Noodles & Company (NASDAQ:NDLS) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call May 8, 2024 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Mike Hynes - CFO
Drew Madsen - CEO

Conference Call Participants

Todd Brooks - The Benchmark Company
Jake Bartlett - Truist Securities
Andy Barish - Jefferies
Jake Bartlett - Truist Securities

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to today's Noodles & Company First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants are in listen-only mode. After the presenters' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.

I would now like to introduce Noodles & Company's Chief Financial Officer, Mike Hynes.

Mike Hynes

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2024 earnings call. Here with me this afternoon is Drew Madsen, our Chief Executive Officer. I'd like to start by going over a few regulatory matters. During our remarks, we may make forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company.

Any such items should be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. Such statements are only projections, and actual events or results could differ materially from those projections due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those referred to in this afternoon's news release and the cautionary statement in the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q and subsequent filings with the SEC. During the call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating the company's operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in our first quarter 2024 earnings release.

To the extent that the company provides guidance, it does so only on a non-GAAP basis and does not provide a reconciliation of forward-looking non-GAAP measures. Quantitative reconciling information for these measures is unavailable without unreasonable efforts.

With that, I would like to turn the call over to Drew Madsen, our Chief Executive Officer.

Drew Madsen

Thanks, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone.

We are definitely encouraged by our first quarter results as we continue to make progress against all five of our strategic priorities. Now I use the word encouraged because of the improving trends we saw in traffic and sales as we moved through the first quarter and into April. More specifically, traffic during Q4 of 2023 was down 9%. This year, traffic during Q1 was down 7.3%, only modestly better than Q4 of 2023.