Luis Raganato: All right. Hello, Bob and Ulises, good morning. As we’ve mentioned, we’re very happy, in October, we’ve launched our loyalty program in all restaurants in Brazil, and we were able to accelerate the process and add Uruguay too. We have already reached 1.8 million members, and we expect to increase the volume of identified sales as the program grows. This is important because loyalty, what it does is boosts the power of the mobile app, okay? And that’s this increasing or driving more frequency, okay? It drives visit frequency, while it increases the percentage of identified sales. And that combination gives us or allows us to provide a more personalized guest experience. So — and this new or more personalized guest experience allows us to increase our ticket that every ticket, every transaction can be more profitable.
And of course, what it does is [Technical Difficulty] our marketing efforts, with our marketing investments. So that would be the impact, and we tend to roll out the program to most markets by the end of next year.
Daniel Schleiniger: Great. Thanks, Luis. Next couple of questions from Julia Rizzo of Morgan Stanley. She starts with, “Could you please break down same-store sales growth in Brazil by freestanding stores and malls?” And also mentions that, “the impressive same-store sale year-to-date despite macro headwinds. I understand comps are harder in the fourth quarter of ’23. So, what should we expect for same-store sales? So, what should we expect and how are same-store sales doing now?” Let’s start with those two, Marcelo.
Marcelo Rabach: Okay. Good morning, Julia, and thanks for your questions. In terms of restaurant formats, we did extremely well in Brazil and in the whole company in all different formats. Obviously, in the case of freestanding units, it’s a competitive advantage. The fact that you can operate Drive-thru in that format, which is still contributing to our sales and Delivery is much easier to be operated from those formats from the freestanding units. But we did well even in shopping malls, particularly in July, the traffic generated by Cinemas was pretty impressive, and we did well in shopping malls, too. And in the second part of the question, as I mentioned, I think in the first question that came from Thiago, we are very pleased with the trends and the momentum we are experiencing in terms of sales.
The base of comparison is getting harder and harder to beat because we are in a run of several quarters of expressive and material comparable sales growth, well above inflation. But again, there are many drivers, many venues of bringing even more sales to our restaurants, and we continue to execute our strategy with a very disciplined approach, and there are still opportunities to improve our results. So, we are pretty convinced that we will do well for the rest of the year and next year, too.
Daniel Schleiniger: Okay. And then Julia’s last question, a little bit different topic, but we’ll stay with you, Marcelo. “Can you remind me how is the evolution of new openings in terms of sales and margins for year one, year one and maturity?”
Marcelo Rabach: Okay. In terms of the maturity of the restaurants, typically, in the past, we talked about three to four years for the restaurants to get to the mature level of sales, I would say that after the pandemic, we are talking more about three years than four. I think that the curve of maturity got shorter. But that’s something that we continue to look at and to get information from the recent investments. And in terms of returns, what we expect at least is a 20% return cash on cash for the first year. So obviously, that number gets better from year two and so on. And in the last two or three years, the returns were above that 20% that it’s the minimum we ask for the openings. So, we are very pleased with the kind of results that our new restaurants are generating from day one.
Daniel Schleiniger: Great. Thanks, Marcelo. Next, from Felipe Cassimiro from Bradesco. He actually asked a couple of questions that we’ve, I think, already answered. “Could you break down Brazil same-store sales between average check growth and guest volume?” I think Luis touched on that about evenly split. “And going forward, how can you sustain the same-store sales growth in Brazil and NOLAD?” I think also Luis touched on sustaining sales. So, I’ll go to question number two. If anybody has something to add to question one, we can come back to it. But question number two, which I believe is for you, Mariano, “How should we think about gross margin expansion, sustainability, considering beef prices are likely to increase in the next 12 months?”
Mariano Tannenbaum: Yes. The outlook we have for margins we have seen actually in this quarter an improvement in food and paper costs of 90 basis points. And for the rest of 2023, we are also seeing that food and paper costs will remain higher than what it was in 2022. So that’s the main trend that we are seeing now in terms of gross margin for 2023. And the expectation, of course, is to continue negotiating with our main suppliers taking advantage of all the large scale and the volumes that we have that actually are unique in the industry.
