Potbelly at William Blair Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, June 4, 2025, Potbelly Co (NASDAQ:PBPB) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, emphasizing its transformation into a growth-focused company. CEO Bob Wright highlighted Potbelly’s unique brand and strategic initiatives, while CFO Steve discussed significant financial improvements. Despite challenges, the company remains optimistic about its growth trajectory.

Key Takeaways

• Potbelly’s system-wide sales have grown by 34% over the past three years, with a 700 basis point margin expansion.
• Digital sales now account for 42% of the business, showcasing significant digital transformation.
• The company aims to expand its franchise network to 2,000 units, with a focus on menu innovation and operational efficiencies.

Financial Results

• System Sales Growth:

- Achieved a 7% growth in Q1 2024, driven by 24 new units.

- Potential to reach $3 billion in system sales with 2,000 units.

• Average Weekly Sales:

- Increased by approximately 3% over the past two years.

- Same-store sales and traffic have outperformed the fast-casual industry for the last three quarters.

• Shop Level Profit Margin:

- Improved from 14.2% in 2023 to 15.3% in 2024.

- Targeting margins exceeding 16% and reaching high teens.

• Occupancy Rate:

- Company shops: approximately 10.8%

- Franchisee shops: 7-8%

• Q2 Guidance:

- Same-store sales growth projected between 1% to 2.5%.

- EBITDA expected between $8.25 million and higher.

- Anticipating the addition of 6 new units.

Operational Updates

• Menu Innovation:

- New permanent menu items include the Sweet Heat pork barbecue sandwich, Cubano sandwich, and prime rib steak sandwich.

- The banana pudding shake has become a top seller.

• Digital Platform:

- 42% of sales are through digital channels.

- Replatforming of the app and website to eliminate friction points and enhance customer experience.

• Potbelly Digital Customer Experience (PDCX):

- Introduction of new technology packages to improve delivery, digital pickup, and in-shop experiences.

- Includes new POS systems, kitchen displays, and handheld devices.

Future Outlook

• Unit Growth:

- Currently, 766 open and committed locations, with 322 committed but not yet open.

- 70% of franchisees are developing further locations.

- Expecting at least 38 new units this year, with a long-term target of low double-digit unit growth.

• Long Term Growth Algorithm:

- Aiming for low to mid-single-digit same-store sales growth.

- Double-digit unit growth and low to mid-teens EBITDA growth rate.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO Bob Wright expressed confidence in Potbelly’s growth status, citing proof points from the conference discussion.
• CFO Steve emphasized the company’s profitability improvements and menu innovation, encouraging investors to try the new offerings.

In conclusion, Potbelly’s presentation at the William Blair Conference showcased its strategic growth initiatives and financial resilience. For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Unidentified speaker: You can see it there. I can see it. You’re in the right spot. If I can people can’t see me, they can see you. You’re in the right spot.

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: You wanna you wanna stand? No. I didn’t. We can stand and rotate. Forget it.

Unidentified speaker: We’re the last one.

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: Just couldn’t see everybody.

Unidentified speaker: I won’t

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: I won’t hurt it. I promise. Can you see better? I can.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Can see better.

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: Alright.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: We got it from see it enough. Yeah.

Unidentified speaker: We don’t know it by now.

Sharon Zackfia, Analyst, William Blair: Hi. Good afternoon. I’m Sharon Zackfia with William Blair. Really happy to have the Potbelly team here with us today. For those of you who haven’t followed the Potbelly journey, we’ve got a management team here that’s brought the the companies to some of the best metrics we’ve seen since the company went public.

And maybe most excitedly excited I’m having a hard time on most exciting, is that there’s a real burgeoning franchise pipeline here, which can really transform the company over the years to come into one that’s much more asset light and higher return in addition to this very healthy, company owned, seed that the company started with. Before handing the, the podium, but I’m actually gonna hand the table over because it it looks like it’ll be at the table. Before handing it over to the team here, I do need to tell you there’s a complete list of research disclosures and potential conflicts of interest at WilliamBlair.com. Thank you.

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: Thank you, Sharon, and, welcome, everybody. Glad you’re here with us. We, I know we’ve got some time. The breakout session’s actually in the same room, so we’ll go through our presentation. And then if you have questions at the end, we’ll be able to stick around and and help you with any of those questions.

My name is Bob Wright. I’m the CEO and president of PopBelly. I’ve been with PopBelly for almost five years now. This is my thirty eighth year in the business and have only been here for five years, but I’ve loved this brand since I first met it about twenty five, twenty six years ago. I I’ve I’ve enjoyed every step of the process, and we’re gonna take you through a little bit of our story that goes back mostly three years, but a little bit of that history that we have together.

I was fortunate that, Steve was here when I arrived, back in 02/2020. He’d already been here for a few months. I’ll let Steve introduce himself.

Unidentified speaker: Sure. Hi, everyone. Yes. I I started my relationship with Potbelly in the early nineties, at that Lincoln Avenue shop, which many of you may have experienced at some point here in Chicago. I haven’t been in the restaurant business as as long as Bob.

I’ve been in consulting and part of that retail, but, spent spent some time at McDonald’s and Panera prior to to joining Potbelly. And the last five years running through the pandemic now into this big growth phase for us has been really exciting, and we’re looking forward to sharing with you some of that story and and where we’re headed.

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: Yeah. Thanks. So welcome to Potbelly today. We’re in Chicago, so I assume many of you, if not all of you, are very familiar with our brand and love the brand. We have that in common.

I will tell you when I enter an airplane and and someone sees this lapel pin on my jacket or I’m traveling somewhere on business, if they spot the logo and recognize it, the response or the the unsolicited comment is 100% the same thing every time. I love Potbelly. And the next thing that that someone that says that wants to do is tell me why they love Potbelly, and we’ll talk a little bit about that as we go through. But that is a very special and unique element to have that kind of brand cachet and those kind of core equities built in. Today, I said Potbelly today, I would describe us as a fast casual restaurant concept with a sandwich based menu, and I often complete that sentence by saying in a sea of subshops.

It’s a very different sandwich experience. We we answer a lot of investor questions about how do we compare to all of the other sandwich players, and we do. We pay very close attention to that. But Potbelly is a unique brand. And if you don’t know us very well, I think that’s an important basis of understanding as you think about the investment opportunity of Potbelly, but really strong heritage.

We were a single location for twenty years. Lincoln Avenue was the first location right here in Chicago, and and twenty years later, the founder, Peter Hastings, sold that to the gentleman we call our founder, Brian Kyle, who developed the chain, starting in Chicago then into Washington DC and then across the country as you see on the map there. At the end of q one, we had 444 locations that were open. We had 766 open and committed locations, and and by the end of q one, we broke a hundred franchise locations, a hundred and three open operating franchise locations. It’s all about the food.

It’s all about the experience, and everything about Potbelly is a cut above from a quality perspective and differentiated in a lot of ways. From an investor perspective, we actually think our investor thesis is rather straightforward. We are after starting together, Steve and I in 2020, which was kind of a phase of saving the company with the cash losses and the profitability challenges that the company was enduring into what we call our turnaround phase. Today, I can proudly say we’re a growth company, and I think that’s really important from an investor perspective to look for the proof points that even throughout today’s discussion that that’s what we are. Some of the things we would point to of late that are evidence of that is our our menu innovation, the product innovation, the excitement around the food.

As I mentioned, it’s the core of the the core of the sandwich experience for our customers, but we’ve had some amazing things that we’ve added to the menu. I’ll talk about those a little bit later. Industry leading digital platform in this space. That’s the consumer facing digital platform, the app, the web, the tech stack that sits underneath that, certainly the Martech stack and and so on that goes into it, especially our Perks loyalty program, they’re very important to the business. In addition to the digital the consumer facing digital work, there’s this off premise business for us.

Our our CMO likes to call it the digital Potbelly shop that goes with the actual Potbelly shop. There are so many combinations of ways that you can order experience Potbelly, and we’ve leaned into all of those over the last five years to create a ton of growth for us. And especially, look, with the success at the unit level, the top line sales growth, margin expansion, it’s all about franchise growth going forward to achieve that 2,000 unit target that we we believe in. The story is a great story. The numbers, even if you just look at the past three years, just really impressive results that that I I know our team is super proud of.

System sales growth of 34% in that three year period of time, almost 700 basis points of margin expansion at the shop level. And when we still own most of our shops, that’s that’s obviously a big profit driver for us. Open and committed locations up 64% in three years. That’s that proof of the franchise sales machine. 400 basis points of digital growth at 42% of our business now comes through digital channels.

And adjusted EBITDA from basically zero all the way up into the $30,000,000 range, that’s last year. So quite a bit of growth, and and we’re very excited about those numbers. So if if the what I opened with was the who, and we just talked about a little bit about the the what we’re doing. This five pillar strategy you see in front of you is the how. It was 2020.

It was the end of twenty twenty when we developed this five pillar strategy, and it hasn’t changed. The the foundation that you see on the screen where we state our mission and our vision is rooted in the brand itself, the belief that this brand is special. And if you’ve got a special brand, you can build growth initiatives on top of that brand that can grow the company itself and for the benefit of everybody involved. Our unifying objectives across the top help our team stay crystal clear on what we’re trying to accomplish. Traffic driven profitability and unit growth.

Sales, profits, and unit growth. No one is lacking understanding on our team anywhere in the organization about what we’re really up to, and that’s that alignment’s really important. Even our incentive programs are tied to that. Now you if you’ve if you’ve ever been to a restaurant or you’ve heard about restaurants or you’ve covered a restaurant company before, the five pillars probably look like platitudes to you. Great food and great value, really great people serving our customers well, having experiences of bringing people back, oh, yeah, digital and franchise growth.

And that’s true. What I’ll cover for you in the next few slides are some some strategic initiatives that underpin those and some of the more recent strategic initiatives that continued to deliver growth. Now the only thing I’d add sort of qualitatively is that those are statements I’ve been making for five years. This is the strategy. These are the things we’re doing for the strategy, and I believe that you’ve been able to look back over time and see that we’ve done what we said we were going to do, and we continue to have new and additional incremental incremental ways to build these five pillars and keep growing the company.

I mentioned a few of them already. So I tell you, it’s it’s a real gift for us internally as a a management team and for all of our organization to not change strategy. There’s a lot of focus here. That strong menu innovation that I talked about, we rebuilt the menu back in 2021 because we had a value problem, and then comes LTOs. And more recently, we’ve unlocked a a completely different stage gate development process under the leadership of our CMO to develop menu enhancements that are permanent menu enhancements.

Most of what you see on the screen are permanent menu enhancements for us. This started back last fall with the Tractor Beverage Partnership or our craft refreshers looking looking for and delivering incremental beverage incidents, especially in a dispensed beverage that’s not a carbonated beverage. If you’re not familiar with Tractor, we’re one of the two bigger chains that have beverages in them, including Chipotle and Potbelly. Really proud of that addition. Then comes the Sweet Heat pork barbecue sandwich and the Cubano sandwich in four sauces that were rolled out at the same time.

That kinda came next. If you haven’t had our pulled pork sandwiches, the the Cubana was an LTO, so we knew that was a hit. And we actually have a third pork sandwich that’s on the underground menu. So this is a the addition of a new whole muscle protein, further elevating the quality of brand and and bringing in traffic. It’s also a fairly reasonably priced protein for us.

So from a margin perspective, we like that too. The most recent one that we’re we’re super excited about is our our our steak sandwich. Our prime rib steak sandwich that just recently rolled out. We couldn’t be more pleased with what that’s doing for breadth of appeal for the brand and for what the customers have to say about when they come in and certainly what we’re seeing in the mix. We haven’t published any mixed numbers on it yet, but I’ll just say we’re very, very pleased.

This focus on the core menu and filling in what were identified as core gaps in the menu has rung the bell with our customers in a big way. Even the the more recent ad of our banana pudding shake has moved up to one of the top selling shakes. Now great food is great. And remember the first pillar is great food at a great value. Now as as I mentioned, I’ve been in the business for a long time.

A lot of that business was in pizza and QSR. And you think about value with that historical context, you think about price pointed discounted value. And oftentimes, even when you think about value menus in QSR, it’s always about the price. It’s always about the cheap food. That is not how we think about value at PopMilly.

We have a three layered value approach that is really important, and frankly, I think it’s unique to how we think about presenting what we present to the customer. Number one, and the most important layer of value, is actually how you all react to restaurant experiences across the board. That’s the intrinsic value of the menu itself. If I pay full price for food on the menu, is it great food, and did I walk away feeling like I didn’t get overcharged for that food? If you don’t have that and you’re relying only on discounts to drive customers into your restaurants, you’re gonna have a hard time building long term growth.

And so think about the menu innovation not only as advancing the menu itself, but pushing value even farther. Then there’s everyday value. We talked a lot last year about our $7.99 combos. We have three sandwiches that we sell in a skinny size that are $7.99 for the sandwich, the drink, and the and the chips. But pick your pear is actually a bigger everyday value option for us than even the $7.99 combos, getting a salad and a sandwich and so on.

And then, of course, the third layer of value is promotional value. This is where our perks program really sings because we can deliver promotional value to customers that rings true for them and their experience rooted in what we know about the how they use the Potbelly brand. So just know that there’s a there’s a lot of effort and a lot of science that goes into that. Now our customer customer facing digital platforms, we actually own our own code. We developed our own app, our web, and the platform and the martech stack that sits under it.

We have shared publicly in the last few months that we’re actually rebuilding that. It’s hard to believe that something that’s four years old is reaching end of life. I’m glad that doesn’t apply to everything. But with technology, that can be the case. So we are replatforming our app and our web, and that’s coming this summer.

It’s gonna unlock some it’ll first of all, it will eliminate some friction points that exist in today’s app and web that really candidly weren’t friction points four years ago, and it will unlock opportunities for additional growth. Things there there there’ll also be layers of the Martech digital stack that we can put underneath that that can really help us continue to use digital as a growth driver for us and make our digital assets all the more relevant for our customers. Now once you put that digital facing consumer out there, how do people interact with with the shop, and how do they order their food? How do they get their food delivered? And and are they using catering or digital pickup?

Are they doing some of both? Ordering for digital pickup or grabbing the bag and sitting down in the dining room. The the fact of the matter is we want to be a great choice for all of those variations of engagement, and I think that we are. One of the things that we’re also investing in this year and next year, by the end of next year, this will be in a % of our locations is what we call PDCX. That stands for Potbelly Digital Customer Experience.

And you see it on the bottom of your screen. It’s a it’s a multidimensional restaurant level technology package that allows us to do all of these things like first party delivery and digital pickup and so on far, far better. It also allows us to to bring some digital components into the in shop experience. So this is the new POS. It’s a kitchen display system.

It’s the customer display for all the digital interaction that they have, and it’s handhelds that allow us to do some other things in the shop that we we don’t we aren’t able to do today. So big investments in this area of digital. When it comes to growth, you hear us use this term open and committed. Our our desire is to have you understand that in addition to the growing open units that we have, there’s a pipeline of committed units that back up the future opens that are coming for us. Steve will cover our guidance in a minute, but we talk about unit growth rates in the low single digit or sorry, low double digits in our long term growth algorithm.

The the sort of the belief in that is rooted in the franchises that we’re selling. So 766 open and committed locations, 322 of those are committed and not yet open. We talked last quarter, 70% of our franchisees are developing franchisees with commitments to develop. That is an enormous number and a percentage of our base that that you won’t find in a lot of other franchise brands. So we’re we’re super proud of that.

You’ll also see the green bar continue to grow because that is where we’re growing is in the franchise growth that that will lead our our total unit growth overall. And as a team, honestly, we’re very proud of our franchising team, but know that and we know this too. Franchisees are paying closer attention to the the comments I just made than they are what we’re doing with growth. They’re looking at volumes. They’re looking at investment costs.

They’re looking at expanding margins. They’re looking at us minding the store with the brand, with food, and value, and and initiatives around development, and so on. That’s exactly why this map looks a little different than the map you saw on the first slide. Very quickly, I’ll orient you to this. If it’s a gold state, that means we have open and operating businesses in that state.

They can be company or franchise, but that means Potbelly has a presence in that state. A green state is it has development commitments in those states, and, of course, the the striped states have both. So you can see that we’re really starting to expand and and broaden the footprint both of development and of existing shop development. So this penetration that’s gonna continue to creep across the country is really important and exciting to us. Franchisees are are wonderful parts of the restaurant business.

They’re a very straightforward way of thinking about looking at whether or not they wanna be a part of a brand. And what our franchisees are telling us, both those that are in the system and the candidates that are joining the system, they’re saying, first of all, your unit level economics are really attractive. We love that you’re taking care of things that make our future better, like reengineering the prototypical design, making it a little bit smaller, bringing down the occupancy costs, making it more efficient and digital centric. And, certainly, this sales team that you have, they’re not overpromising, but they’re shepherding us through the process. We have a high touch development model as well from real estate to engineering, design, construction, and even opening support.

And we’ve also scaled that so in your first two or three units, you get an even higher version of that touch and support from the brand, and then you’re on your own as the training wheels come off and you you develop from there. I think I’d leave you with, we have very clear line of sight to the at least 38 units that we said we would develop this year. So that’s that’s a bit of our story as it stands today. I’m a let Steve share some of the financials with you and a little bit of the history there too.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Thanks, Bob. I wish I had some mouthwatering sandwiches on my slides, but if you get I get mouthwatering, bar charts that come up into the right. So for some of you, that’s more exciting than than sandwiches. But, look.

This is a growth story, as Bob as Bob mentioned, and it’s a growth story that’s that’s driven by the the work that’s done on the menu, on the digital side, but importantly, as Bob just finished, franchise unit growth. And so we start to mark ourselves, in terms of of system sales. Right? That’s that’s going to show up more important over the over the coming years as we open more franchise units. And you can see the impact of this.

These are these are quarter one numbers over quarter one numbers, but you can see that move from quarter one twenty four to to the last quarter we just finished. That’s 7% of system sales growth, but that’s 24 units that we have put in place over that same period of time. With 38 units coming on, this year, you’ll continue to see these system sales grow. In fact, what’s you know, we had this conversation earlier. When we fulfill our our 2,000 unit potential here in The United States, you know, we’re we’re we’re just north of 500,000,000 in system sales right now, as we finished last year.

2,000 units that, you know, the economics that we’ve got with a little bit of inflation added puts us well into the $3,000,000,000 range, for system sales. So that for us is incredibly exciting, as we as we continue to push push growth, through our franchising model. Now in terms of the unit economics, Bob mentioned that a little bit. This is, you know, unit level average weekly sales for our company shops. And, again, a similar story of of growth here.

You know, this this is about, over over the two years, three percent growth at a at a unit level. And you can see, you know, we’ve had some tremendous kind of same store sales in in some of these years. What’s not on the chart is what we did, over the last couple of quarters. Right? So last, quarter, we finished, at a positive same store sales for q four.

We finished positive same store sales in q one. So this momentum, is is in the business, this growth momentum. What’s really critical, though, in terms of, building average weekly sales is a lot of the things Bob talked about, so menu innovation, the digital side of things, etcetera. But but also it’s you know, we’re not we’re not competing in a vacuum here. So we always mark ourselves against, you know, our competition.

And for us, that’s fast that’s fast casual. So for the last three quarters, we’ve we’ve taken fast casual share on a same store sales basis. Right? Our same store sales are surpassing those of the the fast casual industry. And similarly on traffic, right, same store transactions for us have, surpassed that of the fast casual industry.

So not only are we putting units out there, but we’re also within the boxes that we have, you know, producing better performance, quarter over quarter. So, these things are starting to work together for us in a in a meaningful way. And then, you know, look. We we, always wanna mark ourselves by how much profit we’re making, and part of that engine, right, is the the the economics that happen at the unit level. So this is our this is our shop level profit margin, again, kind of taking a quarter one versus quarter ’1 versus quarter one view.

And what’s exciting to see is, you know, we’ve we’ve got we’ve got margin expansion. That’s been a hallmark of of this management team is to always push and expand margins. You know, we’ve we if you wanna look at it on an annual basis for some of the same time frame, we finished 2023 with a 14.2% SHOP margin. We finished last year with a 15.3 SHOP margin. In fact, our quarter four last year was around, you know, fifteen seven.

Right? So, you can see that that the business continued to be more profitable. Now we’ve we’ve discussed in the past, you know, how high can high be. We think we can get, and we will continue to push ourselves beyond 16 and into the high teens. That’s where we believe the potential for this brand can be.

We’re not guiding to that, but that’s you know, as we endeavor to push this business, we believe we can do it that way. I think also what’s important to note here is what drives this SHOP margin expansion, or why do we think there’s confidence that we’re gonna continue to expand it? Well, one is top line. We just talked about how we’re gonna continue to push sales through some of the innovation that Bob discussed earlier. But there’s a lot of work that goes on beneath that top line growth.

Right? So our operations team, is tirelessly working on on building efficiencies into the into the business. You know, our based labor guide continues to get more effective and more efficient for us. We don’t we don’t always give a lot of, attention to the HR side of things, but one of the things that also helps our labor line is we have some industry leading turnover rates. We’re in the top quartile for having low turnover, in our in our shops.

So that’s an important component too that helps aid shop margin. And and the other thing, you know, that we will help will help benefit margin is as we grow top line, we get leverage on the occupancy line and so forth. What you don’t always see or hear about when you look at our financials is our shop profit, as we stated here, is company shop profit. So we’ve still got, we’ve got some high rent we’ve got some high rent markets that we’re in. Chicago is one, DC, and other places.

And so our occupancy line is, you know, almost 11%. It’s like 10.8% is our occupancy percentage. If you look at what our franchisees are are putting in place, they’re building more in the suburbs and in different locations. Their occupancy rates are kind of in that seven to 8% range. And if you if you apply that to this, shop margin level, you can see the potential for for continued expansion, with with with Potbelly.

Another thing to mention in terms of that middle of the p and l for us is additional efficiencies. Bob mentioned PDCX, Potbelly digital customer experience. We know we get efficiencies out of that, not just through throughput, but we also save on labor. So these are these are things in addition to just kind of pushing that that customer facing side of things that are gonna drive profitability for this business, in into the future. So now as we as we, have discussed in the past, right, we had our q one call, in May, and we we put our guidance out for for q two.

And I’m excited to to let everyone know that, you know, we’re performing against this, against this range, and we’re we’re leaving it we’re leaving it in place. You know, the business continues to perform strongly, and, you know, we’ll we’ll keep this guidance here, at one to one and one to two and a half one and a to two and a half percent stands for sales growth and then, you know, EBITDA in, 8,250,000.00 to What’s we didn’t guide to it, but we mentioned it on our earnings call earlier is, unit growth, right, of of six new units in in the quarter. So, again, not a not a guide, but, you know, you can you can hear it from my commentary that that we have confidence, right, in the way that we’re delivering against the quarter. And that confidence for the quarter, I think, you know, continues to, you know, translate into the way that we think about not just our annual guidance, but also then into our our long term growth algorithm.

So, similarly, with quarter, you know, we we have, things that we we can see and things that, you know, we’re excited about that we’re not talking about today in terms of what lies ahead for us in the year in terms of, you know, new menu items. Potentially, we got this digital, refresh that’s coming up and things that are that they’re gonna contribute to this, delivery of the 2025 guidance. And, of course, if you’re you’re thinking about Potbelly, and and how we will look and continue to look as we grow this business, right, same store sales growth, in in the low to mid single digits, is inclusive of us not just driving, you know, same store sales. It’s inclusive of driving traffic. Right?

We’re in a traffic building business as our five pillars would suggest. That’s the goal, right, is traffic driven profitability. Our new unit growth, is is is the engine that drives those same store sales going forward, and we’re, know, once we hit, and continue to push into that double digit range, I think our 38 puts us close to 9%

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: Mhmm.

Unidentified speaker: For this year. So this this this, double digit unit growth, is is right in front of us. And as well, all that translates into, you know, an asset light model, high margin franchise business, our our EBITDA, growth mark growth rate, in the the low to mid teens is also something that, is is, we’re something we’re pushing for and have line of sight into. So we’re excited about future. We’re excited about the growth, that lies ahead.

And, as Bob started out the conversation, this growth story has, you know, a few a few chapters in it. Right? This this menu innovation piece where last year, it was sauces and pork as a new platform. This year so far, it’s been chili mac and and banana pudding shakes and and this this incredible prime rib steak sandwich. If you haven’t tried it, you really have to go try it.

We’re we’re excited about how that’s performing. And and with our digital platform, again, the 42% of our business is digital now. When I started at Potbelly kind of right at the beginning of the pandemic, it was it was 9% of of the business. This is a massive change, in in the business model. We found that most of this business is incremental, and we’ll continue to meet the customer where they want to with the features and functions that they want to.

The exciting thing about the digital piece for us isn’t just customer facing things that we get to share with you all and you get to hold in your hand and and enter keys. It’s also the analytics that go with that too, right, and our ability to to provide more segmented, more targeted, more relevant communications and offers to to our customers. That too is a layer of growth, for us here. And the off premise offering, you know, as I mentioned, with with digital, much of that digital growth has been this, this growth in in in delivery, in this mobile order, and pay kind of pickup channel for us. So we’ll continue to invest in that because it’s it continues to grow for us.

And then franchise growth, again, that is that is the key. That’s the future. That is the key. So

Bob Wright, CEO and president, Potbelly: That concludes our prepared remarks. When the deck is published, there’s some additional financial information in the appendix, so feel free to take a look at that, and happy to be with you all. So I think since we’re gonna stay in the same room for the breakout session, we can go into that. Right, Sharon?

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