Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Jack Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Earnings Call. I would now like to welcome, Chris Brandon, Vice President of Investor Relations, to begin the call. Chris, over to you.

Thanks, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining today's conference call, highlighting results from our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023. With me today are Chief Executive Officer, Darin Harris, and for his first earnings call since joining Jack in the Box in early August, our new Chief Financial Officer, Brian Scott. Following their prepared remarks, we will be happy to take questions from our covering sell-side analysts. Dawn Hooper, Jack in the Box's Senior Vice President and Controller, will also be joining us for the Q&A portion of the call. Note that during both our discussion and Q&A, we may refer to non-GAAP items. Please refer to the non-GAAP reconciliations provided in the earnings release which is available on our Investor Relations website at jackinthebox.com. We will also be making forward-looking statements based on current information and judgments that reflect management's outlook for the future. However, actual results may differ materially from these expectations because of business risks. We therefore consider the Safe Harbor statement in the earnings release and the cautionary statements in our most recent 10-K to be part of our discussion. The material risk factors as well as information relating to Company operations are detailed in our most recent 10-K, 10-Q, and other public documents filed with the SEC, and are all available on our Investor Relations website. Lastly, I'd like to provide an update on some upcoming conferences and events. We will be attending the Barclays Conference in New York City on Wednesday, November 29th, as well as the Wolfe Research and Truist events during the first week of December. In addition to the ICR Conference in early January, we also recently announced our 2024 Investor Day, which will take place, Wednesday, January 24th. We hope you will be available to attend our live webcast and for those attending in person, we look forward to hosting you at our restaurant support center headquarters in San Diego. And with that, I would like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Darin Harris.

Thank you, Chris. Before I recap our fourth quarter and full year, I want to take a moment to welcome Brian Scott to Jack in the Box and Del Taco. In just his first couple of months on the job, Brian has proven his ability to get up to speed quickly on both our business and the industry, as well as earn the respect of our team and franchisees. He is an outstanding addition to our leadership team and I am excited for you to get to know Brian more in the coming weeks and months and learn about how he will enhance our strategy and support our growth ambition. During the quarter, I was thrilled to announce the hiring of Tom Rose as the new Brand President of Del Taco, and we look forward to having him participate in our Investor Day in late January. Tom and I have known each other for over 20 years and we have a deep level of trust. We have shared experiences and backgrounds as former franchisees. Tom's operational expertise and his ability to connect with franchisees is something that will benefit both brands and our culture greatly. He has already made an impact by advancing our strategic initiatives and identifying new opportunities for operational execution, sales growth, and profitability for Del Taco. We also made some recent and notable changes to the marketing function at Del, highlighted by the addition of Sarah McAloon who will join our Executive Leadership team as Senior VP and Chief Administrative Officer, where she will lead marketing and support the shared services teams. Sarah was a trusted partner of mine while we worked together to turn around CiCi's Pizza. I had the pleasure to witness her ability to drive 17 straight quarters of same-store sales growth, clarify…

Thanks, Darin, and good afternoon, everyone. I am very excited to be part of this outstanding Company and working with such a talented and passionate team. My time here thus far has only enhanced my confidence that we have a tremendous growth opportunity and I look forward to working with Darin and the team to clearly articulate our strategy to deliver meaningful and sustained shareholder value. And I look forward to working with our investment community and seeing some of you at upcoming conferences and events, most notably, ICR and our 2024 Investor Day taking place in late January. I'll begin by reviewing each of our two brands individually, followed by details in our 2023 consolidated performance and 2024 guidance. Beginning with Jack in the Box, our fourth quarter system same-store sales growth was 3.9%, consisting of Company-owned comps of 4.4% and franchise comps of 3.8%. This included a 7.6% increase in pricing, partially offset by a decrease in transactions and negative mix due to fewer drink attachments and items per check. Turning to restaurant count, for the full year, there were 20 Jack restaurant openings with 15 closures, resulting in Jack delivering positive net restaurant growth for the first time since 2019. We ended the year with 2,186 restaurants and have started off 2024 strong with six openings since the start of the quarter. There are currently 77 restaurants in the design, permitting, and construction phases, and we anticipate approximately 25 to 35 restaurants to open in fiscal 2024. Jack restaurant-level margin expanded year-over-year by 450 basis points from 16.2% up to 20.7%, driven by menu price increases as well as a change in the mix of restaurants. This was partially offset by increases in commodities, wage inflation, and utilities. Food and packaging cost as a percentage of Company-owned…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Brian Bittner with Oppenheimer and Company. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon. I have a question on Jack and Del Taco. So, can I ask two quick ones, and hopefully you can take them. On Jack, your two new markets in Salt Lake and Louisville are trending at over $5 million AUVs, which is very impressive and I guess, surpassing your expectations. So, how does this potentially reshape the near-term strategy on powering into new markets for the Jack in the Box brand? And on Del Taco, the business clearly seems to have hit a soft patch and it's happening at a time, Darin, where you're reshaping the management team at Del Taco with trusted partners that you've worked with in the past and Tom and Sarah. Can you just unpack these changes a little bit more for us and how quickly you expect these changes could impact brand performance? Thanks.

Good afternoon, Brian. Good to hear from you. Overall, in Salt Lake City, let me just start there, we're incredibly happy with the performance in Salt Lake and in Louisville. As we've said on the call, we've averaged over $100,000 in weekly sales amongst those four restaurants, and on average, they've been opened 11 weeks for those four restaurants. So, some open longer than others, but it is over -- or outperforming our anticipation. In Salt Lake City, we have 15 locations that we should open by fiscal year '25. So, we're aggressively going in and developing the market alongside with two other franchisees. And in Louisville, we're opening five by fiscal year '25. And that's just the start of the pipeline as we've recently signed one of our existing franchisees at Jack to partner with us to also develop that market. And so, what we like is, we've put together a specific playbook of how to enter the market, everything from operations, how we're going to build awareness before and after coming to the market, how we want to ramp up into digital sales and late night sales and without any LTOs. And so, recently one of the first stores that we opened in Salt Lake City that has been one of our highest volumes, we recently turned on digital and overnight sales went up 16%. So, we're going to pace ourselves into these markets, but we're very excited about the way we've entered it. We are excited about the playbook that we've used to enter the markets, and we're going to continue to look for new opportunities like this. And so, let me transition now to your question on leadership. Let me talk about our business at Del Taco. We saw it becoming soft in our guidance last…

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Lauren Silberman with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks so much. I wanted to ask about traffic. So, the guide for next year for low single to mid-single-digit comp seems to imply negative traffic in '24. Can you just talk about how you're thinking about traffic next year and what you're seeing in the environment? And any additional color on what you're seeing with consumer and tech management would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, good question, Lauren. This is one that we really contemplated, do we provide guidance here on price or not? Because what we did is we decided to guide price for Company-only, and the same-store sales guide is for the system. And as you know, we wanted to try to give some better visibility on what the Company impact would be because we have such a large presence in California with AB1228. And the reality of it is, and I think most in the industry are not exactly sure how it's going to perform. So, although we're guiding 6% to 8% pricing for the Company, because majority is California, what we're sharing is, we need that to overcome the wage inflation. That's really the story there. And so how transactions respond, we'll continue to keep you updated, if we think there'll be some transaction decline, but when we're guiding system sales, it was more for the system versus just for the Company.

Our next question comes from the line of Gregory Francfort with Guggenheim Securities. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for the question. Maybe just a follow-up to that. Darin, can you talk a little bit about what price elasticity has looked like more recently? I -- my understanding is, you've taken 4 or 5 points less versus 2019 compared to McDonald's, and so you've underpriced them pretty substantially. But looking at even ex the California increase, 3% to 5% next year, what gives you confidence that consumer is maybe not pushing back to that, or how would you adjust if the environment changes at all? Thanks.

We've really invested in our pricing team over the last year and a half in our tools and technology to go in and be surgical and data-driven in how we price. So, I think we at Del and Jack -- Del will also take on this in 2024, the same toolbook and tool, and playbook. But the bottom line is, we've proven that we can surgically take price and find out where there is opportunities by store, by market, and really try to find how do we reach our guests in the right way. And so, it's challenging in an environment that's unknown. We definitely have seen, you know, some softness at Del Taco in the lower-income consumer. We are still performing on the higher income consumer. At Jack, we're also seeing more of an even performance across all deciles of income. And so, overall, you know, what we believe is that with the AB1228 and what's happening in California, that's where the real price elasticity concern comes in. And we believe that our loyal guests in our home-based state will continue to come back to Jack and Del, and we believe that to be the case.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Charles with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks. I wanted to learn a little bit more about one of the missing pieces around the re-franchising activity for Del Taco that's expected next year. I know you guys are on track to get 120 more stores re-franchised to return to 90% franchise mix by 2026. Can you help shape up what next year will look or this year will look like relative to what you did in 2023, or just any other guideposts as we think about the cadence of re-franchising for Del Taco?

Yeah, we guided to, you know, 120 over the next two years, because right now we have very strong demand even with the external environment, interest rates and AB1228. Jack franchisees and even outside franchisees have shown real interest in Del. And so, we feel really good about that. And we're going to continue to update you just like we did this year. We'll use our proceeds accordingly, as we've laid out for share repurchase or debt repayment. But we believe, at a minimum, there is somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 that we'll do this year. And the real lever here is, do we find the right operator that's well capitalized, that wants to develop. And as you saw us do last year, if we find that, we'll go faster. If not, we've given you guidance that we'll pace it out over time and keep you updated along the way as we did in 2023.

Thanks, Darin.

Our next question comes from the line of Dennis Geiger with UBS. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you. And Darin and Brian, thanks for the commentary and the details on development and how the pipeline looks right now. Just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the development growth plans, latest on franchisee development sentiment, which I think you said was favorable. Anything on sort of how it's trended through the year? And I guess, importantly, anything on sort of timing updates as it relates to pressures on development? Has that done anything from a timeline perspective over the next couple of years as you think about that growth trajectory and sort of, yes, so many, but just the last point, anything on closures next year so we have a better sense to think about what net development looks like in '24? Thank you.

Yeah. So, let me start with the last question on closures. We're not providing guidance there. What I would do if I'm in your shoes, is look back over history, and I think Jack has been pretty consistent over time at the number of closures. We limited some of those in 2023. But overall, I think that's a fair estimate as we try to anticipate future closers, as you look somewhere in that, 14 to 20 range, as you think about historical closures, it's always ranged somewhere in that neighborhood. And so that's not a guide. That's just to tell you that's just history. And then as we look at our guide into next year, we're guiding to 25 to 35 Jack openings and 10 to 15 Del openings. And we now have a pipeline, you know, 90 development agreements with 389 commitments at Jack, 77 of those in design and permitting. And they're actually -- we can actually see the pipeline now on what's in design and permitting versus three years ago. So, we're actually able to manage a pipeline. And now at Del, with the number of re-franchising transactions, we added 109 commitments just from that alone. And now we have 138 commitments at Del for future development. That also helps us build a pipeline and get visibility into it for 47 locations now in design or permitting and construction phases. So, we feel good that we have a pipeline now that we can actually manage, and we will continue to build that over the next year. I think you -- the last thing I would add is, I think the entire industry has been pretty consistent in the statement that we have seen cost rise, so we have a value engineering program in place to reduce the 20% or 30% that we saw increases, some of that's from size of the building. And then also we've got to figure out ways to take and make this process more efficient, because we've definitely seen through COVID and post-COVID, that some of the delays and some of our miss this quarter on the guide, those stores just got delayed from, you know, supplier labor and pushed into this year. So, we definitely saw that happen, and we've opened quite a few at the first month of this year.

Thanks, Darin.

Our next question comes from the line of Sara Senatore with the Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I just wanted to ask about the investments that you're making in terms of improvement allowances and incentives. So, I was just wondering if you could quantify I guess in terms of the amount, the total $110 million to $120 million, if the difference between 2024 guide and the CapEx from 2023 is those incentives? And then maybe talk about the impact on franchisee returns, are you targeting like a specific payback period or you have thoughts on maybe like what growth would look like if you didn't offer the incentives? Just trying to sort of understand the philosophy behind that. Thanks.

Yeah. Hi, this is Brian. On the increase in our guide for kind of overall CapEx and investments, it's across a few different areas. As we looked at that new store opening guidance for '24, part of it is driven by our investment in new stores. And so as that's ramping up, both with our, you know, our own operators internally and as well with our franchisees, that's an increase. As we also mentioned that we're investing more in technology with our new POS expected to start rolling out in '24, continued investments in digital, rolling out our ERP. So, there is a variety of different really important technology investments that we think will generate mature returns over time. That's stepping up. And then there is some increase in the TI allowance incentives, but it's not the bulk of that increase. But we do think those are important to be able to keep our franchisees not only investing in remodels, but also keeping them focused on development as quickly as possible.

To add to your question about payback, I mean, what we're seeing right now in our build cost, we want to get our build cost to around $1.8 million to $1.9 million. And with some of the value engineering, we anticipate that occurring in 2024. And so from a payback standpoint, our target is always to try to stay under five years. And it's really going to be dependent, as you know, on sales and what it costs to build. And we've seen some of that escalate cost-wise, and we've brought that down into 2024. So, we think that'll help our returns. And then with what we've performed in, say, Salt Lake and Louisville and the sales outperforming, we've seen outperformance in all of our openings, not just in Salt Lake and Louisville, we've seen it north of $2 million in the stores that we've opened. So, we've had successful openings as well. So, we think we're in a place to have continue to attract franchisees to grow even in this environment as we navigate last '22's inflationary environment that we're still working through.

Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Alton Stump with Loop Capital. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. I was pretty encouraged by your guidance for low to mid-single-digit, Jack in the Box comparable sales for this year, given the fact that obviously, you're going to be up against some pretty tough compares, how much of that confidence is coming from the fact that you obviously are going to have to take higher pricing, mainly in California with AB1228 versus underlying transactional improvements in your business?

Yeah. I think for us, what we've really focused on is, do we have the right calendar in place, do we know how to reach our customers in the right way. And because right now, with what's going on in California, it's really hard to predict what really will happen with sales. So, we are focused on how do we reach our customers, how do we provide them service in the way that we need to. And really, that's about we've seen things like speed improve year-over-year by nine seconds. That helps sales. Our alerts are down since Q3. All of that will help us. Now, to add color, what I would say is, we think we have a good pipeline of products coming in this year. To get better, what we have to do is, be able to reach our breakfast customers better. That's a little bit of the category this quarter that we struggled in, both breakfast and value. So we'll make sure that we have the right offers for those that are looking for checks under $8 and we'll have the right offers to drive some transactions there, in addition to really focusing on how do we continue to bring back breakfast. And breakfast was our slowest day part, I'll add some color here, in this last quarter, mostly because we deleted items. We were simplifying the menu, and -- but although it was good for margins, it hurt sales, and it helps simplicity in margins, which we wanted to do for our franchisees. But by removing biscuits, a burrito, a sourdough sandwich, and some salads, we definitely -- we impacted sales this quarter.

Great. Thank you, Darin.

Our next question comes from the line of David Tarantino with Baird. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good afternoon. My question is coming back to the pricing philosophy that you have. I know, Darin, you mentioned that the price increase you're assuming for this year is what you need to cover the inflation. But I guess with traffic running negative, I wonder if you could just share your philosophy on your thoughts on protecting the traffic versus covering the inflation. I know it's a tricky balance, but, why not, for example, take less pricing in order to protect the traffic in maybe the long-term business model? I guess, could you just kind of walk us through your thought process on that?

Yeah, I think the real answer is, it's balanced. So we wanted to provide you a guide on what we need to just purely cover the cost of the wage inflation in California. And that's what we tried to guide to. We will be watching it, as I said, with our pricing discipline, to understand where is the right place to take price at the right time so that we can limit as much as possible any traffic declines.

Yeah. And on top of that, we are aggressively continuing our efforts to drive other operational improvement. So anywhere we can create more efficiency within the stores, whether it's labor or food cost, that will also help reduce the need to increase price as well. So -- and we're just really excited about the innovation in our menu and making sure we -- our consumers want to come to us. And so I think as we look at our calendar and some of the innovation we have coming out this year, we feel very confident we can continue to drive improved traffic as well.

Yeah, one of the things Brian mentioned it, that I'm most proud of in this quarter is RLM. We improved it by 400 basis points. Our franchisees have seen three quarters straight of improved margins. So, the initiatives we've been rolling out, the 200 basis point initiatives, have been starting to take hold in the stores. And so the next step is to continue with pricing, watch traffic, make sure we have the right calendar, but also help our franchisees make more money by following through with what we call our financial fundamentals plan. And now that Tom is at Del, he follows the same playbook that we follow at Jack in strategy, and he's putting in place the same initiatives that are particular to Del so that we can balance all aspects of this -- of the business, not just top-line and transactions.

Got it. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris O'Cull with Stifel. Please go ahead. Chris O’Cull: Thanks. Good afternoon, guys. Darin, you mentioned product innovation is going to play an important role again this year or next year, I guess. And I believe the Company has indicated a new major product may be introduced next year. Is that still the case? And is there any kind of -- and if so, is there a prior new product that may be a good analog to think about for this product and maybe help us understand what aspects of it make it a good comparison?

Yeah. The core of Jack, historically, is innovation, right. We were one of the first breakfast, first drive-through, and so we've got a lot of things in test. We're getting closer to rolling out that product that I think is differentiated in the market, and we're excited about it coming, but we're not ready to announce it yet. But we have plenty of new items in our calendar coming for this year. And the first one I'll say is things like, we just rolled out Boba this week, and I think we're the first QSR to roll out Boba. And it's a great product. We're excited about what it's done in test, and it just, over the weekend, was the first entry of Boba into our calendar. So, we'll continue to do that, as well as introduce really good innovation to the marketplace on things that fit Jack specifically. Chris O’Cull: Thanks.

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Slagle with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Wanted to ask a question on the operations side of things with the speed of service, which has always been a big driver, same-store sales for the brands, and you've made some good progress in recent quarters here. So, trying to figure out kind of where you think you stand now versus peers, where you think it can go, and where the biggest catalyst could be to make that happen. I'm not sure if it's coming from lower tiers of stores where a bigger source of improvement could come from, or just broadly across the whole system.

Yeah, I think things like performance at the Ops level. I think there's two key areas that we have still opportunity to improve, and it's with our staffing, which we're now at pre-COVID levels at Jack, almost there on the franchise side of the business. It’s really an area of late night. Make sure we're staffed appropriate at late night so that we can drive out, speed of service and at the right times. And then, it's how we balance our labor scheduling. We've got a new way that we're scheduling labor so that we can be most effective at the times where we need the labor so we can hit our speed of service numbers. And then what I would say from an alert standpoint, both speed of service and alerts are things that are indicative of same-store sales performance. We have an opportunity in our third-party and our online orders to get better at execution of our business model. And so we'll look to say how can we, now that we're about 12% of sales in digital, four years ago, we were at 1%. So, we've got to figure out better ways that we can execute on that digital business. And those two are the key areas from a performance standpoint that we can improve on.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Bernstein with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you very much. As we think about the initial fiscal '24 guidance, specifically on the earnings side, I'm just wondering, you know, where you see the greatest uncertainty? Darin, I think you mentioned the California pricing is kind of a big unknown from an elasticity perspective, but I'm just wondering where you think you're most conservative and maybe more aggressive, how you think about that guidance? And then, just to clarify, I think you mentioned, Darin, that your franchisee profitability has improved consistently over the past number of quarters. I'm wondering whether you ever share, now that we're starting a new fiscal year, whether you would share the annual franchise level profitability at each of your two brands for this year versus -- fiscal '23 versus fiscal '22, so we could have a gauge for expectations going into fiscal '24. Thank you.

Sure. I think, from our standpoint, I think the thing that we have to look at is really focused on, how do we support our franchisees in California during AB1228. And then, like Brian said is, that's not only price, it's operational direction and how do we help them take margin opportunities and improve on their business. And so that's where I think, in our guidance that gives us the most, I would say, to your question, discomfort or not as knowledgeable about what's truly the outcome. And then from a standpoint of margins, at Investor Day, we'll consider exploring, communicating our margins and what's happening with franchisees' P&L and what we anticipate new store returns to be, especially after last year and '22, having so much inflation and not fully recouping all of that yet, we're still on pace to do that. But, you know, at both brands, we have not fully recovered from all the margin loss in 2022. And so, you know, but our franchisees' P&Ls have improved. They're making the same dollars that they were making two years ago, just not the same percentage yet, we want to be able to do both and actually improve their margins.

Yeah, I would agree. I'd just add, again, the top-line is the one, obviously, that we'll continue to monitor in that price trends mix. Outside of that, we have really good line of sight on our G&A, got good controls there, and I feel like we've got a really good strategy as we continue to integrate Del Taco and gain more synergies in 2024. And on the commodity side, we've got good line of sight there and the same thing on the wage side, we have a good sense, an improving labor market. So, kind of outside of AB1228, we're seeing improved ability to staff in the stores. And so I think we feel really good about our ability to control kind of everything, you know, below the top-line. And then we're going to obviously do what we can to make sure we maximize our sales.

Our next question comes from the line of Jake Bartlett with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for taking the question. And mine is really a clarification on the guidance. And, you know, I believe -- and just correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe the guidance specifically says, excludes the impact of re-franchising, so it assumes no Del Taco re-franchising. But you do think there's going to be some re-franchising? Darin, I think you mentioned a minimum of, 30 to 40. Just to make sure I got that right, you know, maybe if you could help us, in terms of G&A per store per, or D&A per store, how should we -- if we were to kind of build in the re-franchising, any kind of, you know, guidelines or guideposts as we try to do that?

So I'll start and I'll let Brian finish. Our focus, as I said, is 120 restaurants in three years and get to 90% franchise by the end of 2026. And so although we think this is not a guide, we think we'll do at a minimum 30 to 40. If we're not finding the right operator or the right deal, we'll slow it down. But, the other thing is like we did this year in 2023, we sped it up because we had great deals, great operators and the right prices. And these transactions were accretive. So I'll let Brian add to that.

Yeah, we did not include it in the guide because we just don't have the perfect line of sight to the timing and the magnitude of the impact. So, I need to get back to you on the D&A impact. So, I'll make sure we try to circle back on that before we finish the call here so we can give you some color on how that may influence it. So what I -- as we've, I think we've talked about in the past here, when you think about the refranchising, it's that trade-off of obviously selling EBITDA, we pick up royalties. If we use the proceeds to repurchase shares, we pick up earnings benefit from that. We reduce our field G&A over time as well. And then what's really important is that we have strong operators that we're refranchising with, whether existing or new, so that we can add more development agreements that we think is really important to driving long-term accretion of the business beyond the benefits of being asset light. That's a really important strategy. So I'll circle back with you on the D&A, just as an estimate, it obviously varies by store.

Great, And I know there's a little bit of guidance in terms of what you provided ICR last year in terms of the first 120 stores. But I guess, is that relevant for the next 100 stores? Or is that something we should kind of use as a guide?

Yeah, we'll update it. I think that's the basic guide I would use until we update it at ICR.

Thank you so much.

Our next question comes from a line of Chris Carril with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking the question. Brian, I think you briefly just referenced this, but could you provide any more insight on synergies from Del Taco? Is there anything you could point to with regard to opportunities around G&A, supply chain, or any other areas you could point to? Thanks.

Yeah, on the G&A side, we are still working through some areas where we can consolidate. We'll get more operational efficiency through consolidating more of our systems. So there's a lot of work that's already been done that in the back half of fiscal ‘23, that you'll see the flow through into ‘24. So I'd say the biggest work efforts have already actually been accomplished. It's just you'll see it in the full year 24 numbers. And then, Darin, on the commodity side and other, maybe you can cover that.

Yeah, what we've seen is obviously we've guided to commodity costs and those commodity costs include some of the benefit from our purchasing and scale that we've received at both Jack and Del Taco. So those synergies numbers are in there. We will exceed our synergy numbers that we targeted when we made the Del Taco acquisition in 2024, will be north of $15 million dollars in EBITDAB benefit as a result of that. A lot of that has been picked up in commodity costs already, but some of it is in overhead and other areas like, public company costs. And then we still think there's a benefit as we finish our enterprise system in the IT area and we get shared systems and POS over both brands over the next couple years.

Yeah, one last thing I'd mention is if you actually look at our G&A guide, we just get to full year, we actually expect to exit ‘24 on a slightly lower run rate of G&A than we're starting. So it's just a good example of how we're still extracting more benefits from integrating the companies.

Great, thank you.

Our next question comes from a line of Brian Harbour with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Yes, thanks. Good afternoon. I just had a clarification question on the pricing. I think that the number you said for Jack in the Box for the fourth quarter, I think it was similar to the prior quarter if I heard that correctly. I thought there was kind of some pricing roll-off. So I guess my question was just, did you already take kind of some a new layer of pricing and then, as you think about that that 6% to 8%, is that going to all come right when the wage change happens or how should we think about that from a timing perspective?

Are you asking on the company-owned side or the franchise side, Brian?

I believe the number you gave was on the company-owned side.

Yes, company-owned side. I mean we've balanced it. We typically balance it and we've taken pricing throughout the year. And so we will continue to do that and take it over time, except for in California, we'll ramp it up a little more aggressively prior to April. So we definitely will look at taking price at the right times across the board. During last year we took price more frequently. Typically we take it quarterly, but we'll take it when we need to as we do that over the next year.

Thanks.

Our final question comes from the line of Jon Tower with Citi. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for squeezing me in. I guess just going back to the breakfast conversation earlier, it does sound like, Darin, you're emphasizing the need for checks under $8 there and it sounds like in the period some items being removed hurt the sales. So, one, was that specific to the fourth quarter? Meaning, it didn't happen in the prior periods, so it'll persist going forward? Then, two, how do you think about balancing the need to drive traffic at that day part without compromising profits at that day part? Is there something else you can do with respect to labor management during that time of day in order to ensure that profits don't continue to kind of sink during that day part?

Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why we removed items. We actually had a margin lift by removing some of those items even though we had a sales decline. So that's exactly part of the strategy we're looking at. I think we're taking a look at where are some other ways that we can increase value during that day part. I know often in times when the market gets tight economically, breakfast is one of the first things that may disappear quickly. And so we want to make sure we're offering the right value offers at the right time. And for us, we also saw last year at this time, we ran French Toast Sticks, which is always a hit for us. And we tried to do a new breakfast roll out with our breakfast taco. And quite frankly, it just did okay. It really didn't move the needle. And so between removing items, having the breakfast taco and some innovation there, we just didn't have the right offer at the right time. And so, but margins did improve even though we were down or we are flat in sales at the breakfast day part.

Great, thank you.

I would like to thank our speakers for today's presentation and thank you all for joining us. This now concludes today's call and you may now disconnect.