Jack in the Box Inc. (NASDAQ:JACK) Q2 2023 Results Conference Call August 9, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Chris Brandon - Vice President, Investor Relations

Darin Harris - Chief Executive Officer

Dawn Hooper - Interim Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Brian Bittner - Oppenheimer

Gregory Francfort - Guggenheim Securities

Brian Mullan - Piper Sandler

Andrew Charles - TD Cowen

David Tarantino - Baird

Dennis Geiger - UBS

Alex Slagle - Jefferies

Brian Harbour - Morgan Stanley

John Tower - Citi

Chris Carril - RBC Capital Markets

Jeffrey Bernstein - Barclays

Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Dia, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Jack Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Webcast. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session [Operator Instructions].

Now I’d like to turn the call over to Chris Brandon, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Chris Brandon

Thanks, operator, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining today's conference call highlighting results from our second quarter 2023. With me today are Chief Executive Officer, Darin Harris; and our Interim Chief Financial Officer, Dawn Hooper. Following their prepared remarks, we will be happy to take questions from our covering sell-side analysts. Note that during both our discussion and Q&A, we may refer to non-GAAP items. Please refer to the non-GAAP reconciliations provided in the earnings release, which is available on our Investor Relations Web site at jackinthebox.com. We will also be making forward-looking statements based on current information and judgments that reflect management's outlook for the future. However, actual results may differ materially from these expectations because of business risks. We, therefore, consider the safe harbor statement in today's earnings release and the cautionary statements in our most recent 10-K to be part of our discussion. Material risk factors as well as information relating to company operations are detailed in our most recent 10-K, 10-Q and other public documents filed with the SEC and are available on our Investor Relations Web site.

And with that, I would like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Darin Harris.

Darin Harris

Thank you, Chris. I want to begin by thanking our restaurant level team members, our franchisees and the Jack and Del Taco corporate staff who continue to make us proud of their dedication to serve our guests and the results being achieved from the execution of our strategy. We are very pleased with the performance of our business in Q3 and we continue to see the execution of our strategy deliver results. In the quarter and year-to-date, we have demonstrated continued top line and margin momentum that has resulted in impressive adjusted EBITDA and operating EPS growth. I believe our performance reflects three items, strong operations execution, the right promotions at the right time and effective communication and engagement with our core users. This quarter was also an exciting milestone for entering new markets in our future growth with a very successful start to our entry into Salt Lake City and strong sales results right from the start. We are also pleased to reiterate our guidance from last quarter, while increasing our share repurchase outlook as a result of the accelerated refranchising of Del Taco restaurants. As you saw this morning, we're very excited to announce that Brian Scott has accepted the role of Chief Financial Officer at Jack in the Box. Brian brings tremendous experience to the Jack family, including a decade long tenure as CFO of AMN Healthcare, helping take the company public and grow it into a $3.5 billion leader within its industry. We look forward to introducing you to him. And lastly, I'd like to give a special thanks to Dawn Hooper, who has done an outstanding job the past eight months as our Interim Chief Financial Officer. Part of this morning's announcement included the addition of Dawn to our executive leadership team. I, along with our management team, am excited to be continuing to work closely with her and she will make a great addition to our team going forward.