Benjamin Porten: We’re really excited about DC Comics. We think it’s going to get us in front of a new and different audience from what the past collaborations have done. We haven’t baked it, like baked in a bonanza, and we’d be really pleased to see it beat Demon Slayer. But one thing is that DC will be starting in August, whereas Demon Slayer had July and August.
George Kelly: Understood. Thanks.
Benjamin Porten: Thanks, George.
Operator: We have a follow-up question from the line of Todd Brooks with The Benchmark Company. Please proceed with your question.
Todd Brooks: Hey, thanks for squeezing me in. Just going back to the commodity side, I believe across the course of last year when demand was robust, your supply chain had issues keeping up. So your vendor base got a little deconsolidated. As we’re looking towards that predictability, Jeff, that you talked about with COGS forecasting going forward and maybe review how the process of reconsolidating with fewer vendors, more volume and then maybe the scale advantages that you’re finding as you do that. And then my follow-up to that one is given the improvement that we’re seeing with the commodity inflation side and the strong sales results, is there a way to think about an exit rate with the initiatives that are in place for this year for where restaurant-level margin should be targeted at as we’re thinking about going into 2024? Thank you.
Jeff Uttz: Yes. So €“ and I’m going to let Jimmy and Ben also to elaborate on kind of last year as well because I wasn’t with the company last year. But my understanding, during the pandemic what happened is we were coming out of the pandemic, there’s a lot of our suppliers had stopped supply having on hand as much product as they did because they ended up throwing so much away during the pandemic. They were a little bit shy in terms of how much they had on board. So we had to go to some other suppliers and that really drove their COGS up last year because we had to go to a new supplier, we weren’t able to really negotiate with them, we were just kind of had our backs against the wall a little bit and they had to go to them and say, we need this product.
They were able to provide it at the quality we needed, but we did pay for that. So there were no vendors that I know of that we really €“ any of our large vendors especially that were really lost, it was just more of a shortage of the supply they were supplying and we’re back to buying our products from the pre-pandemic suppliers for the most part. And is there anything additional?
Jimmy Uba: No. I think, you explained everything.
Jeff Uttz: Okay. And then Todd, I’m sorry, can you ask your second question again one more time please?
Todd Brooks: Yes. Just I’m listening to the commentary on the call and the normalization that we’re seeing in inflation and the sequential improvement and scale benefits the Cisco rollout proceeding over this year. I’m just trying to get my mind around kind of what you guys are thinking maybe for an exit rate for restaurant-level margins kind of going into fiscal 2024 so you would start to think about earnings power in that year? Thanks.
