BurgerFi International Inc

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss BurgerFi's financial results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2021. Joining us today are BurgerFi CEO Julio Ramirez, CFO Mike Rabinovich, and the company's external investor relations representative, Cody Cree. Following their remarks, we'll open the call for your questions. Before we go further, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Cree as he reads the company's safe harbor statement within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements. Cody, please go ahead.

Thanks, Joelle. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to Birdify's estimates of its future business outlook, prospects, or financial results. forward-looking statements generally can be identified by words such as anticipates, believes, estimates, expects, intends, plans, predicts, projects, will be, will continue, will likely result in similar expressions. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause our actual results to differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, and those discussed in other documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these four looking statements, except as required by law. Given these risks and uncertainties, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Also, the following discussion may contain non-GAAP financial measures. For a discussion and reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures, please see our earnings releases for the first quarter 2021 and fourth quarter 2020 and full year 2020. I'd like to remind everyone that this call will be available via telephonic replay for two weeks starting today. A webcast replay will also be available via the link provided in today's press release, as well as on the company's website at BurgerFi.com. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to the CEO of BurgerFi, Julio Ramirez. Julio, over to you.

Thank you, Cody, and good morning, everyone. We're happy you all can join us today. Today, I'll start with a brief history and overview of BurgerFi, and then highlight some of our first quarter 2021 successes. From there, I'll turn it over to our CFO, Mike, to walk through our financials, then return to discuss our go-forward strategy and growth opportunities. We're also going to discuss some brief fourth quarter and full year 2020 highlights, since it is our first call subsequent to completing our business combination to go public in December of last year. With that, I'm going to start us off with a quick history of our business, since it's our first earnings call as a public company, and many of our listeners may be new to our story. The first BurgerFi restaurant opened 10 years ago outside of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in a town called Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and the success was immediate. People loved our food, decor, ambiance, and the overall energy of our brand. Our mission statement of redefining the way the world eats burgers and enriching lives through the best burger experience is now even more relevant than ever. building on our great tasting food and navigating the experiences faced by our guests in the current challenging environment. We offer the highest quality ingredients and premium burger experience in an exceptionally clean, eco-friendly restaurant prepared and served by a highly energetic and motivated team. We have grown to approximately 120 company and franchise-owned restaurants in 22 states, two countries, and Puerto Rico. I'm proud to say than our home state of Florida, we believe we're the premier better burger chain with over 50 locations, which is over three times larger than our nearest competitor. Across all of our locations, we place an emphasis on design that no one else in our industry comes close to. Our dining rooms feature all natural wood walls made out of number two southern pine lumber, one of the most renewable wood sources on the planet. Similarly, our tables and chairs are made out of recycled materials. For example, the Navy 111 chairs in our restaurants are made from upcycled Coca-Cola bottles, and our parallel communal tables are made of compressed recycled wood from shipping pallets. In addition, all of our lighting and fans are energy efficient with very low electricity usage. All of these features and more contribute to our trendy and modern atmosphere that consumers have come to love. I always like to say that our restaurants have such a great design, you can take a date to burger-fy. Just like the attention to detail and design, we place a huge emphasis on the food we serve. We use 100% American Angus beef, naturally raised and harvested, part of the NAE program. That stands for no antibiotics ever. The beef is never given steroids, hormones, antibiotics, chemicals, or additives by feed or by injection. It's humanely raised, vegetarian, grass-fed, and of course, never frozen. This standard is consistent across all of our meat-based burgers, from the signature BurgerFi cheeseburger to my favorite, the premium Wagyu CEO burger. In addition to our beef, we offer a great diversified menu that caters to nearly everyone's unique taste preference. I firmly believe we have the best onion rings in the industry. which are cut from Spanish colossal onions and then hand-breaded and beer-battered. We also offer French fries that are fresh and hand-cut from Idaho Burbank potatoes in our restaurants, all-natural cage-free chicken, premium frozen custards and concretes that we believe are far superior than standard ice cream, and local craft beer and wine in select locations. Additionally, we were the first better burger chain to introduce Beyond Burgers' plant-based patty to our customers, And we also have a vegetarian patty option, the award-winning Veggie-Fi, that's made up of 15 all-natural ingredients, including crispy quinoa and fresh-cut vegetables. This is truly a menu that garners awards. To that point, we were recently named the Top Better Burger Fast Casual Chain in USA Today's 2021 10 Best Readers' Choice Survey. And as of yesterday, I'm happy and proud to announce we were named the number one brand of the year in Fast Casual's top 100 movers and shakers in 2021. The numerous awards that we have received are a testament to our focus on innovation and customer engagement. One powerful way we stay engaged with our local loyal customer base is through limited time offers, some of which allow us to test new products that could potentially become permanent menu additions. Recent examples of our limited time offers include our February Tri-Fi promotion to celebrate our 10th anniversary, which was a $10 cheeseburger, beer, and fries deal. And we just announced our new Dunkaroos Shake through a collaboration with General Mills, which will be serving until June 13th at our New York City and Miami locations. The Dunkaroos Shake mixes our decadent and creamy classic vanilla shake with the popular 90s cookie snack Dunkaroos. We're excited to bring this blast from the past to our guests and hope they can reminisce with this nostalgic treat. Another example of our limited time offerings and one of my favorites is the nationwide success that we had with our spicy-fied chicken sandwich last fall. With the success of the spicy-fied chicken, we realized that our customers were craving spice and we got to work in our world-class commissary in North Palm Beach to create a one-of-a-kind spicy burger sensation. which we call the Swag Burger, as in Spicy Wagyu Angus Burger. Launched in March, our Swag Burger featured five spicy ingredients, a double Wagyu and brisket blend burger with charred jalapenos, candied ghost pepper bacon to pack the heat, sweet tomato relish to add a bit of sweet, habanero pepper jack cheese, and a hot steak sauce. We had a lot of fun playing with the ingredients and texture, and I'm happy to report that the Swag Burger has been so successful we're extending this limited time offering through at least June of this year. These limited time offers showcase our ability to create iconic offerings and show how we're truly redefining the burger experience. I would like to thank our team for their dedication and hard work, especially since it has been a challenging time as everyone continues to navigate through the pandemic. We've always invested in our people with world-class training and development, to deliver our brand promise and instill our purpose and beliefs. But I think these past 14 months have showed that when you invest in people, great things happen. It's our extraordinary team that helped us expand our footprint with 11 new restaurant openings in 2020 and opened our first drive-thru location in Kentucky and Nevada. We also had a team that was adaptable as our digital orders became a larger portion of our mix. with over 1.6 million delivery and BurgerFi app orders in 2020, accounting for more than 30% of our system-wide revenue last year. While the disruptions of COVID-19 continue to impact us, we have seen sequential improvements in each quarter since the start of the pandemic, as we pivoted and adapted to increase digital orders. Overall, I'm extremely proud of our progress and our prospects for growth. In addition to adding new restaurants and introducing drive-thru locations, we became one of the first Better Burger chains to expand with not one, but two Ghost Kitchen partners, Reef Technologies and Epic Kitchens. And we're now up to nine locations in six cities. I'll discuss our partnerships with the Ghost Kitchens in more detail later. But first, I'll turn the call over to our new CFO, Mike Rabinovich, who will provide additional commentary on our performance for the first quarter as well as select fourth quarter results and full year 2020 results. As a reminder, Mike officially joins us as CFO on May 3rd. He comes to us with over 25 years of executive-level financial leadership experience, having recently served as Chief Accounting Officer at Tech Data Corporation, as well as Office Depot. Prior to those roles, he held the CFO role at Mayer's Jewelers for over nine years and was the VP of Finance for Claire's Stores during their period of rapid expansion. As we continue to accelerate our growth strategy, Michael's leadership skills, extensive experience in the specialty retail sector, managing the financial process and growth of large public companies adds significant value to our organization. Mike, I'd now like to turn over the call to you.