Portillo's Inc. (NASDAQ:PTLO) Q1 2024 Results Conference Call May 7, 2024 10:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Barbara Noverini - Director, Investor Relations
Michael Osanloo - President & Chief Executive Officer
Michelle Hook - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
David Tarantino - Baird
Sharon Zackfia - William Blair
Dennis Geiger - UBS
Sara Senatore - Bank of America
Brian Harbour - Morgan Stanley
Andy Barish – Jefferies
Brian Mullan - Piper Sandler
Gregory Francfort - Guggenheim Securities
Operator
Greetings and welcome to the Portillo's First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
It is now my pleasure to introduce your host Barbara Noverini, Portillo's Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.
Barbara Noverini
Thank you, operator. Good morning everyone and welcome to our first quarter 2024 earnings call. Our 10-Q, earnings press release and supplemental presentation are posted at investors.portillos.com.
With me on the call today is Michael Osanloo, President and Chief Executive Officer and Michelle Hook, Chief Financial Officer. Any commentary may hear about our future results and business conditions are forward-looking statements, which are based on management's current expectations and are not guarantees of future performance. We do not update these forward-looking statements unless required by law. Our 10-Q identifies risk factors that may cause our actual results to vary materially from these forward-looking statements.
In today's earnings call, we'll make reference to non-GAAP financial measures, which are not an alternative to GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to their most comparable GAAP counterparts are included in this morning's posted materials. Finally, after we deliver our prepared remarks, we will open the lines for your questions.
Now, let me turn the call over to Michael Osanloo, President and Chief Executive Officer of Portillo's.
Michael Osanloo
Thank you, Barb and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2024 earnings call. It's an exciting time at Portillo's. During the first quarter, we opened our fifth restaurant in the Dallas market, and then just a few days ago, we opened our seventh restaurant in the Phoenix, Scottsdale area. We're happy with how quickly we're building scale in the Sunbelt, where there continues to be plenty of room for us to grow.
Now in the first quarter, we grew total sales 6.3% and achieved restaurant-level margins of 21.9%. Our comp was negative 1.2% as we got off to a slow start due to some miserable weather across the Midwest. Please recall, we have 69 restaurants in the comp base and 60 of them are still in the Midwest. This means the majority of our comp base felt the impact of that cold snap. That said, we've seen top-line trends improve going into the second quarter. So far, in April, our efforts have mitigated transaction declines and comp has settled back into the positive low single-digits. For the full-year of 2024, we are still confident in our ability to deliver low single-digit comp, 23% to 24% restaurant level margins and open at least nine new restaurants.