And we also believe that we will see a big uptick in throughput driving up the AUV. And of course, on that higher throughput, the flow through will be approximately 70% as the only kind of cost that will drag us, cost of goods with no additional labor. That is part of the reason we’re doing the retro. And hopefully in the next call or the call for the third quarter, we’ll be in a position to kind of give more accurate and complete numbers around that.
Brian Mullan: Okay. That’s great. Thank you for that. And just a question on development. Last quarter, you mentioned you were looking at potentially exploring a smaller format unit as well. Could you just talk about that? What’s some of the work you’re doing? How far along are you? Is that perhaps part of the plan for the next year or two? Or is that a bit further out? Any color?
Jonathan Neman: Sure. That kind of plays into my comments earlier around how we’re thinking about continuing to evolve the actual experience. And so we have a few designs and prototypes ready that we’ve iterated on. And you should expect to see those smaller format units begin testing early next year. So they’re pretty — we’re about a year away from those kind of hitting, we’re starting to see, starting to understand how they perform. And we think that will be one of the levers as we think to accept, as we look to accelerate our pipeline. I’d say beyond the smaller format, we do see other formats as a huge part of our playbook. So we do believe drive-throughs are a really big opportunity and something we are looking at. And we have some opportunities, especially powered with the IK.
As you know, we’ve seen very, some great success with our current suite lane. We also have a pickup kitchen that does phenomenally well, which is a super small, you know, just a pickup only mobile order and pickup only store. Again, adding the IK into that unlocks a lot of TAM for us. So, as we look forward for our pipeline, we actually see a lot of densification opportunities in markets that we already — we do already very well in as we’re able to kind of fill in with some of these smaller formats and different types of formats.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Katherine Griffin from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Katherine Griffin: Hi, thank you. First, I just have a quick clarification and then a question. So just to clarify because I think the previous revenue guidance had some assumptions baked into it in terms of the downtime associated with the retrofit, that’s still the case. I think even though you haven’t — it sounds like you haven’t really like quantified exactly what that downtime might be. It’s still baked into the guidance?
Jonathan Neman: Yes, that’s correct, Katherine.
Katherine Griffin: Okay. Great. And then the question is just on Protein Plates as a pretty meaningful traffic driver, it seems like. Can you help me just frame or even like quantify how much of the transaction — growth that you’ve seen is from Protein Plates over the last couple of quarters? And then, I guess, how much of that do you think is like trial versus something that’s more sustainable going forward?
Jonathan Neman: Sure. So I can take that. We’ve been very pleased with Protein Plates. I think, again, it’s created — it’s made Sweetgreen something that people now want at dinner, it’s expanded our customer base and is definitely over-indexing in new markets as well. So some of the performance we’re seeing, as I mentioned earlier, around the newer markets where we’re seeing double-digit comps. Much of that is coming from Protein Places. And the dinner growth we’re seeing and the weekend growth we’re seeing is really, really promising. So still, again, it’s less than 6 months in with Protein Place, but we see a lot of opportunity. And as we’ve talked about before, we see Sweetgreen is more than just the solid place, and we’re going to continue to build on these warm hearty craveable, but still healthy options for our guests.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Harbour of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Brian Harbour: Thanks. Good afternoon. Mitch, could you just update us on pricing for the rest of the year? I think you had previously said about 4%, is it still the right number looking forward? Or is it going to be closer to 5%?
Mitch Reback: Thank you, Brian. It’s going to be closer to 4. There’s one point that’s going to be rolling off, I think, in April. And at this point in time, we don’t plan any more price moves for the rest of the year.
Brian Harbour: Okay. Got it. And then just on the topic of throughput and operations, is there anything you could say about — any way you could quantify it in terms of speed of service or in terms of like digital order throughput, other things that might frame for us, the improvement you’ve seen relative to last year?
Jonathan Neman: So there’s a few ways we think about throughput. We think about throughput, both on our frontline, and then we measure that in a 15-minute period. And what we talked about before is that with an additional five transactions in a store that’s about one point in comp. So there’s a very big frontline opportunity. And then on the backline, our digital make lines we have much better data, because the way it’s managed is through what we call a throttle, and where we see the huge opportunity in that is we see — we understand what the lines theoretical throttle are, we understand what the line max throttle is, and then we know where we’re running. And if you look at the stores that are running at max versus things running, where the average is there is a ton of room on those throttles, which we manage for 15 minutes.
So the best stores can do up to 90 orders for 50 minutes, and then you have many stores more in the 40% to 50% range. So there is a big opportunity as we get staffed and trained and deployed correctly to continue to unlock throttles on our digital make line, which we think is a really big opportunity. And again, I’ll take this opportunity to talk about so much of our focus right now its just on running great restaurants. It’s about delivering a consistent, hospitable experience to our guests, which we know brings them back. They tell their friends, it drives that word of mouth. And given the type of food that we serve and the feeling that it gives you, it really — it has this habitual nature to it. So when we do what we need to do, things really work out well, and we’re very, very much focused on this.
And as we’ve invested in our operations team, very excited to have Rossann here with us under her leadership, as well as Ann, our VP of Operations, we feel very good about the work they’re doing to continue to drive great consistent experiences.
Brian Harbour: Thanks.
Operator: There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Rebecca Nounou for closing remarks. That concludes our Q&A session.
Jonathan Neman: Yeah, I’ll just take this opportunity again to thank our team. Thank you for all that you do every day in delivering our mission. And we’ll see you next quarter. Thanks, everyone.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.
