Alex Sturnieks: Very helpful. And then I’ll just take one more from me on. Kind of going back to the restaurant level margin, what’s your outlook for commodity prices and anything we should be watching? And also any commentary on labor costs going forward?
Steven Cirulis: Sure. Well, certainly, we benefited in 2023 from a little bit of deflation, honestly on the commodity side in Q4, down about 110 basis points. For the year ahead, we’re looking at low single digits for our commodity cost increases. And with wage inflation, it’s really sort of stabilized. We had a lot of movement in — late 2021, 2022 and into early 2023. But I think over the last several quarters, we’ve seen a stabilization in terms of wage inflation. It’s still inflating, but it’s inflating kind of in that low to mid-single-digit range consistently, and it’s not moving around certainly as much as the commodities have moved around on us.
Alex Sturnieks: Thank you, guys.
Steven Cirulis: Yeah. Thanks, Alex.
Operator: The next question is from Matt Curtis from William Blair. Please go ahead.
Matt Curtis: Hi. Good afternoon. I think you guys took a price increase recently. So I just wanted to ask how much price you’re carrying now and then how much of the price benefit you have embedded in your full year guidance? And then separately for the first quarter guidance, I was just wondering, if you could quantify the weather penalty that’s in that negative 25 basis points to plus 50 basis points guidance?
Steven Cirulis: Sure. I’ll start. So Matt, with Q4, we carried in about $0.03 point into that quarter. We raised private not to see what else we — we had a gross price increase of 3.8%, so it was 3.5% in Q4, plus — so 0.3% on the carry forward and an additional 3.5% or 3.8% for Q4. As we look ahead to this year, we’re going to have a bit more story with our price increases, low, low single-digit price increases, three of them similar timing to what we had last year. We just had one in the quarter. We’re carrying into this quarter, let’s see, it looks like about 3.3% of price into Q1.
Matt Curtis: Okay. Great. And then for the weather penalty for the first quarter?
Bob Wright: Yeah, I think we’re not probably not even able to break out weather impact, because everyone is experiencing, and I think we saw a similar impact, given the geography that we have that you may have seen with other fast casual and QSR brands. I think the key with the discussion around weather is what’s happened with the trajectory since January. We saw some nice stabilization in February and continue to be pleased with the trajectory as we kind of moved through the quarter. So it’s not a very — it’s a little more art than science to try to peg exactly what you think weather impact has been. But you can certainly see it, when you’re experiencing during that January period.
Matt Curtis: Okay, understood. And then separately for the recent perks update Bob you walk through some of the customer-facing aspects of it, but could you tell us anything about what you may have done on the back end to improve your ability to incentivize visits or execute targeted offers more effectively for other what is driving engagement?
Bob Wright: Yes, it’s a great question, Matt. Because I think the beauty of some of the changes that we made when you make those kind of pro customer changes with your loyalty program, it means that you unlock a number of things that we can do on the backend. You know with 12 menu items versus the one on trade that you could exchange or perks points for today, we’re already seeing the kind of behavioral shifts among our Perks consumers and what their preferences are when they like to redeem something and for what they want to trade it for. We’re very pleased with the balance across those categories and across those menu items. And it’s very early going. Because you have two different things happening with our consumers we have customers Perks members that are able to earn those rewards at several different stages.
We have many more things we can communicate with the Perks members about when they’re getting close to something if they’re there near the next level with the three on — the three levels of performance with some with achieving Boss level for example at the at the peak level we can start to speak to our Perks members when they’re getting close to leveling up to the next level. And what that means for them and their ability accelerate their coins and the earning of their coins. So the nurturing flows that come in on the back end is one of the best advantages of this. And I think the primary number I shared in the prepared remarks to tell you why we’re excited about it. They have an 87% increase in Perks member acquisition year-over-year during the quarter.
It means that we’re developing that relationship deeper and deeper with more and more of our customers as they move from consumer to customer from customer and member and from member to even more active member. So there’s a lot ahead of us still with the Perks program. But so far we’re very, very pleased with the transition from.
Matt Curtis: Okay. Sounds good. Thanks very much.
Bob Wright: Thank you.
Operator: The next question is from Todd Brooks with The Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.
Todd Brooks: Hey, good afternoon, gentlemen. Hope you are well? I have a few questions left here at the tag. And first of all, Bob you talked about roughly a 20% increase in the brand fund year-over-year in 2024 versus 2023. I know there’s a certain scale that you want to get to before maybe opening up other channels of spending to support and grow the brand, but can you talk about how you how you anticipate putting those additional dollars to work if it’s any new channels? Is it is it more on more breadth of what we’re doing through kind of digital channels would just love to hear how those incremental assets are being put to work?
