Bloomin’ Brands, Inc. (NASDAQ:BLMN) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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David Deno: Yeah, I think we clearly have seen it in steak recooks and food quality, number one. Steak accuracy has gone up 500 basis points versus [past trim] [ph], and that has been a direct result of the investment that we’ve made in the kitchen, and I’m very, very pleased about that. Consistency of experience is up to 400 basis points, so serving a hot meal on time with great service is for me the most important thing we can do at Outback Steakhouse. Now, where are some of the gaps? What I’d like to see us do, is there more that we can do to maybe enhance our service and enhance the guest experience? We don’t think it would take a lot of money to do that, but how our servers interact with our customers and things like that, there might be some ideas there, which I won’t get into, but there might be some things that we can look at to be more interactive with our guests at Outback, while serving the food in a hot, quick manner that our guests have come to enjoy.

So those are the things that we’re looking at Outback. I’m very pleased with steak accuracy being up so much and consistency of experience being up so much.

Andrew Strelzik: Okay, great. That’s helpful. And just my second one, I just wanted to ask about the commodity inflation outlook with about 1% in the first quarter. I think you said favorable again in the second quarter would apply a little bit of a ramp in the back half. What’s your visibility to that? And is it all beef or is there anything else kind of within that driving the acceleration, if I’m right?

Michael Healy: Yeah, you’re right as far as kind of where we land in Q1 will be maybe a little bit better in Q2. And then we do experience a ramp in the back half, a lot of that is actually driven by seafood as we burn through some deflationary inventory. We actually come upon inflationary inventory in the back half. Beef itself is relatively stable as far as how we plan for the inflation. However, as we mentioned and when we lowered our commodities guide, we are seeing some favorability in beef that we can take advantage of with our current contract and how we reflect that favorability is a little bit TBD based off of the market, but directionally we will see an uptick in commodities in the back half.

Andrew Strelzik: Great. Thank you very much.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Dave Deno for any closing remarks.

David Deno: Thank you very much. We appreciate the questions today. And I personally appreciate the kind words. It means a lot to me. But I want to invite everybody back for our Q2 call later in the year. Take care everyone.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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