Operator: Thank you. Our next questions come from the line of Jeff Farmer with Gordon Haskett. Please proceed with your questions.
Jeff Farmer: Thank you. Just following up on modeling post-Ruth acquisition, you shared some information on G&A, but anything you can share as it relates to how we should be thinking about both interest expense and G&A moving forward?
Raj Vennam: Yeah, Jeff. I’d say, interest expense is likely going to be I think for a year-over-year, we’re probably looking at a total of $50 million of which $40 million is related to Ruth’s acquisition. And then the other is just the lease interest and other short-term interest rate exposure we have. So that’s the thing on the interest. And the G&A, I would just really take into consideration the Darden’s G&A and then lay it on Ruth’s from what you have. There’ll be some purchase accounting that we’re working through. So we’ll have some updates on that. But that will be more of a geography, more so than a huge impact. We’ve embedded some incremental step-up in our valuation and in our P&L and that’s incorporated in our guidance, but we’re not ready to share those details yet.
Jeff Farmer: Okay. And just one more. One of your named competitive advantages over the last several years has been this extensive data and insights. But can you share maybe one or two examples of how you were able to leverage that data in ’23 and potentially some untapped opportunities as you move forward in terms of harnessing and really analyzing that data moving forward?
Rick Cardenas: Yeah, Jeff. This is Rick. You think about what we’re starting to do with data, we are starting to use a lot of AI and machine-learning to help guest count forecast and help our restaurants forecast our business better. And that would move all the way down through the company, right. So if you forecast your traffic better, you order better, you receive better, you schedule better, that’s one of the big things that we’ve looked at is using machine-learning and AI. But we got to remember, one of the things that we do every year as we use data to help look at what our guests patterns are, what we think about guests and how do we market to our guests. We also improve operations execution with the data that we have.
But I would say, if you’re asking for one big thing — and is analytics through pricing too. So, we’ve got a great analytics team here that does help with our pricing. They look at restaurants, they look at categories, look at items, they look at elasticity. And we can do all that in-house because of our scale.
Jeff Farmer: All right. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question is coming from the line of Danilo Gargiulo with Bernstein. Please proceed with your questions.
Danilo Gargiulo: Good morning. I’m wondering what is the integration timeline that you are embedding in your EPS accretion expectations. And how is the previous acquisition of Cheddar’s impacting the timeline that you are expecting and what will it take for this integration to accelerate? And I’m talking even beyond the 2024 timeline that you set today.
Raj Vennam: Hey, Danilo, we’re still working through the steps, but our expectation is a lot of the stuff happens over the next 12 months to 15 months. And so that’s why some of those synergies come later because we’re not trying to — we’re trying to be prudent. We’re going to be thoughtful. We got to design this right, make — do this right because we want to set it up for success long term. We’re and we want to make sure we minimize the disruption to operators. And so everything we’re doing, we have a great team working on it. That’s actually being very thoughtfully phasing in these parts of integration and how we integrate different parts of the business. And we’ve learned a lot from our Cheddar’s acquisition. Obviously, Cheddar’s was more complicated with essentially three different businesses being brought under one roof.
