This is the best pipeline we’ve ever had. I could not be more excited. I wish I could tell you what they were right now, but you’re going to have to wait until the next call.
Jeremy Hamblin: Great. Thanks for taking all the questions and best wishes.
Jeff Uttz: Of course. Thank you.
Hajime Jimmy Uba: Thank you, Jeremy.
Operator: Thank you Our next question comes from the line of Sharon Zackfia with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Sharon Zackfia: Thanks for taking the question. Jeff, I have to confess that I was a little surprised that you raised revenue guidance this early in the fiscal year. So — but I’m curious on the $1 million raise, was it [Technical Difficulty] anticipated in initial guidance? Was it the opening schedule [Technical Difficulty] is this just [Technical Difficulty] in the business?
Jeff Uttz: Hey, Sharon, you’re cutting out a little bit on my end, but I think I got the gist of your question. So as Jimmy mentioned earlier on one of the questions that was asked, the cadence of the opening is going quicker than we had expected, which is why we decided to raise the guidance. We feel that we’re going to have some more operating weeks and have an additional unit come in at the end of the year, which is why we raised it $1 million and not more than that. To talk about some of the things that have been happening with the openings and the markets that we’re opening in, we have seen some of the permitting problems that we did have last year ease, and some of the site selection has been really good. And landlords are excited about getting us in.
And I was talking to our Chief Development Officer recently, in fact, last night, and he was telling me that these landlords are getting their work done quicker because they want to get us in and they’re excited about having Kura Sushi as part of their portfolio. And the quicker that they can get their work done, the quicker that we can get our work done and we can get open. And we’re seeing that happen, which is why we raised the guidance a little bit. Wanted to get through the first quarter and kind of see how that played out. We thought that that’s how it would be, but we wanted to get through the first quarter and kind of watch what happened before we raised the guidance. So that’s why we are where we are now.
Sharon Zackfia: Very helpful. And then on the traffic improvement you saw in November, obviously, pretty meaningful. We can all kind of do the math. I mean, is there anything in particular you attribute November too or in hindsight that you attribute prior two months to being a little bit than November?
Hajime Jimmy Uba: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] We would attribute the acceleration in traffic in November largely for our new rewards program. We’re very pleased with its capabilities. Part of it was — in November, we were just making a push to migrate more of our existing users, sort of a final push. And so we had a promotion around that. In December, we started a promotion where this was the first time we’ve ever done this and something that we could only do because we have a rewards program that can track this kind of thing where — but we made an offer where if you come twice in December, you get a 20% off coupon for January. And so that was very good for driving traffic in December. And obviously, it’s going to be a traffic driver in January as well when people come to redeem that coupon.
Sharon Zackfia: [Technical Difficulty] the robotic dishwasher, which I know we’re all very excited about, I think [Technical Difficulty] in the spring, I’m just wondering if that’s still on plan and [Technical Difficulty] went really well. What could the time frame look like for a rollout into new units going forward?
Jeff Uttz: Yeah. So we are still in — we are still on pace for a test in spring. I’m very much looking forward to it. I’d say that the technology is largely ready. It’s just a matter of getting it battle-tested. There is a — it’s a little bit tricky to go from the prototype to the mass market model just — or the mass-produced model, just given that there are some material changes. And so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s going to be at least 12 months from when the mass-produced model is finalized. At that point, I can get the actual parts list and bring it to the regulatory organizations, but that’s a pretty opaque process. And so it would probably be 12 months minimum from testing, and then it would just be the timing for which stores we can plan ahead in terms of a layout to accommodate the robot dishwasher.
Sharon Zackfia: Thank you and Happy New Year.
Hajime Jimmy Uba: Thank you. Happy New Year.
Benjamin Porten: Thanks, Sharon.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jeffrey Bernstein with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.
Jeffrey Bernstein: Great. Thank you very much. A couple of questions on the comp trend. The first one, I think for the fiscal quarter you did a 3.8% and I think you said the pricing was 9% and the traffic if I heard right, was at 3.3%. So that would imply, I guess, a negative 8% or so in mix. And I think you said the plates were flat. So I guess it sounds like an ongoing, maybe non-Sushi check management. I’m just wondering how you think about that negative offset, whether you see that as a concern or whether that concern is abating kind of that missing component of presumably the meaningfully negative mix shift, kind of how you think about that.
Hajime Jimmy Uba: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] So in terms of the negative mix, it’s certainly there, but it — we don’t really think of it as a concern. Our focus remains traffic. Our marketing is geared around that. Our overall strategy is geared around that. We think that that’s the hardest part and really where we shine brightest, especially in comparison to our peers. In terms of average check management, we think of that actually as a unique feature for our guests that comes from our service model. Guests can come in no matter what their budget is and that’s one of — we never price people out, and that’s one of the reasons that our traffic is doing so strongly. But in spite of that mix pressure, our restaurant-level operating profit margin is 19.5%, a meaningful improvement over the 18.2% last year.
And so our thought again is traffic is our focus. We can leverage our fixed costs against traffic and that gets us the margins that we like That being said, of course, we love it when our guests do have greater attachment side menu items, et cetera. And so we do have some promotional campaigns in the pipeline that are geared towards improving guest spend.
