keep going because we also invested G&A in building out that capability. Our real estate teams, our design teams, our construction teams, all in place, all executing at an unbelievable level. You know, we took 10% of our costs out of our restaurants last year. In two years, we've gone from almost $2.5 million to $2 million in a period. I don't know if any of you are building any structures lately, but it's not a deflation environment in construction. We have decreased our costs dramatically, increasing our cash-on-cash returns because margins are up, revenue comps and revenue are up, costs are down.
Like, if this was a private company, you know, that's the biggest story. I mean, that's where our return on invested capital is just going through the roof, and that's exciting. It's also exciting because it's driving a ton of revenue, which will then allow us to increase our marketing investments while keeping the rate the same or even lower, which will drive even more top-line growth.
I want to unpack the development opportunity in a few minutes as well, of course. Let's pivot maybe over just to the macro. Lots of focus, obviously, from investors there. Shack's done extremely well in a difficult macro, very resilient versus most in the industry. How are you thinking about the macro and where we go from here, how it impacts the brand? Maybe on that stimulus question, anything that you're thinking about on the stimulus side of things, how it impacts your customer and potentially your business this year?
Yeah, you know, I think, well, I know given Shake Shack's history, you know, we always had a kinda over-penetration in New York, L.A., Miami, Chicago, and that's always created. It's good. It's wonderful, and it's challenging at the same time. Obviously, the weather in the Northeast this year has disproportionately impacted us, which is why I'm so excited about doing 4.3 in January. It also can color your lenses on value and pricing because, you know, when your whole executive team's in New York and mostly a lot of your Shacks and revenue are in New York and Los Angeles and Miami, you start thinking like, "Hey, a $10 burger isn't that big of a deal." Like, I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Like, nobody in Pittsburgh wants to spend $10 for a cheeseburger.
I'm sorry? It's amazing burger. It's the best burger in the world. You know, and also in a lot of these markets, these expansion markets, we haven't necessarily told our story as well, like, you know, historically. People don't necessarily know that we use 100% Angus, no hormones, no antibiotics. If I'm being honest, some of those people don't really care about that. They just want a great tasting burger that fills them up for $10 or less, right? We are really focused on, you know, going into these markets and diversifying our footprint, which is really important for us.
I think historically, the belief there is that we couldn't do it because of our price points and our cost structure and all those things. We've proven that we can. I mean, we are succeeding in this macro environment in Rochester, New York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Like, we're going into markets that people never thought there'd be a Shake Shack and blowing it out of the water. We have a lot of confidence that we can go into these markets and even though the household incomes are a bit lower, we believe that we're creating value. Not necessarily we've got the right price for these folks, but we've got the right value equation. Our Shacks are beautiful that we're opening up. Our hospitality is on point. Our price points are. We're holding on them.
We're giving promotions and incentives to bring the right people into the Shacks. You know, these macros have been challenging for everybody, and there's been this value war, and to a certain extent, we're a little insulated from that because of our current footprint, right? You know, we have New York and L.A., higher household incomes. Everyone knows the higher income folks are doing a little better and spending a little bit more. We don't want our brand to be an exclusive brand. Like, I'm not this marketing guy that says, "I need an exclusive lifestyle brand." Like, our company started in a park, raising money for charity with an art installation. Like, if that's not inclusive, like, I don't know what is. Everybody had to wait in line for those burgers.
I get stories from people that are billionaires tell me about the stories about waiting in Madison Square Park. Like, we wanna create an inclusive company where everyone in the world can come and experience the best food in the world. Like, we truly believe that we sell the best burgers, whether it's taste or quality. I want everyone to be able to experience that, whether you're in New York or Oklahoma City, and that's why I focus so much on getting that value equation.
Just diving into that a bit, you talked about one-three-five earlier and how successful that's been. How do you think you are positioned on value now between the one-three-five and everything you talked about earlier? Are you where you wanna be from a value perspective? Do we see, you know, a bit more in the way of new value strategies this year? Or for the most part, are you pretty comfortable with how you're positioned, where the scores are, and what the strategy is?
I think that's another thing a lot of people talk about like, "Oh my gosh, Shake Shack's doing discounting. That's not Shake Shack and they were just buying traffic or something like that." You know, we sell 10% of our business on discount. The average in QSR is 25%, and that doesn't even count combos, right? I mean, everyone in here knows that drive-through business is all combos. They don't count that in that percent discount, even though there's a discount applied to combos. Like, we're at 10%. You know, we are doing it in a surgical, strategic way.
We didn't come out and say, "Okay, McDonald's is doing $5 meal deals, so we're gonna do $5 ShackBurgers," and crater our business and bet on the come that our traffic was gonna offset the check decrease and the margin impact. Like, we went out, and we figured out a way to deliver a promotion that drives an inordinate amount of traffic without cannibalizing our core business. One-three-five has. And while it's doing that, it's laying the foundation for future lifetime value, and every one of those new app users is gonna seamlessly move into our loyalty platform that we launch at the end of the year. You know, we are gonna have loyalty. There will be an incentive structure in that loyalty.
You know, we're gonna continue to use the right level of tactical, surgical promotions and incentives to bring the right people into the restaurants 'cause we believe when we get people there, they're gonna keep coming back 'cause we have the best food, and now it doesn't take 10 minutes to get a burger. You know, our service times have gone from over seven minutes to under six minutes in the last year. You know, we're never gonna be as fast as QSR 'cause we make everything fresh when you order it. It takes three minutes to cook a burger. You know, but all of those things are contributing to a great guest experience that the more people we drive in, we know it's gonna be sticky.
We know that they're gonna come back, and our frequency is going up as a result of that. We'll use the right amount of incentives to make sure we get the right amount of traffic.
Anything else on the loyalty side of things to your point there for those of us that are high-frequency users? You know, the test, any thoughts on initial benefits yet, or it's still a little bit early, and there's not a whole lot more to say on the loyalty?
Yeah. I would say it's still early. The only thing I would say is that my vision for our loyalty platform is that we can deliver enlightened hospitality through digital. Like, I don't want it to be just applying, like, points to an app we already have or just discounting and sending emails. Like, who needs another email? Like, it really is I really wanna find a way to build a comfortable connection with our guests. Loyalty, you know, I think you have to have an incentive structure. I don't know if anybody in here has kids or teenage kids. I have three teenage kids. Like, they're like, "Dad," like, "we love Shake Shack, but you gotta give us some points." Like, "We don't go places that don't give us points." And I'm like.
These are not, like, super price-sensitive kids. So, you know, trust me, they're at college, and I'm getting DoorDash three times a day.
Absolutely.
I want it to be a connection point. That's kind of the essence of our company and where we started. If it just becomes transactional, we will have failed. I've laid down the gauntlet and told everybody we're launching it this year. You know, it's hard because we could pop in a points-based program and start to see some traffic improvement or what have you, but that's not good enough for us. We have to build that connective tissue with our guests to create that lifetime value.
Great. Makes good sense. One more on same-store sales, and I wanna shift over to development. Maybe just as it relates to 1Q guidance. You had a terrific January, as you mentioned, even with the weather pressures. February sounds like it's off to a really good start as well. Anything more to kinda highlight? You touched on it a little bit earlier around the strength that you've seen so far, year to date and, you know, kind of where we go from here, given the strong start to the year already.
Yeah. I mean, I would just tell you know, our guidance. Look, there is nothing but volatility right now in everything. I mean, I'm really excited that we've been able to deliver consistent, strong traffic growth, consistent, strong margin growth. You know, we do a lot of heavy lifting every day to make sure that happens. I'm also just aware, you know, we gave that guidance before, you know, what happened last week. The week before that, it was Mexico and, you know, all like, all these things. We're trying to be transparent in our beliefs on what the business can do, but we're also trying to be cognizant of the fact that we're not in control of everything that impacts our business. You know, I've gotten a lot of questions on gas prices.
You know, "What's that gonna do to your business? You're a high premium price, you know, burger shop." I actually think we're insulated more from the gas prices because of our footprint. You know, drive-thru is only 10% of our business. Drive-thru is 80%-90% of the business for a lot of the QSR folks. We don't have a lot of drive-thrus. People in New York and, well, Los Angeles, everybody has a car, but people in New York, you know, don't necessarily have a car. Like we are at the higher income group. I do think that the gas prices, you know, there's always been a correlation between QSR and gas prices. If you go back and look at when gas prices are high and how our brand performed, we've always kinda done well.
but it's just another example of the volatility that can't be foreseen. We're trying to be transparent, but we're also trying to be conscientious of the volatility.
Perfect. Shifting over to development, and we talked about it some already, but you know, as you mentioned, doing more new opens this year than last and last on the prior year. How about on the TAM side of things and that 1,500+ TAM on the company-operated Shack side of things? Just talking about the confidence there. You talked about going into some of those smaller markets, et cetera. Just kinda sharing thoughts on returns and what gives confidence to that sizable number and the long runway that you've still got to reach that.
I have 100% confidence. Not a shred of doubt. Like, I wanna see that come to fruition while I'm still here, and I plan to end my career here. This brand can go into every market and be successful. Right now, the work that we've done on creating a spectrum of formats affords us the opportunity to not only go into every market, but to go into every piece of real estate. I mean, we can go in and build a 2-acre pad next to Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane's and run double drive-thru. Or we can go into a street-side walk-up shop with a storefront, with a limited dining room, and do primarily takeout and delivery. Like, we have all of those formats, and now we've built a standard kitchen that works.
I know it sounds crazy, but we've never had that. Like, every Shack that was built in the past was some different fit it in here, do it in here, we'll make this work when we open. Like, literally. You know, once again, that is not disparagement. I have nothing but respect for everybody that came before me. It's just the model was different. Now as we look to scale to 1,500+, like, it needs to be. We need to balance standardization and customization, and our kitchens need to be standard. We need to be able to train one GM in one kitchen, and if they move to another restaurant, they shouldn't have to learn the kitchen all over again. Like, they need to show up and know how it works.
When our opening restaurant teams come in, everything is set up. They know how it works. That's never been that way. Our flows, our processes are all gonna improve once we launch this kitchen at the end of this year. That gives us, like, an engine to go out and build these things everywhere rapidly at lower cost. I also mentioned we're balancing customization. The dining room needs to feel like Shake Shack. It's not. It can't feel like a standard box. I talk about clean, comfortable, cared for, right? Whether it's brand new or 20 years old, it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be comfortable, it's gotta look like it's cared for. Everything doesn't have to have a fresh coat of paint on it.
Sometimes you walk into a restaurant, and it's not, like, all white and bright and airy, and it feels warm. Like, that's amazing. We have a lot of Shacks like that. There was, like, a little bit of idea, "Well, we need to go remodel these Shacks and make them white and bright." I'm like, "No, you don't." Like, "Over my dead body." You know? When I walk into the Shack in Atlanta that is, you know, has all the beautiful wood on the walls and there's music playing and there's TV up there with SportsCenter on, I'm like, Give me a, you know. Never forget, that was my first experience. Korean-Style Fried Chick'n and a pomegranate tea. Sat down, I'm like, "Man, this does not feel like QSR. I wanna do this." Anyways, I'm sorry. I went off track there down memory lane. Development.
Look, with the TAM, 100% confidence. We've got multiple formats, give us access to real estate everywhere. We've shown that we can make money at different levels of AUV given the different formats. Our cost structure to build is down. Now, I wanna also make everyone aware, the cost to build will be something that we evolve how we report because as we do launch these new formats, like this year, we're gonna build more drive-throughs, and the year after that we're gonna build more drive-throughs, and the year after that we're gonna build more drive-throughs. They cost more. You may see the average cost go up, but that's because of the mix of the formats. It's not because we've gotten sloppy. My challenge to my team is like, "Look, don't worry about the mix.
If we get great real estate, don't worry about our average cost going up. We'll report our average cost by format so people can see that we're still disciplined and still driving costs out for each of these different types of units. Let's put the Shacks where they need to go that are gonna work." When you couple that lower cost, standard, you know, better operating kitchens, higher margins, which we've committed to 50 basis points again this year despite the inflation, and comp sales growth, like, the returns just I mean, you can't invest your capital better than what we're doing right now. Yeah. The development is the thing that nobody really talks about. If you're underwriting this business as a long-term investment, I mean, that's the engine.
To that point, and you just talked about the importance of the restaurant itself and then the dining room itself. Speaking from experience, I know the kids love eating in the dining room. But there are times where, hey, look, that drive-through would be really convenient. You touched on it a little bit, but just how you think about the drive-through, how that's gone so far, and sort of what the potential is. Because, you know, clearly if you can figure this out, and you're starting to, this can be a big unlock. It feels like as far.
Yeah
As development and.
For sure. Last year was the first year that the drive-throughs delivered incremental revenue. For three years we had been building drive-throughs that cost more but didn't deliver any revenue above kind of our core Shack.
Mm.
The reason was because we didn't know how to operate drive-throughs, and the experience was terrible. You know, we were looking, when I got here, ticket times I don't even wanna disclose. The most improvement in speed of service has happened in our drive-through restaurants. Despite our restaurants and our legacy drive-throughs, the kitchens not necessarily being built correctly to flow everything to the distribution point at the window, they're still making all that progress. Our new standard kitchen for our drive-through flows everything to that window, so we're only gonna get better. We have a lot of confidence in the drive-throughs, in making the investments, the incremental investments to build a drive-through which will deliver commensurate returns with our core business.
Right. You touched on margins, a few minutes ago. Driving great margins this year targeted, despite all the inflation that you're seeing. Maybe we could talk about some of the key initiatives, some of the key buckets where you're getting the savings. I know you touched earlier on the quality hasn't actually gotten worse. It's actually improved even as you're kind of finding these savings opportunities. Can we just talk about that, the margin opportunities and how you look at it this year and over the coming years?
Yeah. 2025, the cost mitigation happened in the restaurants on the labor line. We just got way more efficient with how we allocate our labor, no overtime, you know, consistent attainment. All those things led to significant flow-through in the restaurants. On the supply chain, we have done a lot of work on the procurement side. We've RFP'd almost every major ingredient. We've brought in new suppliers that increases competition. I'm a sports guy. Competition makes you better. The competition we've created in the supply chain has you know, improved our quality 'cause we got new suppliers bringing new ideas and new capabilities. It's significantly de-risked our business. When you have a single source of supply, they get hit by a cyberattack or something happens, like, you are left standing there without a solution.
You know, the outcome of all that is we've also increased the competition, driven down costs. We are mitigating the inflation this year with procurement savings through the supply chain. Make no mistake, there is an absolute baseline of bringing on any new supplier needs to at least hit our quality threshold. There cannot be a decrease in any of our quality of any of our ingredients. If there's an increase, wonderful. We look for that. No decrease in the quality of our ingredients. That's procurement. Moving forward, we're just scratching the surface on our distribution and logistics and freight. That's been managed the same way since we had three Shacks. You know, we have 400 company Shacks, so obviously it's more productive to distribute to our company today than it was back then.
We should be deriving value from the productivity of that. Yet also, we should be getting better fill rates, better service levels. As we penetrate these markets with more restaurants, it becomes easier to get full truckloads to go from our distribution centers to all of our Shacks. You know, once again, when you bring in competition, it makes everyone up their game. That we're just scratching the surface there, but that's gonna be beneficial kinda later this year and heading into 2027.
Terrific. Well, we are just about out of time. Rob, Allison, and team, wanna thank you guys very much for spending time and sharing insights with us. Terrific, momentum and looking forward to it continuing this year. Thank you so much.
Well, thank you, Dennis. Hopefully next time we meet I'll have a new CFO in place. We've got a great search going. We have a ton of interest in that. I mentioned last earnings that we plan to have that position filled by the in the first half of this year. We've got great candidates with public company experience, CFO experience, restaurant experience. It's gonna be a lot of fun. That's the last member of our executive team that we have to fill. We've got a world-class team. Every one of them I'd put up against anybody in their functional areas of expertise. We hire a great CFO, and we're ready to go.
Great stuff. Great story. We appreciate it very much, Rob.
All right. Thanks, Dennis.
Thank you. Appreciate it.