Certainly, we want visible sites, so when people drive by they can see it. We try not to hide them too much, but we try and get people excited in advance. And I spent some time talking to mayors of towns and trying to get them kind of excited about us coming into places that they don’t know us. So it’s a combination of things that work, but our marketing teams are doing a great job.
Curtis Valentine: And I’ll just reinforce Jack’s earlier comments around the density in the market helps. Certainly, when you open the 10th store in a market, it’s easier than the first and there is some word-of-mouth and just having the building up and the signage up as people drive by the more and more stores you put in the easier that gets and all those things are coming together to help with new store performance.
Operator: Okay. And our next question will come from Krisztina Katai of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Jessica Taylor: Hi, can you hear me?
Jack Sinclair: Hi, Krisztina.
Jessica Taylor: Hi. This is Jessica Taylor on for Christina. Thanks for taking our question. So I just want to go back to private label a little bit. And in the past, and today you talked about, like, how you watch your competitors’ interest, but don’t worry too much given, the product and customer differentiation. So now, the largest retailer has announced a new private label brand that’s really aiming to increase its share from this set of customers who are more attribute driven and who are more health conscious. So how does this kind of change your view on, like, how you’re watching that competitor and competitors in general who might follow that lead? And how does it kind of impact your go-to-market strategy for your private label and attribute driven items? Thank you.
Jack Sinclair: Yes. Well, Jessica, good question. We’ve been kind of — I’ve been reading with interest the last couple of days as all initiative. We haven’t kind of tasted it or eaten at all. I’ve forgotten what it’s called better for or something. What’s it called?
Curtis Valentine: Better good. Better food.
Jack Sinclair: Better good. So the way I’ve read it and we’ll clearly watch it, Jessica, but the way I’ve read that it’s a tiering in your branded strategy. So it’s trying to trade people off. It’s not necessarily trying to trade people to attributes. And I think that’s how I’m reading it. It doesn’t feel like a health initiative. It feels like a trading up initiative on quality. And again, that’s a pretty common thing from my background in the U.K., how people think about tiering. It feels more like a tiering exercise than it does a health and attribute based active. Although there will be some things in there that oat milk this and something like that. But I didn’t — I felt it was more — we love being next to Trader Joe’s.
I felt it was more a kind of let’s look at Trader Joe’s and take some business from that. But as I say, our Sprouts brand business is very much focused on being differentiated, not about trading up people on the same thing. And so it’s not going to change what we’re going to do. We believe we’ve got a set of target customers that are very relevant to our business and that we can do 30 keto products. I don’t think there’s better for things is going to be that kind of attribute based initiative, but we’ll clearly watch it and be sensitive to how that evolves and develops. Walmart, I’ve got a habit of whatever they do is big.
Jessica Taylor: Yes, that’s true. Thank you so much. And just a follow-up, can you talk a little bit about the cadence through the quarter, for comp trends and any month to-date or quarter to-date trends?
Curtis Valentine: I’ll take that one. We won’t get too specific here in the intra quarter, but pretty consistent from a comp perspective throughout Q1. Q1 is always a little bit noisy. There’s usually some weather events and things like that and you’ll see some weeks up and some weeks down, but generally pretty consistent for us in the quarter. And then certainly within Q2 here, we’re comfortable within our elder guidance range with where the business is trending at the moment.
Jessica Taylor: Great. Thank you so much. Best of luck and congrats on a great quarter.
Curtis Valentine: Thanks, Jessica. I appreciate it.
Operator: And our last question will be coming from Edward Kelly of Wells Fargo. Your line is open.
Evan Ketterhagen: Yes. Hey, guys. This is Evan Ketterhagen on for Ed. Thanks for taking our questions and nice quarter. I know we talked a lot about e-comm already, but just wanted to touch on it a bit more here. We assume that your online sales are included in the overall comp, but could you guys just confirm if that’s correct and if that also includes your Uber Eats partnership that started up more recently? And then the 25% growth this quarter, put up an acceleration versus prior quarters. Do you think that the bad weather in January might have played a role there? Or should we just expect a higher rate of growth going forward with the increased number of partnerships that you have?
Jack Sinclair: Yes. So first part of it, yes, it’s embedded in our comp and included in our comp. And certainly, some of the acceleration would be the new partnership with Uber Eats, which launched kind of mid to late Q4 and has been ramping up. And then the last part of your good question. Yes, we definitely see that when there’s kind of significant weather events, it tends to move some people into e-commerce and out of the stores. And so through the first kind of half of the quarter, we had a few of those and saw that phenomenon. I would add to, again, all three partners recognizing kind of that health trend at the beginning of the year. That’s our Super Bowl as Sprouts and they were right there with us and doing the best they could to capture that with our target customers.
And so we had a lot of activity going on in those first six weeks of the quarter with us, with our partners to try to take advantage of that. And so I think all three of those things are contributing to that stronger e-commerce growth.
Evan Ketterhagen: Awesome. Thanks for the color and good luck.
Jack Sinclair: Thanks.
Curtis Valentine: Thank you.
Operator: I would now like to hand the call back to Jack for closing remarks.
Jack Sinclair: Yes, thanks everyone for your attention and your support. And we look forward to catching up with you in due course. So thanks ever so much. Take care.
Operator: And this concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
