Kura Sushi USA, Inc. (NASDAQ:KRUS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 9 of 10

Jimmy Uba: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] So I think in the last quarter, we mentioned that year-over-year labor inflation was about 10% and that’s what we’ve seen largely to the case for our Q3. We’ve seen a little bit of easing. And so I think that’s reflected in the pricing that we took being a lot lower than what we historically take — than what we’ve taken over the last 1.5 years, I’d say it’s a lot closer to what we’ve historically taken, which really speaks to our confidence in terms of where we expect our labor and our COGS to land or period of pricing is going to cover. But yes, low-single digits, mid-single digits of labor. And yes, we’re very happy with where things are going.

Jack Cole: Got it. That’s helpful. And then related to the unit development again, what does the pipeline look like in terms of executed leases versus active units under construction? I think you mentioned seven under construction. So could you just clarify that? And then provide us the number of executed leases.

Jimmy Uba: [Foreign Language] [Interpreted] Yeah. So it’s — we’ve got seven units under construction, most of them being in the back half of their construction phases. We’ve got 11 leases under — 11 leases that have been executed and a number that are we expect to be executed any day now and double, triple, quadruple the number of LOIs. And so yeah, the pipeline is great. We’re very happy with the pipeline.

Jack Cole: Got it. Thank you. That’s all from me.

Jimmy Uba: Thanks, Jack.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Joshua Long with Stephens. Please proceed with your question.

Joshua Long: Great. Thanks for taking the follow-up. Wanted to see if we could dig into the inflationary environment, specifically in the food basket. You talked about how that is coming back in line like we had hoped and sort of expected here in the back half of the year. But I think in prior quarters, we had talked about an opportunity. You all had talked about an opportunity in terms of sourcing, maybe with some contracting around shrimp and salmon or some of the other key proteins. Curious if you could give us an update there. And then, Jeff, I know one of the other initiatives that was on the plate for, at some point, maybe a longer term was the ability to ship to a broadline distribution partner. And so just curious if you have any sort of update there, if any, in terms of just how you’re thinking about that or maybe the timing and potential?

Jeff Uttz: Yeah. I do have an update. So the broadline distribution project really goes hand-in-hand with talked about semi contracts for six months or a year or whatever. We’ll be able to be in a much better position to do that once we get our consolidation underway. The update on that consolidation piece is that, in the past, we had talked about moving to a U.S. broadliner such as Cisco or U.S. Foods. And what we’ve done — what we’ve decided to do is consolidate some of our Japanese broadline distributors, which we already use because what we found is that it was very difficult for the U.S. broadliner to get a hold of some of the very specialized Japanese ingredients that we use in our products, in our food. And since the Japanese broadliners that we use already have those, it’s easier for them than to go get the mainstream type stuff.

So what we’re doing is we’re consolidating down into two suppliers that we already use, and they are Japanese companies that have U.S. operations. And by doing that, we’re going to have the entire country covered but more importantly, we’ll make sure that the very hard to get specialty items that are used in Asian cooking, we’ll be able to get. And so that’s a process that we’re doing in progress. We’ve already done. Many of our SKUs are already consolidated. And I expect that in the next several months, that will be done. In terms of the inflationary environment that we’ve seen, we have seen that continue to ease. We saw about a 2% quarter-over-quarter decline from Q2 to Q3, in our cost of goods sold inflation. So that line continues to move in a positive direction.

Page 9 of 10