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Text: Joining me on the call today are Gene Lee, Darden's Chairman and CEO; Rick Cardenas, President and COO; and Raj Vennam, CFO.
Any reference to pre-COVID when discussing first quarter performance is a comparison of the first quarter of fiscal 2020.
This is because last year's results are not meaningful due to the pandemic's impact on the business and the limited capacity environment that we operated in during the first quarter of fiscal '21.
We plan to release fiscal 2022 second quarter earnings on Friday, December 17 before the market opens, followed by a conference call.
Rick will give an update on our operating performance, and Raj will provide more detail on our financial results and an update of our fiscal '22 financial outlook.
Our teams continue to operate effectively in a challenging environment.
And I'm proud of their focus and ability to deliver another quarter of strong sales and profitability.
All of our segments delivered record first quarter profit.
Our ability to drive profitable sales growth is a testament to the strength of our business model and our continued to adherence this strategy we implemented six years ago.
Our brands remain laser focused on executing our back-to-basics operating philosophy anchored in food, service and atmosphere, while at the Darden level, we concentrate on strengthening and leveraging our four competitive advantages of significant scale, extensive data and insights, rigorous strategic planning, and our results-oriented culture.
Our first quarter sales trends started strong.
This momentum carried over from the fourth quarter, and they further strengthened and peaked in July.
However, in August, sales slowed due to the impact of the Delta variant, but remained positive relative to pre-COVID levels.
For the first quarter, sales per operating week were up 4.8% relative to pre-COVID.
And through the first three weeks in September, sales per operating week were up approximately 7% relative to pre-COVID.
Regardless of the operating environment, our unwavering commitment to our strategy ensures we will stay focused on what we do best, providing exceptional guest experiences.
Throughout this unique period, our operators have shown tremendous flexibility, while remaining locked in on the fundamentals of running great restaurants.
At the same time, our focus helps us continue to find ways to make our competitive advantages work even harder for us.
One of the ways we do this is by leveraging our ability to open value-creating new restaurants.
We opened seven new restaurants during the quarter, all of which are exceeding our expectations.
And we remain on track to open approximately 35 to 40 new restaurants this fiscal year.
A long-term framework calls for 2% to 3% sales growth from new restaurants.
Given our stronger unit economics, our development team is working hard to build out a pipeline of locations for fiscal '23 and beyond that would put us at or above the higher end of our framework.
As I visit our restaurants and talk with our teams, I'm constantly reminded why our people are our greatest competitive advantage.
Their passion for being of service to our guests and each other fuels our success.
Our success this quarter was driven by the work we have done to simplify our processes and our menus to drive execution at the highest level.
We also paused any new initiatives in order to further eliminate distractions for our restaurant teams and allow them to focus on what it takes to run 14 great shifts a week.
In addition, To-Go sales continue to benefit from the ongoing evolution of our digital platform.
This platform makes it simpler for our guests to visit, order, pay and pick up, all while making it easier for our teams to execute at the highest level, both in the dining room and off-premise.
This served our teams well, as To-Go sales remained high through the quarter.
For the quarter, off-premise sales accounted for 27% of total sales at Olive Garden and 15% of total sales at LongHorn Steakhouse.
Digital transactions accounted for 60% of all off-premise sales during the quarter, and guest satisfaction metrics for off-premise experiences remained strong.
As we navigate short-term external pressures, our focus is simple.
We must continue to win when it comes to our people and product.
From a people perspective, the employment environment is challenging.
That's why our top priority during the quarter was staffing our restaurants.
Our operators and HR teams have done a great job sourcing talent.
We recently launched a new talent acquisition system that helps increase our pool of candidates by allowing applicants to apply and schedule an interview in five minutes or less.
Additionally, our brands are successfully utilizing their digital platforms, including social media to promote our employment proposition and drive applications.
As a result, we are netting more than 1,000 new team members per week, and our team member count is approximately 90% of our pre-COVID levels.
The biggest operational challenge we've been dealing with is a temporary exclusion of team members identified through contact tracing.
Given our commitment to health and safety, we are diligent about exclusions, but they create sudden staffing disruptions for our operators.
Despite being appropriately staffed in the majority of our restaurants, these exclusions reduce the number of available team members with little notice for our operators to prepare.
This volatility can negatively impact sales in these restaurants for the duration of the exclusion period.
Getting and staying staffed also requires a strong focus on training.
As we continue to hire, it is critical that we have the right training in place to ensure we continue to execute at a high level.
That's why our operations leaders are validating the quality of our training during their restaurant visits, ensuring new team members receive the appropriate amount of training and successfully complete the required assessments.
Our team members are the heart and soul of our business, and we are constantly focused on our employment proposition.
The investments we have made and continue to make in our people are helping us retain and attract top talent, and I'm confident in our ability to address our staffing needs.
When it comes to product, our significant scale, including our dedicated distribution capabilities, enables us to manage through the challenges affecting the global supply chain and maintain continuity for our restaurants.
Our supply chain team continues to work hard to ensure we successfully manage through any spot outages we encounter, and our restaurants have the key products they need to serve our guests.
During the quarter, we had to secure more product than usual on the spot market, because our brands exceeded sales expectations and some of our suppliers experienced capacity challenges.
Raj will share more details in a moment, but these higher sales volumes, as well as freight costs have contributed to higher-than-expected inflation.
Our scale advantage provides the opportunity for us to price below our competition and inflation, which is a strategy we have executed successfully.
Our competitive advantage of extensive data and insights allows us to be surgical in our pricing approach, positioning us well to deal with these higher costs and maintain our value leadership.
The rich insights we gather from our analytics help us find the right opportunities to price in ways that minimize impact to traffic over time.
We still expect pricing to be well below the rate of inflation for the year, further strengthening our value proposition.
Ensuring our restaurants are appropriately staffed and our supply chain continues to avoid significant disruptions, will be the most important factors of our continued success in the short term.
To wrap up, I also want to recognize our outstanding team.
I'm inspired by the dedication and winning spirit that our leaders and team members, both in our restaurants and in our support center continue to demonstrate.
Total sales for the first quarter were $2.3 billion, 51% higher than last year, driven by 47.5% same restaurant sales growth and the addition of 34 net new restaurants.
Diluted net earnings per share from continuing operations were $1.76.
We returned approximately $330 million to our shareholders this quarter, paying $144 million in dividends and repurchasing $186 million in shares.
We had strong performance this quarter, despite increased inflationary pressures with EBITDA of $370 million and EBITDA margin of 16%, 250 basis points higher than pre-COVID.
Our sales results were better than expected requiring us to go out and purchase more product on the spot market, in particular, proteins, as our LongHorn and Fine Dining segments had the largest sales outperformance versus our expectations.
The market for proteins this quarter was very strong with spot premiums as high as 30% above our contracted rates.
This resulted in higher average cost per pound for our proteins contributing to total commodities' inflation for the quarter of approximately 5.5%.
Given the heightened attention on inflation, I want to clarify that we use a conventional approach to calculating the rate of inflation.
We're only measuring change in average price holding product mix and usage constant.
We follow the same approach for calculating wage inflation rate, in which we keep the hour and job mix constant and only look at change in wage.
While we expect higher rates of inflation to persist for the remainder of the year versus what we initially planned, we believe our scale and recent enhancements to our business model enable us to deliver significant margin expansion, while still adhering to our strategy of pricing below inflation.
Now looking at the P&L for the first quarter of 2022, we're providing a comparison against pre-COVID results in the first quarter of 2020, which we believe is a more comparable to normal business operations and with how we've been talking about our margin expansion.
For the first quarter, food and beverage expenses were 150 basis points higher, driven by investments in both food quality and pricing significantly below inflation.
Restaurant labor was 110 basis points lower, driven primarily by hourly labor improvement, due to efficiencies gained from operational simplifications and was partially offset by elevated wage pressures.
Restaurant expenses were also 110 basis points lower due to sales leverage.
Marketing spend was $45 million lower, resulting in 220 basis points of favorability.
As a result, restaurant-level EBITDA margin for Darden was 20.9%, 290 basis points better than pre-COVID levels.
G&A expense was 30 basis points higher, driven primarily by approximately $10 million of stock compensation expenses related to the immediate expensing of equity awards for retirement eligible employees.
Additionally, we had approximately $5 million of expense related to mark-to-market on our deferred compensation.
As a reminder, due to the way we hedge this expense, it's largely offset on the tax line.
Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 12.6%, which benefited from the deferred compensation hedge I just mentioned.
Excluding this benefit, our effective tax rate would have been closer to the top end of our guidance range for the year.
Turning to our segment performance.
First quarter sales at Olive Garden were flat to pre-COVID, while segment profit margin increased 220 basis points.
This was strong performance despite elevated inflation and two-year check growth of only 2.4%.
LongHorn had the best sales performance across our segments with sales increasing by 26% versus pre-COVID, while growing segment profit margin by 250 basis points.
Sales at our Fine Dining segment increased 24% versus pre-COVID in what's traditionally their slowest quarter from a seasonal perspective.
Segment profit margin grew by 490 basis points, driven by strong sales leverage and operational efficiencies, which more than offset double-digit commodity inflation.
Our Other segment grew sales by nearly 5% and segment profit margin by 360 basis points.
We continue to be excited about the long-term prospects of this segment, as it's driving the strongest underlying business model improvement of all our segments.
Finally, turning to our financial outlook for fiscal 2022.
Based on our performance this quarter and expected performance for the remainder of the year, we increased our outlook for the full year.
We now expect total sales of $9.4 billion to $9.6 billion, representing growth of 7% to 9% from pre-COVID levels; same restaurant sales growth of 27% to 30% and 35 to 40 new restaurants; capital spending of $375 million to $425 million; total inflation of approximately 4% with commodities inflation of 4.5% and total restaurant labor inflation of 5.5%, which includes hourly wage inflation of about 7%; EBITDA of $1.54 billion to $1.60 billion; and annual effective tax rate of 13% to 14% and approximately 131 million diluted average shares outstanding for the year, all resulting in diluted net earnings per share between $7.25 and $7.60.
This outlook implies EBITDA margin growth versus pre-COVID, in line with our previous outlook as higher sales are helping offset elevated inflation.
This will be a net negative to second quarter from a sales perspective.

user
darden restaurants q1 earnings per share $1.76 from continuing operations.
q1 earnings per share $1.76 from continuing operations.
sees fiscal 2022 same-restaurant sales versus.
fiscal 2021 of 27% to 30%.
sees 2022 total sales of approximately $9.4 to $9.6 billion.
sees 2022 diluted net earnings per share from continuing operations of $7.25 to $7.60.

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