Darden Restaurants, Inc.

Welcome to the Darden Fiscal Year 2020 Third Quarter Earnings Call. Your lines have been placed on listen only until the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star 1 on your touchtone phone. The conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Kevin Kalachak. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Regina. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating on today's call. Joining me on the call today are Gene Lee, Darden's CEO, and Rick Cardenas, CFO. As a reminder, comments made during this call will include forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. Those risks are described in the company's press release, which was distributed this morning, and in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We are simultaneously broadcasting a presentation during this call, which is posted in the investor relations section of our website at Darden.com. Today's discussion and presentation will include certain non-GAAP measurements, and reconciliations of these measurements are included in the presentation. We plan to release fiscal 2020 fourth quarter earnings on June 25th before the market opens, followed by a conference call. Given the circumstances, we will only briefly discuss third quarter results and we'll spend the majority of time discussing the impact of COVID-19. Additionally, I want to remind everyone about the calendar shift that moved Thanksgiving from the second quarter of last year to the third quarter of this year, resulting in one fewer operating day for our casual dining brands during the third quarter. Now, I'll turn the call over to Gene.

Thank you, Kevin, and good morning, everyone. I want to acknowledge that we are clearly in a time of uncertainty as it relates to COVID-19. I know you have a lot of questions relating to the future, and we'll try to answer them the best we can. First, I want to say thank you to our teams who are doing a great job managing through this adversity. Additionally, I want to thank them for the outstanding job they did in the third quarter. Our results were impressive. As you've seen from our press release this morning, total sales from continuing operations were $2.35 billion, an increase of 4.5 percent. Same restaurant sales increased 2.3 percent, and adjusted net earnings per share were $1.90. However, today we're clearly faced with more pressing matters to discuss given the rapidly changing environment and ongoing impact associated with COVID-19. To that end, I want to share with you what the Darden team is doing as it relates to the virus and the impact to our operations. Rick will share some of our quarter-to-date results and analysis on potential financial impacts. Turning to our ongoing response. We've established a cross-functional crisis team led by me, and we're in close contact with the CDC and other government agencies to ensure we have the most up-to-date information to inform the decisions we are making. We have developed an action plan addressing business continuity, operations, communication, and supply chain. Our plan is updated as we receive and process new information. The health and safety of our team members Their families and our guests remains our top priority, and we continue to take steps to ensure the safety of our hourly team members and restaurant management teams. Yesterday, we announced that we're implementing an emergency pay program that will cover hourly team members for two weeks in restaurants facing a business disruption. This is in addition to the permanent paid sick leave policy we announced last week. At this point, we don't see any major impacts to our supply chain. We have been in discussion with all of our major suppliers, and they are confident that they can continue to supply our restaurants with safe, consistent goods to maintain service to our guests. Our restaurant teams are well trained in food safety, sanitation, and managing through viruses. We are regularly cleaning our restaurants with products that are on the CDC list of approved cleaning agents for COVID-19. we are confident that we will be able to maintain a steady flow of these products into our restaurants. We are committed to keeping our restaurants open where permissible, to be able to provide meals to the community in which we operate, whether that be off-premise or dine-in where permitted. And I'll reiterate that we are committed to the health and safety of our team members and guests by offering limited or no-contact curbside pickup, and practicing social distancing in our seating configurations in all locations where we are permitted to operate our dining rooms. While we have a strong balance sheet and a strong cash position, given the material declines we're seeing in our business, we'll have to make dramatic change to our cost structure and cut non-essential spending. I'd like to emphasize that this is a rapidly changing environment, and as such, we are not able to reasonably estimate the impact to our business. The analysis that Rick will be writing are theoretical in nature and won't be able to predict the duration or scope of the impact at this time. Now I'll turn it over to Rick.