El Pollo Loco Holdings, Inc.

leases being signed for projects for next year gives us even more confidence in in being able to accelerate far beyond the 10 that we have this year. We're not giving a firm number yet for next year. Hope to do that in the upcoming month, but can safely say it'll you'll see some nice growth off of the 10.

Great. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.

The next question is from Andy Barish from Jeffries. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon guys. Anything other than just the backdrop that you described, I mean, March seemed to fall off was. You know, was it just my mango habanero kind of ran its course or anything you can point to on the, you know, on the month of March that you didn't address in your in your prepared remarks.

Yeah, the one additional would be the weather and I, you know, always hate to bring up Mother Nature, but given the prominence of Southern California, usually I know weather isn't a big thing in California. But in March, we had actually about three weeks of rain and you always see an impact, particularly on our lunch business when it's raining. A little bit on our dinner business, but it's pronounced and so that would be the other piece that was a true headwind in March. In addition to just all of the macro, just the uncertainty, you could just see the consumer reacting to that. And also, I guess the other point would be, you know, we launched mango habanero in January, you know, so we got that that nice pop and trial in January, February. And, you know, although we got great customer reactions, some of the repeat could have been stronger as we, you know, as we were running it out into the third month of a product. And just some of our operational execution, if I'm being really honest, I think could have been better in terms of just having that repeat be even stronger. So coupled with the weather and the consumer malaise, it just meant for a softer March than we had seen in January and February.

Got it. And then, yeah, can we drill down a little bit operationally? I mean, it seems to be something you're picking up with with the consumer feedback with SMG that there's some gaps. Is that is that somewhere is labor hours or an investment that's needed at this point? Or is it kind of like, you know, we can look at kiosk and that that reallocation can kind of occur. And as obviously, inflation sort of moderates, you know, maybe maybe that frees up some some opportunity to address some of the gaps.

Yes, I see this as, you know, I think SMG was a nice awareness for us that some of the gaps in our operation are really things that we can fix and are in our control. So things like accuracy is an example, making sure our team members are doing a triple check when consumers are in a drive through. Just simple things like hospitality, making sure our service is even more friendly and hospitable. And when there is a problem, addressing it with customer recovery. So we're putting it's kind of a back to basics program where we're putting those back to basics in place. And then the other piece is, you know, this brand has been such a great brand with high quality food. Having that consistency in the quality of service is something that I've been out in restaurants I've seen as a huge opportunity. We have some restaurants that operate really, really well. Maybe there's a general manager that's been there for years and they just they run a great restaurant. And then there's some on the other end and raising those on the other end. We've never had a, I shouldn't say never, in the last couple of years, we haven't had as clear of a standard program and a standard third party audit. So just putting back in place some of those fundamentals that every restaurant company I've been with has in place in terms of driving operations. I think those there's some real low hanging fruit that can get us back some transactions fairly quickly. So it's like I said, a back to basics in our operators has taken this on with bigger our franchise partners are leading some of the efforts as well. It's a true team effort.

Got it. And then finally, just on on the update kind of where where is that in terms of the roll out through the system more broadly? And then, you know, what are you seeing from that? Is it, you know, is it is it giving you some benefit? Is it, you know, kind of more still in need of more uptake from the consumer? How are you kind of looking at kiosk these days?

Yeah, it's in most of our company restaurants. We still have a handful 20 or so that we need to get it in as we're kind of remodeling for the balance of the year. Some of the more. You know, difficult configurations that require a little more work. And we'll be trying to do those through the balance of the year. There's a there's a there's a fair amount of franchise uptake as well. But I think where the opportunities lies really how we, how we take the next step with the kiosk and use it as a merchandising tool to really help us drive check and a little more guest engagement than just really kind of order taking.

Right

now.

Okay, thanks for the time. Yes. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of today's question and answer session. I would like to turn the call back over to Liz Williams for closing remarks.

Thanks again, everyone for your interest today and I'll play a local. We look forward to talking with you again next quarter. Have a wonderful evening.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.