The Wendy's Company (NASDAQ:WEN) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 11, 2022 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Greg Lemenchick - Investor Relations

Todd Penegor - President and Chief Executive Officer

Gunther Plosch - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Andrew Charles - Cowen

Gregory Francfort - Guggenheim Securities

Brian Bittner - Oppenheimer

Jeff Farmer - Gordon Haskett

Chris O’Cull - Stifel

Dennis Geiger - UBS

Jeffrey Bernstein - Barclays

Sara Senatore - Bank of America

Brian Mullan - Deutsche Bank

Jon Tower - Citi

Nicole Miller - Piper Sandler

Andrew Strelzik - BMO

Brett Levy - MKM

Jared Garber - Goldman Sachs

Jim Sanderson - Northcoast

Eric Gonzalez - KeyBanc Capital Markets

Peter Saleh - BTIG

Operator

Good morning. Welcome to the Wendy’s Company Earnings Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Greg Lemenchick, Senior Director, Investor Relations and Corporate FP&A, you may begin your conference.

Greg Lemenchick

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Today’s conference call and webcast includes a PowerPoint presentation, which is available on our Investor Relations website, irwendys.com.

Before we begin, please take note of the Safe Harbor statement that appears at the end of our earnings release. This disclosure reminds investors that certain information we may discuss today is forward-looking. Various factors could affect our results and cause those results to differ materially from the projections set forth in our forward-looking statements. Also, some of today’s comments will reference non-GAAP financial measures. Investors should refer to our reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measure at the end of this presentation or in our earnings release.

On our conference call today are President and Chief Executive Officer, Todd Penegor, will give a business update; and our Chief Financial Officer, Gunther Plosch, will review our 2022 first quarter results and provide an update on our outlook for the year. From there, we will open up the line for questions. As a reminder, we will walk through our long-term strategies in detail as part of our upcoming Investor Day in June.

With that, I will hand things over to Todd.

Todd Penegor

Thanks, Greg and good morning everyone. I am extremely pleased with the meaningful progress we made against our three strategic growth pillars in the first quarter, reinforcing the strength and resiliency of the Wendy’s brand.

We achieved a second consecutive quarter of double-digit 2-year Global same-restaurant sales, reaching 15.4% as we lapped one of our best quarters of all time in the prior year. This was an acceleration versus our Q4 on a 2-year basis, which highlights the momentum we have in our business across the globe. Our international business achieved another outstanding quarter with widespread success. We have truly shifted past recovery into a compelling growth story with substantially all our markets achieving sales growth versus 2019.