BurgerFi International, Inc. (NASDAQ:BFI) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

BurgerFi International, Inc. (NASDAQ:BFI) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript November 16, 2022

BurgerFi International, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.15, expectations were $-0.25.

Operator: Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for participating in today’s conference call to discuss BurgerFi International’s Financial Results for the Third Quarter-ended October 3, 2022. Joining us today are Ian Baines, CEO; and Mike Rabinovitch, CFO. Following their remarks, we’ll open the call for your questions. Before we begin today, I want to remind everyone this conference call may contain forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements may be related to BurgerFi’s estimates of its future business outlook, liquidity, store opening plans, same-store sales and restaurant operating margin growth plans, prospects or financial results, including the projected sales, restaurant EBITDA or financial results from the company’s acquisition of Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza & Wings.

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

Forward-looking statements generally can be identified by words such as anticipates, believes, estimates, expects, intends, plans, predicts, projects, will be, will continue the likely results and similar expressions. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties which could cause the company’s actual results to differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed in the annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, and those disclosed and other documents that the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

All subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements attributed to BurgerFi or persons acting on BurgerFi’s behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements included in this conference call. The company undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements except as required by law. Given these statements and uncertainties, listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Also, the following discussion may contain non-GAAP financial measures. For a discussion and reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures, please see the earnings release for third quarter 2022. Please note the event is being recorded.

I would like to remind everyone that this call will be available via telephonic replay for two weeks starting today. A webcast replay will also be available via the link provided in today’s press release as well as on the company’s website at www.burgerfi.com. I would now like to turn the conference over to BurgerFi’s CEO, Ian Baines. Ian?

Ian Baines: Thank you for joining us today and we appreciate your continued interest in BurgerFi. I would like to begin by thanking our entire team, franchisees and their employees for their dedication and hard work in this challenging environment. Now, I will recap our third quarter performance and then discuss our current initiatives. Following that, Mike will review the third quarter financials and provide an update on our 2022 guidance. I’m pleased to report total revenue grew 290% to $43.3 million in the third quarter, compared to $11.1 million in the third quarter last year. The significant increase in revenue over the comparable period was related to the acquisition of 61 corporate-owned Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza & Wings in November of 2021, and the addition of new corporate-owned BurgerFi locations.

Anthony’s continues to see a sales uptick was increased sequentially through the third quarter and continued into the month of October, where the brand sales were above that of 2019 for the first time since the pandemic began. Our third quarter consolidated system wide restaurant sales decreased 1% to $70.6 million as we saw a 5% decrease at BurgerFi, which was offset a 4% increase as Anthony’s. System wide comparable same-store sales decreased 2% for the quarter, consisting of a 7% decrease at BurgerFi and 3% increase at Anthony’s. We grew adjusted EBITDA almost eight times to $1.6 million in the third quarter compared to the prior year quarter. Bringing our year-to-date adjusted EBITDA to $6.5 million primarily driven by the acquisition of Anthony’s.

However, as a result of the lower than expected sales of BurgerFi, and various cost pressures due to the current economic environment, we’re now projecting between $9 million to $10 million in adjusted EBITDA for the full 2022. As you know, Hurricane Ian made landfall in our home state of Florida on September 28. All restaurants will reopen within a few days, and we had them all fully operational since. We estimate that hurricanes had a neutral impact on Anthony’s sales, as the majority of our Florida restaurants are on the East Coast. However, it had a slightly negative impact on BurgerFi’s revenues, as we have a high percentage of sales — sorry a high percentage of restaurants on the west coast of the Florida market. I would like to express how proud I am of our teams, and how hard they worked after the hurricane to ensure that our restaurants could reopen quickly so that our guests can enjoy and continue to enjoy our food.

As of October 3, our portfolio consists of 117 BurgerFi restaurants, 25 corporate-owned and 92 franchised, and 61 corporate-owned Anthony’s. We did close one underperforming Anthony’s restaurant in October. Similar to other restaurants in the industry, permitting and construction delays have affected our franchisee partners’ ability to open their restaurants on their original timeline. During the third quarter, we opened one new franchise BurgerFi restaurant, bringing our year-to-date openings to nine restaurants by the third quarter. We plan to open two more franchises in the coming weeks and our final opening this year is scheduled for late December, for a grand total of 13 locations, 10 franchised and three corporate-owned. We are also growing our footprint through virtual kitchens.

This growth opportunity enables us to further expand and capture a new customer base while building brand awareness, with no capital investments of our own. Year-to-date, we have opened 22 Gopuff Fresh Food Halls with plans to open eight additional locations by year end for a total of 30 Gopuff Fresh Food Halls. These units are incremental to our original growth targets. By acquiring Anthony’s last year, we now have the opportunity to cross-sell franchising across both brands and foster attractive, multi-unit, multi-concept franchise deals. As we look ahead, similar to our growth strategy of BurgerFi, future growth at Anthony’s will be focused on asset-light franchise model which facilitates brand expansion without significant capital investment on behalf of the company.

To this end, we are also thrilled to announce we have signed our first multi-unit development agreement for Anthony’s with one of our largest BurgerFi franchisees with three locations over the next three years. We expect the initial location to open in the Spring of 2023 as a co-branded location. This franchisee will be incorporating in Anthony’s into one of their existing BurgerFi’s located in Kissimmee, Florida. Co-branding is another great opportunity for us to drive sales and leverage margins through combining to the fastest growing categories, burgers and pizzas under one roof. My team has been focused this year on finding well capitalized franchisees with restaurants, retail and hospitality experience. Bringing these operators into our system will result in a more disciplined and profitable growth over the long term.

We believe BurgerFi and Anthony’s have a long runway of organic growth ahead. And we are in negotiations with several interested parties for both brands. And the pipeline is looking strong for 2023 and beyond. Looking ahead to 2023 at this time, we plan to open 15 to 20 new restaurants, all of which will be franchised. Now I would like to update you on some of our other strategic initiatives, starting with BurgerFi. Last quarter, we onboarded a new advertising agency to drive brand awareness. Capitalizing on BurgerFi’s unique attributes of quality fresh ingredients on our chef-inspired offerings, I am thrilled to announce it in October in conjunction with a new advertising agency, BurgerFi launched a brand new campaign, Amplify your Appetite to further strengthen our positioning in the better burger category.

This new positioning will amplify the unique flavors and quality of BurgerFi’s fresh preparation, premium options, and the taste of intelligence without the guilt. The Amplify your Appetite Campaign marked refreshing of the brand’s positioning based on leveraging a better for you all-natural burger experience as a unique differentiator. The tone and messaging of this campaign follows an in-depth customer research study that identifies how guests connect with BurgerFi and what they want into the future. We also plan to expand our value offerings and LTO program at BurgerFi to enhance the guest journey. In August burger five partnered with a well-known industry chef, Cliff Pleau and launched the Juicy Lucy burger, which ran through September 19.

We plan to continue having fun with menu innovation, offering even more variety with new LTO menu items ideal for anyone who wants to reward themselves with a better burger. Now while sales of BurgerFi were below our expectations in the third quarter, and as a result of lower sales leverage our restaurant level margins continue to be pressured. We believe our enhanced focus on marketing, operations and day-to-day execution will be effective in France leading to stronger financial returns in the coming quarters. Our guest satisfaction scores continue to improve and we began to see a stabilization in labor, which will lead to better operational performance. And we are confident we have the right plan in place to drive growth for this brand. Turning to Anthony’s, continue to lean into digital marketing and our loyalty reward program to drive awareness.

This has been paying dividends as seen in our increase in same store sales. We’re also seeing an increase in sales outside of our home market of Florida, where brand awareness is not as powerful. We believe this demonstrates our marketing efforts are resonating with our guests. As a result of this sales improvement, we’re continuing to see margin recovery at Anthony’s. While our margins have not yet achieved our pre-pandemic levels, we are optimistic that we can improve profitability over the short and long term. We’ve also begun to see commodity prices ease in some categories, especially chicken wings. We expect this to continue into the fourth quarter and be a tailwind for our margins. Across both brands, we have several digital initiatives underway to improve operations and increased sales, including the continued rollout of self-ordering kiosks, building a loyalty program and enhanced mobile and delivery platforms.

In November, we launched our new app of BurgerFi, which features a better guest experience and offers more benefits to the guests, such as the sale of E-gift cards, amongst other features. In addition, the app contains a prominent link to our Anthony’s brand website as part of engaging in our cross-brand marketing possibilities. Technology improvements will also allow BurgerFi to leverage new data and research to grow and elevate the overall guest experience. Now turning to kiosks specifically, as of today 22 of our corporate-owned BurgerFi and 10 franchise-owned BurgerFis have kiosks available for ordering and we expect more will begin to adopt the technology as time progresses. Kiosks can be a high margin channel as they allow us to market directly to our guests, add on and upsells, ensure order accuracy and redeploy or reduce our labor.

At Anthony’s, we have fully rolled out our AI technology phone entering system for those that still like to call in orders. This is especially helpful during our peak periods. Early indications have proven that this is a seamless experience and similarly to the kiosks, we are seeing an uptick in the average check by guests that choose to use this channel. Before turning the call to Mike, I’d like to share that for the month of November, we joined forces with Marcum LLP, set up by one of the nation’s leading accounting and advisory firms to provide Hurricane Ian relief to those in need in southwest Florida. BurgerFi and Anthony’s will donate a portion of proceeds along with encouraging guests to dine-in and donate to the Red Cross. Guests are able to add $1 to their meal to BurgerFi or round up at Anthony’s and Marcum and plans to match up to $10,000 in donations.

So on closing, we have two very high quality brands that are on trend with the consumer. And we believe we’re in the early innings with both brands, since we believe they have significant whitespace for growth ahead. We are laser-focused on enhancing operations and driving sales to achieve profitable growth. Once again, I’d like to thank all of our team members for their tireless efforts and dedication. I’ll turn the call over to our CFO, Mike Rabinovitch, who will provide additional commentary on our third quarter 2022 performance. Go ahead, Mike.

See also 15 Biggest Ice Cream Companies in the World and 15 Biggest Import-Export Companies in the World.

Mike Rabinovitch : Thank you, Ian and good morning, everyone. As a reminder, we acquired Anthony’s on November 3, 2021. I will speak to our recorded results, which includes Anthony’s for the third quarter of 2022. Additionally, I’d like to remind you that in July, our board of directors approved the company’s change to a 50 to 53-week fiscal year ending on the Monday nearest to December 31 of each year, in order to improve the alignment of the financial and business processes following our acquisition of Anthony’s. This change is reflected in our fiscal third quarter financials ended October 3. As a result, our current fiscal year will now end on January 2, 2023. Let me start by discussing our financials in greater detail. Third quarter total revenues were $43.3 million, increasing 290% from $11.1 million for the same quarter last year.

This increase was due to approximately $31.5 million of sales contributions from Anthony’s which was acquired late last year. Shifting to our segments’ results for the third quarter. The BurgerFi corporate-owned restaurant sales increased $300,000 or 4%, to $8.8 million for the third quarter of 2022, compared to $8.5 million in the same period in the prior year, driven by the addition of new corporate-owned restaurants over the last year partially offset by a decline in same store sales. BurgerFi system wide same store sales decreased by 7% for the quarter, compared to 2021. For corporate-owned BurgerFi, same store sales decreased 11% and franchised restaurant same store sale decreased 6% versus 2021. System wide sales for BurgerFi in the third quarter decreased 5% $39.1 million, compared to $41.4 million in the year ago quarter, primarily due to the decline in same store sales partially offset by new restaurant growth.

BurgerFi’s restaurant level operating expenses increased 370 basis points to 93.4% for the quarter, compared to 89.7% in the prior year second quarter, primarily due to lost leverage on fixed costs due to the same store sales declines. Turning specifically to Anthony’s. Restaurant sales were $31.5 million in the third quarter compared to $30.4 million in the prior year. This increase was driven by a 3% increase in same store sales when compared to 2021. Turning to restaurant profitability, Anthony’s restaurant level operating expenses improved 210 basis points for the quarter, compared to the prior year third quarter. As Ian noted, we are beginning to see a stabilization of commodity costs, especially chicken wing prices, and expect margins to continue to improve in the fourth quarter.

Our third quarter results also included $2.6 million in employee retention tax credits, made available through the CARES Act legislation. On a consolidated basis, we reported a net loss of $3.3 million in the third quarter, compared to a net loss of $5 million in the year ago quarter. The change is primarily due to the employee retention tax credits, partially offset by the net operating results of Anthony’s. Adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter increased 755% to $1.6 million compared to approximately $200,000 in the year ago quarter. This year-over-year improvement was driven by the acquisition of Anthony’s. Moving to the balance sheet. Our cash balance at October 3 2022, was $14.1 million compared to $14.9 million at December 31, 2021. Moving on to our fiscal year ’22 outlook.

We are updating our expectations for the full year. Our 2022 guidance is as follows. Total revenue of between $175 million to $180 million, which assumes a low single digit increase in same store sales for company-owned restaurants, and the addition of 12 to 13 new restaurants, three corporate-owned and nine to 10 franchises, as well as up to 30 BurgerFi, Gopuff ghost kitchens this year. Adjusted EBITDA of between $9 million and $10 million, and we’re expecting capital expenditures to be approximately $2 million for the full year. With that, operator, please open up the call for questions.

Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Peter Saleh from BTIG. Please go ahead.

Peter Saleh : Great. Thanks. And good morning. I just wanted to circle back a little bit on the — maybe the hurricane impact. I know you guys said it was a neutral impact on the Anthony’s slightly negative impact on BurgerFi. Any way to tease out or quantify how much of an impact on BurgerFi sales and just curious if I had any other impact on costs with labor? Anything of the sort that we can — we should be aware of this quarter?

Ian Baines : Sure, Peter. I’ll try to provide a little color. On Anthony’s, our stores — although we still have 28 stores in Florida. They’re really well dispersed. And so, although the store the Anthony’s locations in the west coast and around Orlando had some impact and being closed for a few days, we saw an uptick in other restaurants in other geographies as people migrated away from the storm and enjoyed the Anthony’s product to call it in Miami or Palm Beach. So that was almost call it a neutral effect. I would say that there’s probably a very small amount of food that might have had been wasted in a few locations. On the BurgerFi side though, we don’t have the same math in terms of — I think we had about six restaurants between Tampa heading south to Naples.

And so they were impacted from anywhere from two days to six days. They certainly had to throw out some of their food and reorder as well. We didn’t see that they move over to the rest of the brand. But I don’t think that it quantified up to be a notable change in our sales. I don’t think that it would have exceeded a 1% impact or a 2% impact in the quarterly decline. So if it was a thing the team worked hard to try to stabilize it certainly an influencer but not a driver.

Peter Saleh : Understood. Okay. Very helpful. Can you help us understand maybe for BurgerFi and Anthony’s maybe some of the components of same store sales here? How much pricing traffic mix were in the comps in the quarter?

Ian Baines : Sure. So if you’re looking at Q3 versus Q3 in the prior year, both brands had taken increases in December, which is past the prior year Q3, and then again in June of 2023. So both brands had price. I’d say from a BurgerFi perspective, it would be low double digits, maybe 10% to 12% on a cumulative basis between those two price increases on the Q3 to Q3. And on Anthony’s probably 6% to 8% — 6%?

Mike Rabinovitch : Yeah, 6%.

Ian Baines : 6%. So both brands had price lift. But on a transaction perspective, BurgerFi continued to have the clients and traffic count versus the same time last year. Last year, we were enjoying Florida as a haven for other markets throughout the U.S. that were in a more closed restricted manner. So we had a little bit of a bump in in traffic and activity. But even without that, our transaction counts were down.

Peter Saleh : Okay, and just any way to – just give us a sense on where BurgerFi is relative to 2019 sales. And I know you guys mentioned that you’re starting to see some uptick, at least for Anthony’s in the month of October. Are you seeing any improvement on the BurgerFi side as well?