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Text: Joining me on the call today are Gene Lee, Darden's CEO; and Rick Cardenas, CFO.
We plan to release fiscal 2021 second quarter earnings on December 18 before the market opens followed by a conference call.
And then Rick will provide more detail on our financial results and share our outlook for the second quarter.
As a reminder, all references to the industry benchmark during today's call refer to estimated Knapp-Track, excluding Darden, specifically, Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse.
During our first fiscal quarter, industry same restaurant sales decreased 26%.
Given the ever-changing environment we continue to operate in, I am very pleased with what we accomplished during the quarter.
We are focused on four key priorities.
The health and safety of our team members and guests, in restaurant execution in a complex operating environment, investing in and deploying technology to improve the guest experience and transforming our business model.
The progress we made in these areas combined with our operating results, gave us the confidence to repay the $270 million term loan and reinstate a quarterly dividend.
Let me provide more detail on the four priorities.
First, the health and safety of our team members and guests remains our top priority.
Following CDC guidelines and local requirements, our teams continue to practice our enhanced safety protocols, including daily team member health monitoring.
We also continue to configure our dining rooms with social distancing that create a safe, welcoming environment, while maximizing allowable capacity.
A key part of this work is installing booth partitions to enable us to safely increase capacity where permissible.
At the end of August, we had completed installation in just over 500 restaurants in our total portfolio.
Operating in this environment adds another layer of complexity to an already complex operation, and I'm proud of the commitment our teams make every day to keep our guests and each others safe.
Second, we are laser focused on our back to basics operating philosophy to drive restaurant-level execution that creates guest experience, whether that's in our dining rooms, outdoors on our patios or in their homes, but it's not easy.
Executing at a high level is more complex today due to COVID-19 restrictions that vary by market.
Additionally, the constantly changing mix between on-premise and off-premise, plus expanded outdoor dining that is weather-dependent, leads to unpredictability in sales.
This is why the work we continue to do to streamline our menus and improve our processes and procedures is so important.
Moving complexity from our operations has allowed our restaurant teams to execute more consistently in this unique environment.
Our operators continued to deliver great guest experiences by displaying a high level of flexibility, creativity and passion every day, and I'm thrilled to see that reflected in our guest satisfaction metrics.
Third, we are continuing to invest in and implement technology to remove friction from the guest experience.
This includes providing multiple ways for our guests to order inside and outside the restaurant across our digital storefronts.
Additionally, we are deploying mobile solutions to make it easy for our guests to let us know when they have arrived to dine or pickup curbside order to go.
We are also expanding mobile payment options providing additional convenience for our guests.
For our three largest brands combined, more than 50% of our off-premise sales during the quarter were fully digital transactions where guest ordered and paid online.
Finally and most importantly, we transformed our business model.
Even with the sales declines we are experiencing, our restaurants continue to produce high absolute sales volumes.
Therefore, we made the strategic decision to focus on adjusting our cost structure in order to generate strong cash flows, while making the appropriate investments in our businesses.
This provides us a stronger foundation for us to build on sales as build on sales -- build upon as sales trends improve.
The first step in this process was to reimagine our offerings.
This resulted in simplified menus across the platform driving significant efficiencies in food waste and direct labor productivity.
Additionally, due to capacity restrictions, we significantly reduced marketing promotional spending along with other incentives we have historically used to drive sales.
We will continue to evaluate our marketing promotional activity as the operating environment evolves.
Finally, we have further optimized our support structure which is driving G&A efficiencies.
The results of all these efforts to transform our business model can be seen in the fact that we generated adjusted EBITDA of $185 million for the quarter.
Turning to our business segments.
Olive Garden delivered strong average weekly sales per restaurant of $70,000 while significantly strengthening our business model, resulting in higher segment profit margin than last year.
They were able to capitalize on simplification initiatives that strengthen the business model while making additional investments in abundance and value.
This work was critical to position Olive Garden to drive future profitable top-line sales as capacity restrictions ease.
Olive Garden same-restaurant sales for the quarter declined 28.2%, 220 basis points below the industry benchmark.
Overall, capacity restrictions continue to limit their top-line sales, particularly in key high volume markets like California and New Jersey where dining rooms were closed for the majority of the quarter.
In fact, restaurants that had some level of dining room capacity for the entire quarter averaged more than $75,000 in weekly sales, retaining nearly 80% of their last year's sales.
Given the limited capacity environment during the quarter, Olive Garden made a strategic decision to reduce their marketing spend as well as incentives and eliminate their promotional activity.
They will continue to evaluate their level of marketing activity as capacity restrictions ease.
Additionally, off-premise continue to see strong growth with off-premise sales increasing 123% in the quarter, representing 45% of total sales.
Finally, Olive Garden successfully opened three new restaurants in the quarter, which are exceeding expectations.
LongHorn had a very strong quarter.
Same-restaurant sales declined 18.1%, outperforming the industry benchmark by 790 basis points.
Their strong guest loyalty and operational execution helped drive their outperformance, while they also benefited from their geographic footprint.
In fact, same-restaurant sales were positive for the quarter in Georgia and Mississippi.
Additionally, the LongHorn team made significant investments in food quality and operational simplicity, which led to improve productivity and better execution.
They also took a number of steps to improve the overall guest -- the overall digital guest experience.
Off-premise sales grew by more than 240%, representing 28% of total sales.
Finally, LongHorn successfully opened two restaurants during the quarter.
The brands in our Fine Dining segment are performing better than anticipated.
While weekday sales continued to be impacted by a reduction in business travel, conventions and sporting events, we saw strong guest traffic on the weekends, and believe there will be additional demand as capacity restrictions begin to ease.
And lastly, our other business segment also delivered strong operational improvement with segment profit margin of 12.8%.
This was only 130 basis points below last year despite a 39% decline in same-restaurant sales.
Yard House's footprint in California is impacting same-restaurant sales in this segment.
Finally, I continue to be impressed by how our team members are responding to take care of our guests and each other.
The encouraging trends and performance we experienced toward the end of the fourth quarter continued into the first quarter of fiscal '21.
Furthermore, the actions we took in response to COVID-19 to solidify our cash position, transform the business model, simplify operations and strengthen the commitment of our team members helped build a solid foundation for the future.
These actions and our continued focus on pursuing profitable sales have resulted in strong first quarter performance that significantly exceeded our expectations.
For the quarter, total sales were $1.5 billion, a decrease of 28.4%.
Same-restaurant sales decreased 29%.
Adjusted EBITDA was $185 million.
And adjusted diluted net earnings per share were $0.56.
Turning to the P&L.
looking at the food and beverage line, favorability from menu simplifications more than offset increased To Go packaging costs.
However, beef inflation of over 7%, primarily impacting LongHorn, drove food and beverage expense 20 basis points higher than last year for the company.
Restaurant labor was 20 basis points lower than last year, with hourly labor as a percent of sales improving by over 350 basis points, driven by operational simplifications.
This was mostly offset by deleveraging management labor.
Restaurant expense, including $10 million of business interruption insurance proceeds related to COVID-19 claims submitted in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020.
Excluding this benefit, we reduced restaurant expense per operating week by over 20% this quarter.
For marketing, we lowered absolute spending by over $40 million, bringing marketing as a percent of sales to 1.9%, 130 basis points less than last year.
As a result, restaurant-level EBITDA margin was 17.8%, 20 basis points below last year, but particularly strong given the sales decline of 28%.
General and administrative expenses were $10 million lower than last year as we effectively reduced expenses and rightsized our support structure.
Interest was $5 million higher than last year, mostly related to the term loan that was outstanding for the majority of the quarter.
And finally, our first quarter adjusted effective tax rate was 9%.
All of this culminated in adjusted earnings after-tax of $73 million, which excludes $48 million of performance-adjusted expenses.
These expenses were related to the voluntary early retirement incentive program and corporate restructuring completed in the first quarter of fiscal '21.
Approximately $10 million of this expense is non-cash and the remaining will be cash outflows through Q2 of fiscal 2022.
This restructuring resulted in a net 11% reduction in our workforce in the restaurant support center and field operations leadership positions.
It is expected to save between $25 million and $30 million annually.
We expect to see approximately three quarters of these savings throughout the remainder of fiscal '21.
Looking at our segment performance this quarter.
Despite a sales decline of 28%, Olive Garden increased segment profit margin by 110 basis points to 22.1%.
This strong profitability was driven by simplified operations, which reduced food and direct labor costs as well as reduced marketing spending.
LongHorn Steakhouse, Fine Dining and the other business segment delivered strong positive segment profit margins of 15.1%, 11.9% and 12.8% respectively despite a significant sales decline experienced in the quarter.
These brands also benefited from simplified operations, keeping segment profit margin at these levels.
In the first quarter, 68% of our restaurants operated with at least partial dining room capacity for the entire quarter.
These restaurants had average weekly sales per restaurant of $69,000 and the same-restaurant sales decline of 21.9%.
And while Olive Garden and the Fine Dining segment had fewer dining rooms opened than our average, these restaurants had the highest average weekly sales per restaurant of almost $76,000 and $90,000 respectively.
At the start of the second quarter, we had approximately 91% of our restaurants with dining rooms opened operating in at least limited capacity.
Now turning to our liquidity and other matters.
During the quarter, as we saw steadily improving weekly cash flows, we gained confidence in our estimated cash flow ranges.
We fully repaid the $270 million term loan we took out in April.
We ended the first quarter with $655 million in cash and another $750 million available in our untapped credit facility, giving us over $1.4 million of available liquidity.
We generated over $160 million of free cash flow in the quarter and improved our adjusted debt to adjusted capital to 59% at the end of the quarter, well within our debt covenant of below 75%.
Given our strong liquidity position, improvements in our business model and better visibility into cash flow projections, our board reinstated a quarterly dividend.
The board declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.30 per share.
This dividend represents 53% of our first quarter adjusted earnings after-tax within our long-term framework for value creation.
We will continue to have regular discussions with the board on our future dividend policy.
Our first quarter results were significantly better than we anticipated.
The actions we took to simplify menus and operating procedures and capture other cost savings, along with our choice to pursue profitable sales, have yielded strong results.
And now, with a full quarter operating under this environment, we have even better visibility into our business model.
We anticipate EBITDA between $200 million and $215 million and diluted net earnings per share between $0.65 and $0.75 on a diluted share base of 131 million shares.
In this environment, we continue to focus on building absolute sales volumes week-to-week and quarter-to-quarter.
This may result in variability in sales comparisons to last year as capacity constraints lead to less seasonality than we would have experienced historically.
Said another way, if capacity and social distancing restrictions remained similar to where they are today, it will be challenging to dramatically increase our on-premise average unit volumes.
Our second quarter is typically our lowest average unit volume quarter and our third quarter is typically our highest.
Additionally, as capacity restrictions ease and sales normalized, we will be able to reinvest to drive the top-line and a better overall guest experience.
Based on our strong business model enhancements, we now think we can get to our pre-COVID EBITDA dollars at approximately 90% of pre-COVID sales, while still making appropriate investments in our business.

user
sees q2 earnings per share $0.65 to $0.75 from continuing operations.
q1 adjusted earnings per share $0.56 from continuing operations excluding items.
qtrly same-restaurant sales down 28.2% for olive garden.
darden restaurants -reiterated full year outlook for 35-40 net new restaurants and total capital spending of $250 to $300 million.

assistant