Thursday February 14, 2019, 00:00:00

Restaurants The Set-Up into the Print re CAKE, WEN, DIN, DPZ, and PZZA

By Mark Kalinowski

A number of restaurant companies are scheduled to report quarterly earnings over the February 20-26 time frame, including The Cheesecake Factory (CAKE; Neutral), Wendy’s (WEN; Neutral), Dine Brands (DIN; Buy), Domino’s (DPZ; Buy), and Papa John’s (PZZA; Neutral). In this report, we look at the set-up into the print for each of these five companies:

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Friday January 25, 2019, 00:00:00

WEN Adjusting Estimates, and Dreaming of Ghirardelli Chocolate Sauce

By Mark Kalinowski

Based on our data-driven checks regarding Wendy’s (WEN; Neutral) and the burger sector regarding December, we bump up our Q4E same-store sales forecast for Wendy’s North America by +50 basis points to +0.5%. While we still believe Wendy’s had a rough go of it in November (our Wendy’s checks for November 2018 were the worst of any month since those we did for February 2012), December appeared to be a meaningful bounce-back month sequentially — better than we expected. Our Q4E EPS estimate remains at $0.15.

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Friday January 25, 2019, 00:00:00

Modifying our Q4E Kalinowski Quick-Service Burger Same-Store Sales Index

By Mark Kalinowski

With this report, we update our data-driven Kalinowski Quick-Service Burger Index for Q4E from +1.2% to +1.8%. Our key takeaway: we believe that U.S. quick-service burgers chains in aggregate enjoyed their best same-store sales month during December 2018 since February 2016. The 60 basis-point increase in this index of ours is based on our latest proprietary checks/data as regards same-store sales performance for this segment during the last half of November and all of December.

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