Noodles & Company. (NASDAQ:NDLS) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call November 6, 2024 4:30 PM ET

Company Participants

Drew Madsen - Chief Executive Officer
Mike Hynes - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Jake Bartlett - Truist Securities

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to today's Noodles & Company's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce Noodles & Company's Chief Financial Officer, Mike Hynes. Please go ahead.

Mike Hynes

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our third 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 the call, 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 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 third 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 reconciliations 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. Our third quarter results reflect both industry-wide volatility caused by a difficult consumer environment that has led to significantly elevated levels of competitive discounting as well as two other dynamics specifically related to Noodles, a high level of prior year discounting in the third quarter plus an unexpected sudden drop in third-party delivery sales. Collectively, these negatively impacted our short-term results in the third quarter.

That said, we remain very encouraged by our positioning for long-term growth, aided by the positive early results from our menu innovation work, which I will touch on shortly.