Restaurant Brands International Inc. (NYSE:QSR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: We now turn to Joshua Long with Stephens. Your line is open.

Joshua Long: Great. Thank you for taking the question. When we think about the narrowing of that gap on traffic specific to Burger King US certainly exciting and it seems like you’ve also been able to do that with a real focus on day to day operations and kind of the core equities from a marketing perspective. Just curious if you think there’s more opportunity for upside to continue closing that gap and driving traffic before needing to lean into maybe new product innovations or new LCOs specific to the US.

Josh Kobza: Can I just? I’m going to start by saying we don’t want to narrow the gap because it’s a positive gap for us. We want to expand the gap at this point. And, yes, Joshua I think there are absolutely opportunities to continue to, as Patrick said, expand the gap. So a couple of big ones. I really think the operations side is one of the things we will be continuing to focus on it. I think it’s a huge opportunity. We have made a lot of progress over the last year and a half or so, but there’s still a long way to go. We still have restaurants that have big opportunities in terms of the quality of operations we’re running there, and that is a front center focus for Tom and the team. We want — we made some progress in some of the OP stats, whether it’s our internal ones or some external rankings, but we want to go much farther on that than where we’ve gotten to.

And I think that’s maybe one of the single most important drivers of our traffic opportunity over time and perhaps a bit of an underappreciated one. I also think that what we’re doing on the image side is going to be really powerful and we’ve just gotten started there. So we have a lot more we want to do in terms of modernizing the fleet. And when we do those remodels, especially when they’re the more meaningful ones, those kind of full remodels and the scrapes that I mentioned with John’s question, those are really powerful in driving additional traffic to our restaurants. So as we get more of those going on, I think that’s going to be a bit of a tailwind to.

Joshua Long: Helpful on widening that gap. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes our Q&A. I’ll now hand back to Josh Kobza, CEO, for closing remarks.

Josh Kobza: Thank you all so much for taking the time to join us today. And again thank you very much to all of our team members, to our franchisees, to our restaurant teams around the world who drove a really great quarter this quarter. We look forward to updating everybody on our results again for Q4 in February and wish you all a great rest of the day.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, today’s call is now concluded. We’d like to thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.