And I think on beef, we’re actually 80% covered for Q4. As far as we look into ’25, we’re, as I said earlier, we’re in the middle of planning process for next year. So we’ll be able to share more in the June call. But I think at this point, we are working through some contracts for next year. So I would hesitate to share a lot at this point.
Gregory Francfort: Thank you for the perspective.
Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Patrick Johnson from Stifel. Your line is now live.
Patrick Johnson: Great, thanks, good morning guys. Rick, I wanted to touch on menu innovation, particularly at Olive Garden and LongHorn. And I’m just curious if there are any opportunities you see to either introduce permanent menu items that still align with the brand strategy or even if there’s potential to create limited time platforms like Never Ending Pasta Bowl that aren’t necessarily discounted, but could drive incremental interest in visits over time?
Rick Cardenas: Yes, Patrick. There’s always room for menu innovation. We’ve got to balance innovation and new items with improving our existing items and making sure our menu stay compact and simpler than they were before COVID. And there’s also always room for kind of limited time, not necessarily promotional offers. So currently, LongHorn has lamb on their menu, and it does really well. It’s doing a lot better than it did last year. And with brands like Cheddar’s, we use opportunity buys to put some items on the menu, but at really great values. And Olive Garden is continuing to look at ways to improve some of their items and maybe introduce an item but take off an item. So yes, we still have a lot of work that we do with innovation.
But most of our guests come to us for what we have on our menu today and we’re not going to alienate the core guest by completely changing those menus around and we don’t plan on getting back to a six or seven-week promotion where an item is great. It does great for six weeks and then the guest comes back in week 10, and it’s not there anymore. And so we’ll continue to innovate but we’ll continue to invade a lot more on improvements, but we’ll introduce new items here and there.
Patrick Johnson: Great. Thank you guys.
Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Lauren Silberman from Deutsche Bank. Your line is now live.
Lauren Silberman: Thank you very much. A few follow-ups. Can you just talk about the same-store sales differences that you’re seeing across regions? And then from a marketing perspective, you’re now running less than 1.5% of sales this year, well below pre-COVID at 3% or even north. So I understand you want to be prudent and protect long-term. Why is this the right level of marketing spend today? How do you assess it even if it’s not deep discounting?
Raj Vennam: Yes, Lauren, so from a regional perspective, we continue to see softness in Texas and California. I think Texas pretty much throughout the year, we had seen weakness, and that continues to be the case. Florida was a little weaker, but nothing crazy. But you also had the weather impact that probably disproportionately impacted both Texas and California during Q3. Different types of events, but weather there, so that’s regional. From a marketing perspective, we’ve been very clear that, look, we’re going to be prudent, we’re going to be very deliberate in how we bring back marketing. We’ve learned a lot in terms of the effectiveness of marketing in different channels, how we deploy it. And we’ve talked about bringing it back at a level that’s more methodical in terms of 10 to 20 basis points increase over time in a way that’s margin neutral, all else being equal.
So that’s kind of really what — how we’re thinking about it. And we have done a lot of work. We continue to do a lot of work on marketing mix analysis and we got our teams of data scientists internally and work with some external partners to ensure that we’re getting the appropriate return, and it’s actually being effective the way we want it to be, which is to elevate brand equity and build long-term guest loyalty.
Lauren Silberman: Thank you. And then if I can just — on the guide, lower sales maintained or increased the lower end of the guide, inflation more favorable. Any other puts and takes in the guide for the year? And then can you just clarify what you’re expecting for the full year on G&A? Thank you.
Raj Vennam: Yes. Let me start with the G&A. We expect G&A to be pretty similar to what we said last time, $440 million, I think, is what we said for last — in the last quarter. So call it roughly $100 million for Q4. Look, I think the big things are we’ve obviously brought down some sales expectation but inflation is better. And then our teams are doing a better job managing our business. So there is some improvement in productivity, improvement in other waste and other types of inefficiencies. But outside of that, nothing that’s not outside of those few items that I’ve just mentioned. But if you just step back and look at what we — where we started the year, right? If we look at the beginning of the year, we said earnings guidance was $8.55 to $8.85.
And we said, to the extent sales slowdown or we see weakness in sales, we should see inflation come down and our cost management continue to help us get us closer to that. And today, we’re talking about earnings guidance of $8.80 to $8.90, now with a lot lower sales, but we got there through other wins. So again, I don’t want to say what we said, we told you, but it’s just — that is reality. That’s what happened.
Lauren Silberman: Thank you. Appreciate it.
Operator: Thank you. Next question is coming from Peter Saleh from BTIG. Your line is now live.
