Thank you. It's John Ivankoe with JP Morgan. Very happy to have Shake Shack here today. Shake Shack was a lead managed IPO back in 2015 from, you know, JP Morgan. Pretty early in that in that cycle, and it's been absolutely fascinating watching what, you know, what really was a very young growth stage company, you know, mature into what has been a very important brand in the U.S. now eclipsing approximately $1 billion in sales over this past year. Welcoming.
For me, welcoming Randy Garutti, the company's Chief Executive Officer, friend of mine, great to have him on stage, consider us, and Katherine Fogertey is the company's Chief Financial Officer, obviously, with a lot of recent finance experience, including having my very job at Goldman Sachs. It's always a fun conversation to kind of have somebody in the seat on the other, on the other side. Thank you very much. You know, you guys have obviously been through, you know, kind of a, you know, a lot of work in transitioning, building what has been a relatively small company into arguably a big brand, right?
Mm-hmm.
I mean, you know, you are still, as I, you know, kind of talk about that billion-dollar revenue number, you know, still very, very small relative to a lot of your peers. As you try to build this scale and build your capability, really where are your priorities? I mean, you can't you know, have the same priorities with the same amount of spend as where your peers are. You know, given, you know, the realities of your business, you know, where is the current focus as we think about 2023 and maybe the next couple of years?
I'll start, Katie, jump in. It's, first of all, it's good to be with you, John, everybody. Thanks for taking time with us. I'm glad you brought up that memory of 2015. We went public at just over $100 million in sales and less than 70 total restaurants. This year, system-wide sales around $1.4 billion. When you think about that, you know, we've overachieved nearly every target we ever set and guidance that we set over the long term. That's been pretty exciting for us.
I think, John, you fairly noted we're in that, I don't know if you wanna call it adolescent phase or whatever, that's. It's a really interesting both huge asset to us and great challenge because we're not yet at the scale where we can do, you know, a bowl game advertising or mass international or national advertising and those kind of things. We're still at a scale where we need to be investing in G&A, in building our restaurants. Yet we're at about 450 restaurants worldwide, and very clear and confident in who we are.
I do think, I hope we spend some time today talking about our international license business, because I think one of the most undervalued, less understood things about Shake Shack is how powerful it is that we're actually about a 40% franchise company. We don't talk that way, we don't act that way because we really like our returns in the United States, and if we can build a Shack, we're gonna own it. We also love that in a few weeks, we're opening in Thailand. You know, we'll be studying different parts of Asia. We have over 32 restaurants in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
It is a vast worldwide global brand at this point, I would say since the day we met you and today, we punch so far above our weight for who we are as a brand. I can guarantee that we will open in Thailand, and there will be 500, 1,000 people online, and it will be a shocking, exciting start. The brand power has probably never been better. Where are we focused? To your question. Really 5 main priorities right now. Recruiting, rewarding, retaining our team. It is not an accident that we have struggled through this last few years. The restaurant business will always be hard to hire. It has been since I was 13 years old working in restaurants, and it is still hard today.
It is better than it was at the depths of a year ago or 2 years ago during the hardest parts of hiring in COVID, but it is still harder than 2019, and we've got to start there for everything. Second, it's about the guest experience of Shake Shack, and we are relentlessly focused on that, through food, through experience, through digital, all the investments we're making to make it a great feel. Third is our real estate strategy, which is we're really starting to hone in on new formats and are doing our core formats better, building restaurants at a good pace that can have great returns, and adding drive-through, which I'm sure we'll talk about, is a key part of our strategy.
Fourth, it's about recapturing the stronger margins that we've had in the history of this company that have suffered more in these last few years through inflation, through some of our challenges, and frankly, through our real estate footprint that was a huge positive to us pre-COVID and has been, I think, relative to our peers, definitely something that's been more of a unique struggle for us. Lastly, investing with discipline. Really watching our G&A, making sure that we can begin to see the long-term leverage for these things and making sure that when we invest in capital spend to build restaurants, to build digital tech, to remodel our restaurants, those are the best investments they can be. The last thing I'll say on that is we were lucky. Not lucky.
I think we had a strategy through COVID to fortress our balance sheet. You look at what we were able to do is quite prescient when you think about this weekend. We were able to have a convertible debt line of $250 million at a 0% interest rate, and we have that through 2028. You think about the power to be able to do that at a zero cost was incredible and has set us up to really be able to make smart long-term decisions and invest that capital with discipline, and you've seen us been doing that. I'll pause there.
No, that's perfect. Let's kind of hit them, you know, point by point. You know, team retention. I mean, you do have an operationally intensive system. Not everybody wants to, you know, to become a district manager that's, you know, starts in your stores as a day one hourly employee. You know, how do you improve team retention? I know, you know, there is tips. There is.
Yeah.
kiosk ordering, obviously digital ordering. That takes maybe some of the pressure away from the person taking the order. The kitchen is still an intense place to work.
Yeah.
it just is for every restaurant, but you are certainly, you may be even magnified to some extent, considering it's in a, in a fast... I'm not about to say quick service. In a fast service type of environment. Talk about like what you can do to make that job better to become a, more valued employment proposition.
Yeah, anytime we travel, Katie and I yesterday were with our teams in Las Vegas. We had, you know, a dozen managers from all over the Vegas Shacks, which is a great region for us, a very profitable region. We talked about these very challenges. It's a few main categories, that are obvious, but we've got to pay more. That's a pressure on our P&L. We've been fortunate to add tips this year, which we weren't sure about, and it was something our guests had asked us for a while, and we're very humble about it. We don't put it in your face. We don't start at 20% or like 11. We leave it very-
440.
Yeah. I mean, like. So that's had a nice impact, and we think that'll have a good long-term retention impact. Adding benefits, constantly adding benefits. You've heard us talk a lot about 4-day work weeks. There are a lot of Shacks where we're continuing to test and learn that managers work 4 days, and that's huge. You better believe that's a retention effort and opportunity. We're doing that more. Then it comes down to just trying to simplify operations as much as we possibly can, so it's a great place to work. With all of that, if you were around that table with us yesterday with our team, you would see every one of those people started here and went up here, and we have to provide that opportunity.
We can only meet our growth goals if that happens. I say all the time, like, if you'd asked me at the IPO, what are the things that keep me up at night? I gave three things. I wanna make sure we can find the great sites that we've always been able to find. Check. I do not worry about that for one second. Second, supply chain. I wanna make sure we can actually get across the country and around the world. I don't worry about that for one second. It's hard work. All that stuff's hard work.
Yeah.
It's not keeping me up at night. The thing that will always keep me up at night, and I believe the only thing that stops the party, is not being able to find, train, retain exceptional people to build and lead our Shacks. That has been harder than ever in the last few years, but it's also our sweet spot, and it's getting better, and that's why it's the number 1 focus.
kiosk ordering, I think it's in 100% of your store. Sorry.
Yeah.
If you want. Go ahead, if you wanna add.
No, you can ask your question, Marie. It's okay.
All right. I'm sure you can just dovetail it into this. Kiosk ordering, I think, is at 100% of your stores now?
Mm-hmm.
Okay. All right.
Well, we have guided that we're going to be rolling out kiosks to nearly all of our stores by the end of this year.
Okay.
We've made a lot of progress on that goal. We're proud of where we are, but we do still have some more stores to go.
Okay.
Yeah. I think we have about 50 or 60, roughly Shacks to go.
Yeah.
Okay.
It won't be 100% because there's some like.
Okay.
-food court here and there, things that might not make sense. By the end of the year, effectively all domestic company-operated Shacks will have kiosk ordering.
It's maybe it's better for customer experience.
Mm-hmm.
It might be better for your employee, better for margins. How significant is it?
I mean, kiosk, let's just start off with all the benefits that we think kiosk really gives us. Number one, it's our highest check of an in-Shack channel. We get great attach rates for cold beverage, for LTOs. People are adding more premium items to their checks. If you ever have a chance to experience a kiosk in a Shack, I really encourage you to do it.
Yes.
Compare that experience to waiting in line and going up and ordering at the cash register. Two very different ordering experiences. By the way, there are guests who still wanna have that in-person experience. We wanna be able to provide that. But for especially our younger guests, you know, those who have kind of grown up with a smartphone, they get there, they have seen, you know, they have all the different parts of our menu that they can just go through and navigate really in a, in a great way. Our visuals really describe what the product is, whether it's our White Truffle, whether it's our amazing Tiramisu Shake right now. The guest comes in and they see that, and more often than not, they say, "I want that," and they add that. You know, it's a high check occasion for us.
It's also our highest margin channel.
Yeah. Of course.
We're also able to. Look, there's been a lot of, you know, a lot of pressures on Shake Shack, you know, since COVID, and staffing pressures have been one of them. In the moment that we haven't had a full, you know, team to operate, when the Shacks that have kiosks, we're able to just do that a lot better. We're able to give our team members kind of, you know, more tools to help navigate these pressures. In Shacks where, you know, we have kind of the full staff, we're open, everything's great, that kiosk just lets us do more orders.
Right.
You know, you can have four or five kiosks and one person ringing cash. It's a really good background there.
The other thing it's allowed us to do, this is gonna sound like a small thing, but it's a big thing, is in most Shacks, not all, we now bring you your food.
Yep.
at your table. It's kind of an added level of service that you may or may not have even noticed or experienced.
I haven't seen it, no.
A lot of Shacks, we don't do it. Kind of the high volume Shacks, you can't really do it 'cause people are standing everywhere. It's busy. If you go to Lincoln Road in Miami, that one, I don't know if we do it. A lot of what we're moving towards, if we were in Summerlin yesterday.
Yeah.
-kind of a typical, really strong, awesome, everything about that Shack from a unit economic model is fantastic. You order either on the kiosk or with the cashier, and we then bring you your food. There's a whole kind of added layer of service, and that's part of this not being a fast food restaurant and just trying to say, "Okay, I understand why when I come here, I pay a little more. Why I come here, I understand the ingredients a little better, and these people are a little nicer. Oh, and maybe I'll give them a tip because of that too." That's part of the whole strategy of guest experience in the second real strategy.
I assume in the fourth quarter results and in your first quarter to date, the benefit from kiosk probably hasn't really been realized, I would assume, right?
The benefit of kiosk will be most realized throughout this year and into next.
Okay.
Back to, you know, Randy's earlier point, you know, it is definitely much more comfortable, especially when you have kids, to be sitting at your table waiting for your food than standing there waiting for your order.
Okay. sounds good. let's, you know, You know, team retention, you know, guest experience. Now, what's interesting, balancing simplification with the brand when it was built, like, as we saw, very focused brand. you added chicken and you started doing some more LTOs and that concretes. Started, you know, scaling back, maybe coincident with COVID. You probably would have, you know, just simplified some operations even without it's just kind of an interesting point. how do we, you know, kind of talk about, you know, guest experience and flexibility making Shake Shack special with operational simplicity.
Absolutely.
-which I think you led with on the labor side. Where is the balance between the two?
Constantly, John, trying to balance that and not making too many additions to our menu. We've rarely done that, if ever. As you noted, we pulled a couple things off. We fight about those things all the time during COVID.
Yeah. I'm ready for a couple of them to come back.
You know, this call, yeah, if it were only up to me...
We should compare notes.
they'd probably all be back. I also intellectually understand, there's been some important gains in our efficiency. Let's start with, like, the brand again. Like, we need to do what everybody else is unwilling and unable to do. If you look at right now, we're serving a White Truffle Burger for under $10 with the most amazing organic, real, not crap white truffle that you get on some fries in every restaurant. Real organic. Yes, that is actually real organic white truffle oil for $9.99. When you look at, we can spin this in a lot of ways, but understanding who our guest is, it's very clear to us our guest tends to skew more higher income.
Mm-hmm.
That has been a great strategy for us. We believe it will be a good strategy through the uncertainty of the time that we're living in. That doesn't mean we don't wanna go after all guests in lower income and frequency. That has been a part of the kind of the brand halo, and the straight numbers are, it works. When we do LTOs, it works. We launch them on digital first. We pick up a ton. You talk about customer acquisition. It's basically free customer acquisition on our digital channels every 3, 4 months when we do LTOs. White Truffle is just the most recent example. We'll have a fun slate of that. What are we doing to keep it simple as possible? Well, we can't do too much all at once. You gotta spread it out.
If you look at the pattern of our LTOs, now there are probably less of them, but they run a little bit longer.
Yeah. That's all. Yeah.
The way that we make them is deeply ingrained in our operational system. Believe me, you come to our innovation kitchen in the West Village in New York City, like, we'll have a really good time, and 90% of that stuff should never hit the menu because it's either too complicated, too much, too expensive, whatever, and it's gotta hit. For us, we're constantly testing in that kitchen and other Shacks, what kind of stuff works, and then how to make it operationally the most effective it can be. We know we need that more than ever, given all the labor stuff we're just talking about. That's a huge part of the guest experience that we gotta add for. You're not going to see anyone else in our level of the industry put out the items that we put out.
Right.
That's a critical part of our long-term brand.
You know, on the call, I did, you know, at least pick up an increased focus and tone on this fourth quarter conference call, focusing on every line in the P&L.
Mm-hmm.
digest that. prime costs. It's like a magical thing in the restaurant industry where, you know, which is, you know, basically food plus labor.
Mm-hmm.
You know, different ways that you can allocate what's done in store versus what's out of store. You know, the numbers never get really below 55%. They're never above 65%. They're somewhere in, like, the high 50s% to low 60s%, like everybody, you know? You know, yours are, you know, kind of like they were mid-50s%, now they're kind of high 50s%, so they don't seem to be completely out of whack.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, that's how's that for a technical term?
Yeah.
You know, you suggest, okay, so the opportunity would be on your more fixed cost part of your business, which of course is going to be volume driven.
Mm-hmm.
That would be the 50,000 foot view. You know, to drop a little bit like.
Sure.
more specifically say, "Okay, we do have real opportunities here that you can address.
First of all, just let's look at COGS. One of the things that has impacted our cost of goods sold is our off-premise mix, because if food and paper is what's in there, and our off-premise orders, they just cost more. One of the key strategies we have here is just reducing the amount of expense that we have in our off-premise orders. We also are, you know, continuing to invest to drive more people into our Shacks. That's where we really win, and that's where, you know, the wind is at our back, to say. When you kind of think about food and paper, you know, beef will do what beef will do.
There's some other, you know, kind of, you know, volatility that we're gonna, you know, have because we just don't contract things out. When you think about that mix of off-premise versus on-premise, it really does show up in food and paper. We also, you know, tend to have higher beverage attach rates for our in-Shack orders as well.
Okay.
You go to labor. Okay, Randy just talked about how we've had, you know, high turnover in the restaurant industry.
Yeah.
That is an impact to our hourly labor cost. Our teams are just not as efficient as they should be, when, you know, when they're all brand new and you're constantly training and trying to bring people up. You know, hopefully, you know, and we're excited by what we're seeing, but hopefully we'll continue to see gains on retention. You know, it's absolutely critical. You know, we also try to, you know, you know, we'll see kind of how certain strategies play out as well to help kind of bring a little bit more labor, out of the Shacks. You go down to the other OpEx line. You know, delivery expenses, that's where that lives.
When we talk about the rise in off-premise ordering, and delivery, that's just a higher expense. As we drive more people into our Shacks and into our own delivery channel as well, that's a benefit. There's, you know, other issues in there which we've called out before, like R&M, utilities expenses.
Yeah.
We had a lot of T&E in the fourth quarter around all the openings. Some of that overhangs into the first quarter. That's a little bit of what we're dealing with. When you go to the guidance that we gave for this quarter for 16%-18% margins, we talked about those 22 NSOs in the fourth quarter having a little bit of overhang. What that is when we opened so many restaurants in the fourth quarter. We had 36 for a year. That's great. 22 happened in the fourth quarter. Our team members are still brand new. We are working to get them more efficient. That is probably the best lens to look at what efficiency means for our business, so.
You know, you're not doing many markets de novo at this point.
No.
maybe I'm sure there's some. you know.
A couple new markets, but it's mostly focused on going deeper, and that's a big part of the strategy.
even then, they're probably being served from, like, a market that's not so far away, you know, where you, like, people are kind of, like.
That's right.
...as opposed to flying and getting corporate apartments, what have you. You know, how much of an opportunity is just, hey, we're much more efficient at opening new stores than you were previously when you had one store in a market that wasn't driving distance to anything else? It must have been very inefficient. what
It's a big long-term opportunity, John. Not just... It'll, you'll see it in the restaurant's P&Ls, in the Shack level op profit. You'll also see it in pre-opening costs over the long term. You'll see it in that hangover that Katie talked about of, like... It sounds like it's not a new market, but, you know, there are times where you still gotta fly in a team. They gotta stay there. They gotta do it for a month, and they gotta.
Yeah
...get up and running. We've had, certainly in 2022 and 2021, a lot more hangover of, whoa, this is a brand-new market. We gotta fly people in. You go to Baton Rouge, okay? We opened in Baton Rouge.
Yeah.
Awesome Shack.
Yeah.
Drive-through, really cool. It's Baton Rouge. Nobody knows what's Shake Shack is. Yeah, there's a group of people who know. After they kinda come through in the first month, well, then nobody knows. That's not I'm not even talking about the guests.
Mm-hmm.
I'm talking about hiring.
Right.
If I never heard of this thing before, why do I choose to work there? What do we have to do? We gotta bring people in to buoy that up. That's, we're still at that stage. When I think about long-term economies of scale.
Yeah
...going deeper in certain markets, it's just such a powerful opportunity. I was in Salt Lake City a few weeks ago. We have 3 Shacks there. We have the 1 at the airport, licensed deal, and we have 2 really kinda flagship awesome Shacks, and we're building a bunch more. We get no efficiency out of that region. None. It's really hard to run. We kinda gotta have an area director on the corporate G&A to get that going. It takes sometimes a few years. You know, we've thought of it kind of as a minimum of 5 Shacks in a close region that you start to see some economies, and then it's really 8, 9, 10, where you get a truck full of fries. You get to borrow a cup of sugar.
We're at the Shack in Summerlin yesterday, and the guys from the Vegas Strip are bringing over lemonade because they ran out. Like, that stuff has a powerful scale impact. I think people forget because our brand is so big and everyone else you follow and you spend time with is so much bigger than us. Everyone that you might compare us to, when you say, "Well, why are they doing that or that?" Has thousands more restaurants than we do.
Yeah.
Much more geographically dispersed. We gotta catch up.
Yeah.
That's the journey we're on. When you look at what we've told the world, that's the journey we've delivered, and we're gonna keep delivering on. It's what excites us about the current near-term and long-term opportunity for this company, where we can start to capture some of that.
Is that, in terms of the, you know, excluding pre-opening, even excluding G&A, I mean, is that hundreds of basis points of store P&L of inefficiencies? Or is it?
We haven't got it to it. I think it's a combination of. It's a piece of it for sure. It will play out in every line item. It will play out in COGS and our ability to buy better over time. It will play out in people.
Mm-hmm
...and our ability to find, hire, retain, keep you there. We had a guy yesterday. I think it's important to tell stories 'cause you all gotta, it's, you know, got to understand it's not an Excel spreadsheet, right? This is a guy who started in Chicago as an hourly team member. Did a bunch of Shacks in Chicago. He's a exempt manager. The guy's probably making $60,000 a year in Las Vegas, taking care of his family.
Mm-hmm.
The more of those that you have, the more you can open up, and you can say like, "Yeah, my grandma lives in San Francisco, and I'm, I wanna move to San Francisco." Cool. We got Shacks there, let's go. That stuff is a powerful retention tool and an attraction tool, and it scales in a huge way over time. It's like a network effect. You talk about a network effect of software and things like that. There's a network effect that happens internally and for guests, by the way. I'ma totally shift gears 'cause this made me think about it. What do you think the number one reason when we ask people, "Why don't you come to Shake Shack more often?
Oh, I'm sure it's location.
Yeah. There isn't one close enough to me.
Yeah.
And that's I love that that was the true answer. If the answer was something else, we'd have to really think differently. When the answer is, "Well, I love it, but I'd like it if you brought one close to me," we know that's the big opportunity, and that happens over time in an appropriate way, and we think we've got the right pace on that.
You are not capital constrained, and we've spent a lot of time talking about OpEx, and you actually basically never get the question on CapEx. It was kind of interesting doing. It's lazy math.
It's definitely lazy math.
It is?
We'll let it go.
You know, $143 million CapEx at 36 units is $4 million a store.
Right.
you know, you're just like, "Wow," it's like that's actually a number and your system is young enough-
Mm-hmm.
You don't have a lot of, like, hey, you know, I know there's, like, a couple like Columbus, what, the.
Yeah.
Excuse me, on Columbus Avenue near the park-
Sure.
Near the park. Excuse me for that. You're not doing a lot of maintenance CapEx.
Yeah.
help us kind of understand that market because that's kind of like that return.
Right. we have, you know, if we just look at this year, how we ended this year, 2022 into 2023, we have a number of Shacks under construction.
Yes.
I think we talked about more than 20. All of that sits in that CapEx spend.
Yes, of course. You also had some 2021 CapEx that-
Not as much.
A little less.
All right. Okay.
Not as much. Then, you know, we had a little bit more of development issues and meeting targets last year that we are going to not repeat this year. I think that's a little bit of what you're seeing. We just have a lot more under construction today. We also have our digital business. You know, kind of making those strategic investments to continue to, you know, develop that, is important, and we're doing it in a very strategic way. It's part of our key priorities as well. Then, you know, we do have. As our Shacks age, we will have more maintenance CapEx.
Right.
It's just going to happen. We're very strategic about how we do it. You know, it's just a lot of numbers. A lot of supply chain issues that we've talked about with our ability to open up restaurants, we're also seeing that on the maintenance CapEx side. Sometimes it's harder to get certain things, and it might cost a little bit more in this specific moment. Those are, you know, kind of some of the larger buckets that come on that.
You joined a company without a CapEx?
Yeah.
A lot of people kind of like forget. Like, hey, there's not a CapEx, you know? That number was relative to start of the year, I'd have to look, but I'm sure it was higher, like in terms of where you were. do you think about is, you know... we can talk about drive-.
A lot.
Drive-throughs might be a perfect time to talk and kind of segue into that. Do we think about, hey, what are we spending on average for a new Shake Shack store? Because that really, you know, is a, like.
Yeah. We talked about the number. It's $2.4 million for 2022. We're expecting the class of 2023 to be about at that range. We have a much higher mix of drive-throughs this year.
Yeah.
Randy, why don't you talk about kind of that gap?
Yeah. I think we think this year we'll do about 10-15 drive-throughs of the roughly 40 company-operated Shacks. Those have a higher initial cost. They also will have a much higher initial cost in this first group of a couple dozen of them. We've talked about it. You've heard my language before, John. It's we're optimizing that for learning. We're gonna spend a bunch of money right now for a potentially huge unlock, and that is a smart use of CapEx that you may look at in the near term and say, "Oh, they're spending high $2 million-$3 million on a drive-through. That's a lot of money." Yes, it is, and it will come down. That is what we've told everyone.
We've shared that guidance that we think we can be in the mid to high twos on some of these next gen drive-throughs, but they take time. You know, when I go back to the city tomorrow, we have an awesome meeting with our team.
Mm-hmm.
Where we have two teams stood up to really look at the long-term cost reduction of the per Shack CapEx. as you know us for a long time, and I've been with this company, more than 23 years, like, we're long-term thinkers. We're not thinking for the next quarter. We're thinking, "Let's get the drive-through right." We got a lot wrong. This one, we got a lot right. This one, we messed up on that or whatever. Let's figure it out, let's learn, and there will be a lot more drive-throughs if we do that. That takes CapEx, it takes commitment. I want you to hear when we get to the last one of investing with discipline, there is more discipline than ever on really critically thinking about how to make those restaurants better at a lesser cost.
That is our commitment to doing that over the long term. Let's not just make this about drive-through. That's true about core Shacks. It's true about everything we do. That's a workflow that's a big part of our year this year and ongoing.
I don't know what's happened to our time, so I wanna make sure we talk about international.
Yeah.
So licensed-
Yeah.
Now the reason you don't get a lot of focus, it's basically $30 million of licensed revenue relative to $150 million in restaurant, company restaurant operating income.
Mm-hmm.
Still, and that's pre-G&A allocation. We can talk about that pre-opening.
Yeah.
It's still, like, not that big of a number. You talk about, you know, kind of like, hey, the street's missing the focus on this.
Yeah.
How important that business is.
I think it's so important, and I think the only way for you to understand it is to go experience it and watch it and see it.
I have in many, as you know.
You see it, and you'll be like, you'll walk into.
Hong Kong, Japan.
We opened in Wuhan. Okay? Like, you go see Shake Shack in Wuhan, you're gonna be like, "Oh my God, I can't believe... This is amazing." Wherever it is, that's all fun and brand. Great.
Have you been to Wuhan?
I haven't visited Wuhan.
Okay. I was a little bit worried.
We won't lose our last minute, but I was in China the day Wuhan shut down in 2020, that's when we were choosing our sites in Shenzhen and Guangzhou and some of the other amazing places where we are. I think the important thing to note, it's not just international, and those are fun to talk about. It's domestic airports, which we do extraordinarily well.
Yeah.
Stop by the Las Vegas airport on the way out, you will see a amazing Shake Shack. It is roadsides, another unlock for us, John.
Yeah.
We're doing more roadsides. You'll see it on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Yeah.
You will see Shake Shack in the New York Thruway. Who are we trying to be? There has never been a person who isn't disappointed when they pull over for gas on the highway with the options. Well, you're not gonna be disappointed anymore. You're gonna see Shake Shack doing those kind of things, stadiums and all that. It's a highly efficient, asset light part of our business that we intend to grow in a huge way. 33 Shacks last year and more this year.
You're happy with the way the brand has executed, most importantly?
Oh, yeah. Look, like any relationship, you got issues. and we have... There'll be moments over here where, there'll be moments over here. on scale, we team up with partners who are incredible operators that deliver our brand in amazing ways that we learn from. I think the international and license piece is a huge part of the opportunity and will deliver very efficient EBITDA over the course of time.
We will make sure that we will focus. We do model it obviously separately, but we'll make sure that we focus on that more on our end. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Randy.
Thanks, y'all.
Thank you, Katie. That's like, we have like twice that time.
We need more time. Thanks, everybody.