Wingstop Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Wingstop Inc.'s fiscal second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. Please note that this conference is being recorded today, Wednesday, July 29, 2026. On the call today are Michael Skipworth, President and Chief Executive Officer, Alex Kaleida, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Sarah Niehaus, Senior Director of Investor Relations. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sarah. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome to the fiscal second quarter 2026 earnings conference call for Wingstop. Our results were published earlier this morning. and are available on our investor relations website at ir.wingstop.com. Our discussion today includes forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from what we currently expect. Our SEC filings describe various risks that could affect our future operating results and financial condition. We use certain non-GAAP financial measures that we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. Presentation of such information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations to comparable GAAP measures are contained in our earnings release. Lastly, for the Q&A session, we ask that each of you please keep to one question and a follow-up to allow as many participants as possible to ask a question. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Michael.

Thank you, Sarah. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I would like to start the call by taking a moment to recognize our brand partners, restaurant teams, and Global Support Center team members. I have previously described 2026 as a transformational year for Wingstop. from operationalizing Wingstop Smart Kitchen, a new kitchen operating platform that completely changed our back of house operations to the national launch of Club Wingstop, our first loyalty program. The commitment from our brand partners and team members has been impressive. All of this while operating in this evolving consumer environment. That is a direct reflection of the resilience and incredible commitment of our team members across the system and demonstrates the shared excitement around the future for Wingstop. While we've continued to strengthen the business for the long term, our financial performance this quarter fell short of our expectations, with second quarter same store sales declining 7.5%. The pressure on our core guests remained more pronounced than we anticipated. At the same time, the quarter gave us greater clarity about what's driving our results. It's increasingly clear that the challenge we're facing today is not structural and not a reflection of our brand relevance or product quality. That being said, we have an opportunity to showcase value more overtly to help preserve Wingstop occasions with our core guests as price-pointed messaging broadly across the industry has continued to intensify. Independent brand tracking continues to rank Wingstop among the strongest restaurant brands for quality. Brand awareness is growing and over the past year Aided brand awareness has increased more than five percentage points. Perhaps one of the strongest proof points of brand health and relevance came during the World Cup. On key match days, we saw same store sales swing into double digit growth as guests came together to celebrate with family and friends. We saw similar responses during the NBA finals and markets with hometown teams competing. Those moments are a great reminder of what we have known as a brand for a long time. When our guests have special moments and occasions to celebrate together, Wingstop's flavor and quality is one of their top choices. And many of those guests who engaged with Wingstop on those days are the very same consumers experiencing the greatest financial pressure today. Whether it was key World Cup matches or the NBA Finals, Our core guests ordered for groups driving double-digit increases in average ticket and frequently choosing one of our bundled offerings. To us, that's a really important insight. When our guests choose to treat themselves and come together for a group occasion, the Wingstop brand was top of mind. Consumers are still willing to spend on meaningful occasions. They simply want confidence they're receiving compelling value for the group. Our opportunity, particularly in this current environment, is to make that per person value even more obvious so that our guests consider Wingstop for more occasions while we continue to expand the brand to new consumers. We find our business more exposed than other restaurant concepts to consumers who have been disproportionately impacted by persistent inflation and ongoing economic uncertainty. To better appreciate our results, let me share a little bit about the makeup of our restaurant footprint. Today, more than 55% of our domestic restaurants are located in urban trade areas where households are under more financial stress than higher income households. Digital guest visits in those trade areas and correspondingly frequency declined by approximately 9% while visits in higher income trade areas actually grew in the second quarter. That divergence in trend reinforces our belief that the pressure we're seeing today in our core guests is macro driven, not any change in the underlying strength of the Wingstop brand. While brand awareness remains an opportunity for us, we have made great progress over the last five years, and our footprint has played a key role. But as awareness has continued to grow, our focus is naturally evolving. Over the past several years, we've focused on introducing more consumers to the Wingstop brand. Today, our opportunity is increasingly about converting that awareness into consideration, driving more occasions and increased frequency. That means giving guests more reasons to choose Wingstop through differentiated flavor innovation, compelling value, and increasingly personalized engagement. What you will see from us in the second half of the year is our creative and message will evolve to this strategy. When we think about value, it's one simple question. Was the experience worth what I paid? Price is certainly an input into that equation, but it's not the only one. Our quality, flavor, abundance, and experience all contribute to the value guests receive. That said, in this current environment, price is clearly playing a greater role in consumers' perception of value. Guests can still feed a group at Wingstop for approximately $8 per person, just as they could several years ago. What has changed is the environment our guests are operating in. And that means we have to communicate value in ways that resonate today. Our confidence in the strategies we've put in place has not changed. And as we move into the balance of 2026, we're executing against our strategies with a sharper focus on protecting our core guests while continuing to strengthen the business for the long term. During the second quarter, we deployed a variety of offers to better understand how guests respond to different expressions of value. Our $1 wing promotion reinforced the demand compelling value can generate. The 30 for 30 bundle validated that the right offer can do more than drive transactions. It can grow the overall occasion, increasing average first party ticket by nearly 17%. Flavors under $10 demonstrated that we can better highlight the accessible price points already available on our menu, creating more entry points into the Wingstop brand while maintaining the quality, flavor, and experience our guests expect. That approach resonated with guests. The overall satisfaction scores improved in 89% of the markets where the promotion ran. We're executing our value strategy while preserving the strong unit economics that have always differentiated the Wingstop model. Competing more effectively for today's consumer requires us to win more occasions and strengthen the emotional connection with our guests over time. Perhaps the most significant milestone in advancing that strategy this quarter and one we've been working towards for several years was the national launch of Club Wingstop, our first loyalty program. From the beginning, our vision wasn't simply to launch another loyalty program. It was to build a more personalized relationship with our guests that allow us to engage with them in more meaningful ways, such as through exclusive access to Wingstop or in special experiences and events. The early response has exceeded our expectations. In just a matter of weeks, Club Wingstop enrollments are tracking ahead of expectations by 22%, and loyalty sales represent nearly half of our first party digital sales, significantly outperforming the pilot market results. While our near-term focus is centered on enrollment, early engagement trends reinforce our confidence in the platform. Club Wingstop is giving us something we've never had before, a scalable personalization platform with millions of active guests that allow us to introduce exclusive experiences, tailor and hyper-personalize communications, deliver relevant value through targeted offers, and ultimately build greater guest frequency over time. As we've discussed, value isn't a one-size-fits-all. and Club Wingstop gives us the ability to deliver the right message and the right offer to the right guests at the right time, ultimately strengthening the emotional connection with our guests. That's a much more effective way to communicate the compelling value already inherent in our menu than broad-based discounting and one that supports both guest engagement and healthy brand partner economics. It's still early and we have a great deal to learn as the platform continues to mature. But the pace of adoption and early engagement reinforce our confidence in Club Wingstop and its potential to become an important long-term growth platform for the brand. As awareness has grown, our focus is increasingly on converting that awareness into consideration. And one of the greatest reasons guests engage with Wingstop continues to be our unmatched flavor. Our bold and distinctive flavors have always been one of our strongest competitive advantages, and we've recently become much more intentional about maintaining a consistent cadence of innovation. Citrus Moho and Sweet Heat Chamoy generated great guest engagement during the quarter, and we're excited about our innovation pipeline in the second half of the year. Innovation remains one of the best ways we can drive consideration, create new occasions, encourage repeat visits, and reinforce what makes Wingstop unique. Operations is equally as critical to ensure we consistently deliver on the promise we're creating for our guests. That's exactly why we've remained focused on executing our Wingstop Smart Kitchen strategy. While we have more work to do, operationally, we're seeing the improvements we expected in guest satisfaction, speed, consistency, and restaurant execution. While the current environment is masking the near-term setting for sales lift, it does not change the long-term opportunity. Smart Kitchen is designed to improve the guest experience over time, and those benefits compound as guests repeatedly experience Thank you for joining us today. by more than 40%. To us, those are the right leading indicators, and they reinforce our confidence that Wingstop's Smart Kitchen will continue strengthening the business over the long term. Perhaps the strongest validation of our confidence in the long-term opportunity is the confidence our brand partners continue to demonstrate through their investment in Wingstop. New restaurant development remains healthy across both our domestic and international business, reinforcing our belief that our long-term unit economics and growth opportunity remain firmly intact. Our brand partners continue investing because they see the same long-term opportunity we do. A highly differentiated brand, compelling restaurant economics, and a significant white space remaining both in the US and internationally. Our brand partners in the U.S. opened more than 300 restaurants across 46 states in the last 12 months, a more than 13% growth rate. Outside of the U.S., we're continuing to make meaningful progress as we surpassed 100 restaurants in the United Kingdom, opened our flagship restaurant in Singapore, and remain on track to enter India later this year. which represents our largest international growth opportunity to date. 2026 is on pace for another record year of openings for our international markets. We are also excited to announce that we have signed a development agreement to expand into Poland, a market with an opportunity of over 100 restaurants, reflecting continued confidence in the long-term international opportunity. and adding another attractive growth market to our development pipeline. Finally, we're continuing to invest in one of our most important competitive advantages, our people. We have recently strengthened our leadership team with the addition of our first chief AI officer, further building the capabilities we believe are necessary to support Wingstop's next chapter of growth. Just as we've invested in our restaurants, technology, and digital capabilities, we're equally committed to investing in the talent that will help us execute our strategy and deliver on the long-term opportunity in front of us. With today's consumer backdrop, we're focused on what we can control. First, we're refining how we bring Wingstop to market. Our creative and messaging will increasingly connect our leadership and quality Bold Flavor, and Compelling Price Per Person Value, helping us win more occasions more consistently throughout the year. Second, we're building deeper relationships with our guests through Club Wingstop. While still early in the launch and initial results are encouraging, Club Wingstop gives us the ability to communicate more effectively, deliver value and exclusive experiences and build greater guest frequency over time. We're also focused on driving smart kitchen execution. As we continue improving operational consistency across the system, we're creating a more consistent and better guest experience that reinforces everything our marketing promises and strengthens the business for the long term. Taken together, these priorities position us to better serve our guests today while building an even stronger Wingstop for years ahead. We believe they're the right actions to strengthen the brand, create long-term shareholder value, and continue advancing towards our goal of becoming a top 10 global restaurant brand. With that, I'll turn the call over to Alex.