John Ivankoe: Hi, thank you. I remember in past periods, there were a number of things that you’ve done that aren’t necessarily operationally difficult, and I don’t think overly discounts the brands, things like dinners for two, buy one take one, maybe even highly targeted couponing to certain lower income consumers to bring them back. Those types of things did prove effective to the Darden of the past. I mean, I wonder if ideas like that are on the table? It’s the first part of the question. And secondly, a lot of the higher income consumer, obviously, as you’re getting more price resistant about some of the restaurants that they visit, is there a way to invite some of the higher income consumer maybe through different types of promotions back in Olive Garden as well that you haven’t been doing in the past couple of years? Thank you.
Rick Cardenas: Hey, John. Yes, that was — the deep discounting, couponing, a lot of promotions was kind of a Darden pre-COVID. This is the Darden post-COVID, which is when we’re talking about marketing, being things that elevate brand equity that are easy to execute and they’re not at a deep discount. It doesn’t mean that we won’t have price points on things over time, but that’s kind of more of our everyday low price or around that price. You think about Never Ending Pasta Bowl, we ran that this year at $13.99. It was a great promotion for us. And that was at $13.99. So we can think about doing those things again next year with Never Ending Pasta Bowl. We already have buy one take one on our menu basically, with the $6 take homes.
So there’s a lot of everyday value already. In terms of kind of talking to the higher-end consumer, as I mentioned, we actually grew at the higher end consumer at all of our segments. The 200,000-plus, 150-plus was up year-over-year. But I think you could see a little — a few signs of some consumers trading down within our brands. When you think about LongHorn did really well with — as they grew even at a little bit — at the high-end consumer at a little bit lower, the 150, 125, and they had actually positive check. And so we’re seeing some of that shift in some ways. And so we think as long as we execute great and we have great word of mouth, that will get that higher-end consumer maybe to trade to one of our brands from someone else, even if it trades from one of our current brands to one of our brands, that’s fine with us, too.
But again, long-term, every day, talk about what our core equities are, execute better than the restaurant next door, and we’ll win, and we’ll deal with short-term challenges.
John Ivankoe: And is the company discussing kind of reintroducing or at least thinking about a more effective way to approach loyalty? I mean, is that something that becomes table stakes in ’24 and ’25 or are we happy with the current approach?
Rick Cardenas: We’re happy with the current approach. If you think about loyalty and full-service restaurants, frequency isn’t super high. And we’ve learned that when we did loyalty before. And so it’s a little bit less valuable for a consumer, we believe. Now there’s other ways to get that data. The value of loyalty is the data that you get, and we have other ways to grab that data. Doesn’t mean that we won’t think about loyalty in the future. We’re just focusing on what we can do right now to continue to execute better to drive results and not to drive something that’s just buying sales, because we’ll have to keep buying it next year and the year after that. We don’t want to go out and buy sales. We want to go out and earn those sales.
Operator: Thank you. Next question today is coming from Danilo Gargiulo from Bernstein Research. Your line is now live.
Danilo Gargiulo: Great, thank you. So first of all, it appears the LongHorn, whether these challenges of this tough operating environment better than other brands. So I’m wondering what cost and what learnings could be applied to the other brands?
Raj Vennam: So Danilo, I think as we talked about in the past, there’s a lot of things, right? First of all, let’s start with the big picture. We’ve talked about how, in general, Steak does a little bit better when beef prices are higher just because of the relative gap between the consumer would rather not take risk on cooking something that’s expensive. So let’s start with that big picture. With that said, within the steak category, not everybody is winning. So if you look at LongHorn, our performance has been driven by our execution. We talk about the simple operations, quality, investments in quality. So our team, Todd and the team have done a great job over the last four years, invest — continuing to invest in the food and in service.
And so if you look at it overall, you get a better value today than you ever did. So if you look at their pricing, it has been a lot lower in the industry versus the industry and especially for the Steak House, their pricing has been much lower than the competition. So the value equation is much better and a great execution. Really, those are the two things.
Danilo Gargiulo: Great, thank you, Raj. And I want to follow-up on one of the comments that Rick was just making on, the level of attraction of your customers over the long period of time. And I wonder if you can provide some update on your customer trends with regards to the frequency at which they are spending in your brand? And maybe if you can offer also some insight on the size of your eClub member say versus the past and the total addressable market that you have? So how many customers you’re seeing on a monthly basis at any of your brands?
