Domino's Pizza, Inc. Q2 F2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jordan and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the rescheduled Domino's Pizza, Inc. second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Greg Lemenchick. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our second quarter conference call. Today's call will begin with our Chief Executive Officer, Russell Weiner. and incoming CEO, Joe Jordan, followed by our Chief Financial Officer, Sandeep Reddy. The call will conclude with a Q&A session. The notices regarding forward-looking statements in this morning's earnings release and 10-Q, both of which are available on our IR website, also apply to our comments on the call today. Actual results or trends could differ materially from our forecast. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our filings with the SEC. In addition, please refer to the 8K earnings release to find disclosures and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures that may be referenced on today's call. This morning's conference call is being webcast and is also being recorded for replay via our website. We want to do our best this morning to accommodate as many of your questions as time permits. As such, we encourage you to ask one question only. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Russell.

Thanks, Greg, and good morning, everybody. I wanted to start off by welcoming Joe Jordan, our incoming CEO, who has joined us on the call this morning. I am thrilled that the board unanimously elected Joe as our next CEO. He's an incredible leader whose experience spans virtually every aspect of our business over his 15 years with the company. Joe has earned the trust of franchisees across our global system, embodies the Domino's culture of developing leaders from within and is uniquely qualified to guide the company through its next phase of growth. Let me turn it over to Joe for a few comments.

Thanks, Russell. I'm honored to have the opportunity to lead Domino's, and I'm excited about the opportunities ahead. I've had the privilege of working alongside Russell for many years, and I want to thank him for his leadership and partnership. He has helped build one of the strongest businesses in our industry, and I'm grateful that we'll continue to benefit from his experience as he transitions to executive chairman next year. Having spent the last several years as COO, I've had the opportunity to work closely with our franchisees and our teams across the globe. That experience has only strengthened my belief in what makes Domino's unique. We have an exceptional global franchise system, talented people, a culture of innovation and operational excellence, and a brand that continues to earn the trust of customers every day. Those strengths give me tremendous confidence in our future. Our priorities remain clear, serving customers with delicious food, outstanding value and a great experience, supporting our franchisees and executing with discipline to drive long-term growth. I couldn't be more excited to lead this next chapter alongside the incredible people who make this company what it is. I look forward to engaging with you all more closely in my new role once I become CEO in October. Until then, my focus is on partnering with Russell and our leadership team to ensure a seamless transition.

Congrats again, Joe. The most important lesson I have learned in nearly two decades with Domino's, it's simple. Order counts drive long-term success. Order counts matter because they fuel growth for both the brand and our franchisees. The winners in QSR over time are the brands that can grow order counts while driving healthy ticket through disciplined pricing. That has been Domino's formula for success. Since I joined the company at the end of 2008, we have more than doubled the number of orders coming through our system in the U.S., resulting in double-digit market share gains. This growth in transactions helped drive approximately $7 billion in additional retail sales. More than 2,100 net new stores and a nearly 240% increase in store-level EBITDA for franchisees. Put simply, more orders and disciplined pricing have led to more sales, more stores, and more profits. This formula has helped make Domino's the number one pizza company in the world, and our growth opportunity remains substantial. With roughly 23% share of the pizza category, we still have significant runway ahead of us compared with leading QSR brands and other categories that command a 40 to 50% market share. The QSR industry in the U.S. has been struggling with order counts during a difficult period of macroeconomic uncertainty. We believe this continued in Q2, where QSR order counts were flat. Now, despite this backdrop, demand for Domino's remained incredibly strong. While we have not shared specific order count numbers in the past, and I won't start sharing them now on my last call, what I will tell you is that our order counts were up meaningfully in total and individually in our delivery and carry out businesses. This means that while other restaurants were fighting for orders, millions of new customers came to Domino's. and the race for long-term dominance, our increase in order count during both the first and second quarters of this year highlights that more people are ordering Domino's than ever before. Order counts are what drive our business. Orders bring people into our loyalty program, Flywheel, and they power our supply chain business. The order counts of today are consumers with whom we can drive frequency in the future. Now, one of the reasons we grew orders in Q2 was tapping into the aggregator marketplace. We continue to grow on both Uber and DoorDash and believe that we are now the number one pizza player on both platforms. Despite being number one, we have a significant amount of growth ahead of us to achieve our fair share. As we look at what consumers are ordering from Domino's on aggregators and look at where our customers go when they don't buy pizza, We see an opportunity in our portfolio and in the pizza segment for a new offering. We're bringing this product to market later this quarter, and I'll expand on that more in a minute. While I'm energized at our long term prospects, given our ability to drive order counts in this environment, same store sales in Q2 did not meet our expectations due to a miss on ticket. I don't believe this miss was due to macroeconomic headwinds. Those were assumed in our plan. The miss on ticket was largely within our control, which means we can and will address it moving forward. In Q2, we were lapping our Stuffed Crust Pizza launch, which carried a higher ticket and mix in the prior year. To roll over this, we launched our premium series, inclusive of our new slice sauce. This did not resonate with customers the way it needed to. The messaging wasn't compelling enough. The result was a drag on ticket, which impacted our results. We expect this drag to be lower in Q3 as a mix of stuffed crust came down in the prior year when we shifted media to our next promotion. We also expect and are already seeing the quality of our messaging back at the high bar we set at Domino's. On our last quarterly earnings call, I told you that we would be making changes in our 2026 marketing calendar for the second half of the year in light of what we were seeing in the competitive and macro environments. And we've done that. To start the third quarter, we changed our best deal ever and made it even better with the addition of stuffed crust. Customer reaction has shown that it was the right thing to do. Customers are enjoying getting our most indulgent pizza as part of this promotion that leverages both our most delicious food and renowned value hungry for more strategic pillars. Our revised calendar for the second half brings a pizza innovation in Q3 that is unlike anything we've offered before at Domino's. Similar to the opportunity Stuffcrust created by filling a gap in our menu offerings, We believe this new product will address an unmet consumer need, but this time with a pizza that is unique to Domino's. This signature product will give customers a delicious new reason to come to Domino's while protecting the core pizza occasions that have been key to our success. I will also tell you it is my favorite pizza full stop, and customers agree. It's one of the best tasting products we have ever tested. More to come later this quarter. As I finish up my last earnings call as CEO, I want to highlight why I remain so bullish on our business. Just like great pizza, the key to a great pizza company is its ingredients. The formula for success at Domino's remains the same. The only difference is our brand has never been stronger and our competition has never been weaker. We have the best ingredients in the business, both literally and figuratively. The scale, the team, the franchisees, and an incredible new CEO in Joe Jordan. In the QSR industry, just like orders count, the team counts. The achievements of the Domino's team have been incredible, and we are just getting started. The global team and our best-in-class franchisees in over 90 markets around the world create the Domino's effect every single day. They're what makes us the number one pizza company on the planet, and they are hungry. Hungry for even more. I'll now hand the call over to Sandeep.

Thank you, Russell. And once again, a huge congratulations to both you and Joe. It has been fantastic working and learning from Russell over the past four years as he welcomed me into Domino's. Joe has been an incredible business partner for me. He has been just as welcoming and I've learned so much from him as well. I'm very much looking forward to continuing to work with Joe to drive our business. Now let's jump into the results.

Income from operations increased 2.6% in Q2, excluding the impact of foreign currency and re-franchising gains from the sale of certain U.S. company-owned store markets in the second quarters of 2026 and 2025.

This increase in operating income, which came in slightly below our expectations, was primarily driven by higher U.S. and international franchise royalties and fees. It also benefited from gross margin dollar growth within supply chain that was fueled by our strong order count growth in the US. These increases were partially offset by higher general and administrative expenses. G&A increased due to expenses related to our worldwide rally in the second quarter of 2026. The rally takes place every two years. Excluding the impact of foreign currency, global retail sales grew 3% in the quarter due to global net store growth of almost 1,000 stores over the past 12 months. In Q2, retail sales grew by 1.9% in the U.S., driven primarily by net store growth, inclusive of 26 net new stores in the quarter. Same-store sales grew 0.1%. Our business continued to be impacted by a challenging macro environment, which is pressuring consumers, as well as heightened competition. Our comp was comprised of a strong increase in order counts that drove the strength of our core business, as well as continued growth in our aggregator business. This was offset by a lower average ticket. As Russell noted, our ticket was impacted by rolling over our launch of Stuffed Crust in the prior year, which carried a higher ticket and a mix of orders while we were on media with it. Our planned lap with the Premium Series and Sliced Sauce resulted in a mix that was below our expectations. Pricing was up 0.2% in the quarter, and our carryout comp was up 1.1% and delivery was down 0.7%. I wanted to take a moment to share some color on the QSR Pizza category through the first half of 2026. The category continues to grow in line with our historical growth rate and we continue to take share. Category growth this year is being driven by the dine-in channel, as some pizza consumers are returning to pre-COVID habits of wanting a dine-in experience. Independent QSR pizza restaurants have been the biggest beneficiary of this shift. Shifting to our international business, where retail sales grew 4.1%, excluding the impact of foreign currency in the quarter. This was primarily driven by net store growth over the last year, inclusive of 183 stores in Q2. Comp sales declined by 0.1% in the quarter, as they continue to be impacted by Domino's Pizza Enterprises. They remain focused on turning their business around, and we continue to work closely with them on that. Comps were also impacted by macro and geopolitical uncertainty across the world in the quarter. Moving to capital allocation, through Q2, we repurchased approximately 632,000 shares for a total of $231 million year-to-date. As of the end of the quarter, we had approximately $1.23 billion remaining on our share repurchase authorization. We continue to expect to deliver meaningful cash to shareholders in 2026 and beyond, in line with our capital allocation priorities, and we look to drive the best possible returns for our shareholders. Now turning to our updated outlook for 2026, which excludes the impact of the 53rd week. First, U.S. same-store sales. We continue to expect our U.S. comp to be up low single digits. This contemplates the continuation of a challenging macro and competitive environment like we have seen in the first half of the year. We continue to expect our international same-store sales growth to be up low single digits, inclusive of the benefit of the World Cup soccer tournament that just concluded. We now expect approximately 175 net stores in the U.S., which is a slight shift from the 175-plus we had previously. We are making this adjustment as we are seeing some pressure on our pipeline due to the macro, coupled with the challenging start to the year that has impacted franchisee profitability. We continue to expect approximately 800 net stores in our international business. We continue to expect our global retail sales growth to be up mid-single digits for the year. Lastly, we continue to expect operating income growth of mid to high single digits, excluding the impact of foreign currency, re-franchising gains, and the gain on the sale of our corporate aircraft. Before I wrap up, I wanted to call your attention to an investor presentation that we've added to our IR website. This deck gives a summary of our business and historical growth over time across our key Hungry for More metrics. It also includes updated market share information through December 2025 that is broken down by nationals, regionals, and independents. Thank you. We will now open the line for questions.

As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, simply press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. You are limited to one question. Your first question comes from the line of David Palmer from Evercore ISI. Your line is now live.

Great. Great. Thank you. Thanks for those comments. Russell, if you could maybe take a step back and maybe sort of label the biggest challenges and opportunities Maybe by the parts of the business as you see fit, I can think about the innovation front, the value lift front, the channel expansion. You're doing very well with carryout. There's been more like low single digits there. There's the third-party marketing lift. You have the DOM OS and new versions of the app. If you had to kind of go through these areas, your own execution versus the environment, where do you think has been the biggest sort of disappointment versus plan and how much is under execution and how does that inform the biggest near and medium term opportunities? Thanks very much.

Thanks, David. You know, what I've always been proud of working here at Domino's is we turn our challenges into opportunities. And so one of the things I'm really looking forward to, I mean, when you're in these jobs, all you can do is lean forward and give it everything that you can. and then there's the time to look back and I look forward to doing that with Joe on what our strengths have been what our opportunities are and then in my new role helping him as he you know plants the vision moving forward so I'm not going to go through detail by detail I will say you know one of my Thanks for joining us, David. and we looked at what do consumers who are interested in pizza, what do they buy when they don't buy pizza? And that's what this new product does. It's going to hit an occasion I don't think we as a pizza category hit that well today. And so that's an opportunity that I'm really looking forward to hitting market in Q3.

Your next question comes from the line of Brian Bittner from Oppenheimer. Your line is now live.

Hey, thank you. And Russell, as you move into this executive chair role, just a huge congratulations on such an amazing career at Domino's. And Joe, of course, congratulations on the big CEO promotion. And the question is, just in light of the meaningful order count growth that you're alluding to, It begs the question, are you still seeing the short-term competitive pressures on the business that you called out specifically on the last quarter's earnings call? On this earnings call, you said that your competition has never been weaker. And I'm assuming that's more of a consistent structural view that you have. So I'm curious if you're starting to see some of those competitive pressures that you called on the last call start to dissipate, or if you could just unpack that dynamic for us. Thank you.

Yeah, sure, Brian. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure to work with you as well. You know, the competitive pressure is not only in pizza, in QSR, continues through the quarter. We expect them to, you know, continue through the rest of the year. I talked about in Q1 what we saw competitively, what we anticipated for the rest of the year, and I said that we would be looking at our calendar and making changes, and we have. You know, we looked at our best deal ever, which was... of a renowned value promotion for us. And we made a change on that. We said, hey, how do we make it better? And so we added our one of our most delicious, indulgent pizzas with stuffed crust into that. And so I think what we did was we looked at what was going on in the category and we said, you know what? Everyone is leaning in. We need to lean in as well. And so you saw that with best deal ever. And you're going to see that with stuff going on in Q3 and Q4. And when I talk about the competition, I'm also talking about relative to us. I've been here, as you know, 18 years. We weren't always the number one pizza brand. And now as we are, the distance between us and our competition is greater than it's ever been. And so when I think about, not I think, I know what wins in this category, right? It's scale, because what you can do is through supply chain offer low market basket cost to your franchisees. Then you can drive volume if you have the biggest ad budget in the industry, which we do, and scale wins. And we've never had a greater scale. And relative to our competition, they've never had less scale and momentum. And so those two things add up well for us to continue to drive share as we have over the last decade plus.

Your next question comes from the line of Gregory Frankfurt from Guggenheim.

Your line is now live.

Hey, thanks for the question. I just wanted to ask me about third party. Russell, I think you made a comment that you're the largest pizza player on third party now. And I guess as you think about trying to drive the business higher or continue to grow going forward, how do you balance profitability with market share in that channel? Are you trying to hold kind of gross profit dollars similar to your in-store business? And are you willing to maybe discount a little more aggressively? Just any thoughts on continuing to drive that business going forward? Thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Greg. Yeah, on third-party, just to be clear, we believe we're now the number one pizza company on both Uber and DoorDash. Overall, as we've talked about, our pricing on aggregators is premium. And so we try to be kind of profit neutral for the franchisees. So even though and we still think the 50% incrementality number we put out there is still the one to look at. Really, at the end of the day, the way we priced, you know, the franchisees should be neutral where consumers buy that product. What I did want to talk about that I'm really excited about that actually pertains to the third party is something under our operational excellence pillar. You know, we've talked a little bit about our orchestration agent. And just to remind those on the call, what we're doing is we're setting up our back of house to optimize to make sure that I use this term just in time pizza making, that we've got the pizza right out of the oven and in a delivery driver's hands or in a consumer's hands as quickly as possible. And so what the orchestration agent does, let's say, for example, a delivery driver is stuck in traffic on his way back, an order comes in. In the past, we would have just made that order. Now, the orchestration agent, without the store kind of seeing, will say, hey, you know what? Let's not show the store that order yet because we don't need to make it. We need to make it so it's hot when the delivery driver gets back. Now, Greg, those orders, that's orchestration agent that works not only for orders on Domino's website, but also orders through the aggregator. And so I think when you look at what our advantages are on aggregators, certainly we've got the same thing that wins in every marketplace. We've got brand scale. We've got value. But one of the secret ingredients for us is we deliver our product no matter where the order comes. And it's part of this ecosystem that we're getting better and better every day. So I think not only in the front end are we going to be delivering great value, but that value is going to pay off on the back end because there's no one who's going to be able to deliver a hotter product than we will.

And Greg, I'm just going to add something on the profitability that we're actually seeing on the aggregator orders. We've been very, very thoughtful about the way we're actually going after the growth opportunity. As Russell mentioned, we're not near our fair share from a growth perspective. There's plenty of runway still for us, even though we're the number one player. But the reason we're actually being so careful is because we want to protect profitability as we go after this growth. and that's going to be a guiding philosophy that we're going to employ as a management team as we move forward.

But the runway is there, the profitable growth is there and this is one more lever to actually drive franchisee profitability.

Your next question comes from the line of David Tarantino from Baird.

Your line is now live.

Hi, good morning. Russell and Joe, congratulations from me as well. My question's maybe on the U.S. comps performance in the second quarter, and you mentioned, I think, meaningful order count growth offset by ticket declines. I was hoping maybe you could give us a sense of the magnitude of the up and down around the order counts and the ticket growth. I appreciate that you don't want to give the exact number, but perhaps something directionally like was it better in Q2 than Q1 on order count growth or something like that. And then I guess on the order counts specifically, just wondering your thoughts on what drove that specifically in the second quarter and how sustainable that might be for the second half of the year.

David, thanks for the question. And let me actually give you just a high-level overview of how the quarter worked out. From an Oticon perspective, not only was it meaningful Oticon growth, but it actually met our expectations. It did exactly what we were planning to do. The challenge we really had was on ticket, as Russell mentioned in the prepared remarks, and I did too, I think the premium series that was intended to lap the Parmesan stuffed crust from last year didn't give us the results that we needed. And I think that's why we had a bit of a shortfall on ticket and seems to have fell below our expectations. But from what our plans are, I think this is a very sustainable opportunity from an auto account growth perspective because it ties into what we're doing with Renown Value, whether it's some of the promotions that we actually have had in the first half of the year or What we're running right now with Best Deal Ever. And in addition to that, aggregators will continue to be a growth driver. And that should be driving more and more occasions. So we're really confident in our ability to drive auto account growth as we move into the rest of the year as well.

Yeah, maybe just to add some color to that, I was putting Sandeep on the spot. I knew he wasn't going to give you the actual numbers, but it just shed a little light. When you think about the way we run our business, it's kind of like a barbell on you know, order count and ticket. And not only were orders meaningfully up on the total business, but they also were on delivery and carry out separately. And I think that's really important. So both parts of the business are healthy. Now, when that happens, you drive market share. You know, I talked about that. I want to make sure I reiterate this point, you know, that we believe the QSR industry was flat on order counts. And so this is significant, not only in absolute, but relative to what's going on in the industry where you see a lot of folks out there trying to drive value, trying to drive orders. And these are profitable orders that go into our loyalty program. So we've got millions of more people now as part of our loyalty program in that flywheel and that's why our accounts are so important and that's why they're so correlated with franchisee profitability is once we get them in the flywheel, That's what the future is all about. On the ticket thing, you know, David, what I'd say there is that one was under our control. If we executed the way we intended to and we rarely miss, you know, we would have had that balance. So there's nothing, you know, within the business that I think permanently is affecting that. We're going to barbell balance ticket and order count moving forward. And that's going to continue to result in share growth.

Your next question comes from the line of Danilo Garrillo from Berenstein. Your line is live.

Thank you.

And again, Russell, huge congratulations on the incredible success you've had at Domino's, the big impact you've had over your career and, you know, congratulations and good luck to you, Joe, on your new role. I guess my question is, obviously you tested the new premium series before opening up to the market, and it fell short of your expectations. So I'm wondering if you can elaborate on what drove the disconnect between your testing and the actual result, and what learnings are you embedding to make sure that the new pizza that you're going to be launching later this quarter is not going to fall short of your expectations?

Yeah, you know, thanks Danilo. We've been, as you said, pretty good, at least over the last 18 years I've been here in what I call is having the answers to the test before we go into the test. Whether it's pricing or new products, doing a really good job at understanding the impact of what we do. Clearly, we missed on this one. It wasn't compelling enough. I think I said in my opening remarks that I really felt like our messaging is back to where it needs to be. And that is not only for what's on air now. for what's going on with this new product coming up. So stay tuned. We're very, very excited, and I can't wait for you to try it.

Your next question comes from the line of Dennis Geiger from UBS. Your line is now live.

Great, thanks guys, and congrats Russell and Joe. I wanted to ask another one on the order count and mix dynamic. Specific to the order count, Russell, you commented on adding millions of new customers. I'm curious if there's any way to put that into context relative to Prior Quarters, and presumably some of that's a good chunk is coming from the third party channel. Anywhere else where you think those new customers are coming from? And then just as it relates to the mix side of that, just curious as you think about Best Deal Ever with stuff there, is that something that has a notable drag on mix? Or have you kind of engineered it or figured it out that it's not a notable ticket drag? Thanks, guys.

So, Dennis, I'll start, and maybe Russell will tag team on this one as well. I think on the order count front, it's really a consequence of all the great stuff we talked about during the investor day. When you think about the loyalty program that we launched just before investor day, we have continued to build significant numbers into the loyalty program. And as of the end of 25, we were up 20% from what we were before launching it. and I think we're really excited about the frequency bills that come behind customers acquired through the loyalty program and that is a big driver of our order count. And that's on the one hand. On the other hand, the other part that we talked about on the Invest Today was entering to the aggregator channel. and the beautiful thing with 50% incrementality is we are acquiring more customers that we wouldn't have been able to acquire otherwise by being on the aggregator channel and this continues to build and this also continues to compound over time as we spend more time on platform. We're seeing this in the case of Uber and we expect to see this in the case of DoorDash over time as well and that's why we're so bullish on the future with the aggregator platform as we move forward. And then I think on the mixed dynamics, we touched on this a little bit in the prepared remarks as well, where yes, we did have an impact on ticket during the second quarter because the premium series didn't give us the mix that we were looking for. But as we also noted, as we moved into the third quarter of last year, a few weeks into it, the messaging changed from Parmesan Stuffed Crust to our next promotion, which happened to be Best Delivered. and now we're actually lapping Bestie Lever with Bestie Lever and we're super excited about the reinvention that we've done with the inclusion of Parmesan stuffed crust in the Bestie Lever offer and really excited and confident that this is going to be an important all-account driver in addition to the fact that the mixed impact from the ticket is much more modest in Q3 because we pretty much have already lapped that.

And I also think about this as almost, we use this term, paid trial. By putting Parmesan stuffed crust in Best Deal Ever, yeah, it's a discount for customers, but they're still paying a good fee for it. And that trial will lead to long-term repeat. So putting Parmesan stuffed crust in Best Deal Ever was really important because because we know when people try it, they'll come back again and again, and so that's happening right now with Best Deal Ever.

Your next question comes from the line of Lauren Silberman from Deutsche Bank. Your line is live.

Thank you very much, and congrats, Russell and Joe. First, I just want to clarify my question. The clarification is on same-store sales. Is it fair to assume 2Q comps are the lowest for the year, just given the comments that average tech should get better and sounds like momentum on the order count continues? And then my actual question is just on U.S. unit growth. So trimmed it slightly, called that franchisee profitability. I know a lot of development would have been in place in 26. So I guess what does that mean for 27? And just given pizza industry pressures, is this a little bit of rebalancing across years? Same Store Sales and Unit Gross, anything you'd consider differently to sort of incentivize unit growth. Thank you.

So, Lauren, let me start with the scene store sales projections. And look, I mean, we didn't change the guidance for the full year from up low single digits.

And I think we're sticking to that. And I think based on how we updated last quarter, we weren't really going to talk to a cadence during the course of the year where we're happy with the order count growth in the second quarter, but not happy with the ticket outcome that we got. And I think as we move into the back half of the year, we're looking to fix both sides of it. and so we're very confident in our guide of workflow single digits. So when it comes to the unit growth, and I think we touched on that specifically and you did catch that we made a modification to it, when we actually have looked at the last few months and some of the headwinds that we've been seeing broadly in the environment, the pipeline has started to see some pressure and I think this happens Thank you for joining us. We know exactly what the problem is. We're fixing it in the back half of the year. So we're pretty confident that we'll actually get back on track over time. But I think in the short term, because of the window that we're in halfway through the year, we are seeing a little bit of that pressure, which we are sure will actually take care of itself over time. Too early to talk about 2027. We'll come back once we do our budgets for the year, by the end of the year, and we'll talk about it more when we report Q4.

Yeah, I think I'd be remiss on my last call not to address the second part of your question, which is pizza industry pressures. That one I'd love to put into context. Again, for as long as I've been here, the pizza industry has grown One to two percent. We can continue to take share. And I guess rather just reiterate that statement, I take a step back and say, certainly is this is pizza a mature category? Yes. Is our sandwiches and burgers mature categories? Also, yes. And I think pizza did relatively well to both those categories last year. The difference between pizza and the leaders in those categories is we have about half the share that the leader in burger has of their category. So I think the proof is in the pudding, and if the category continues to grow the way it has, the upside for us, just to get what a number one share should be of a category that grows pretty similar to those other categories, there's a lot of upside for us, and it's upside that we've shown we've hit over the last decade plus.

Your next question comes from the line of John Ivanko from JP Morgan. Your line is now live.

Hi, thank you. First, a comment. And obviously, I don't know if it's the product, but the Italianos that you have in the UK is my single favorite large brand pizza I've ever had. So we have an opportunity to bring that to the US. I'd be very happy about it. So just a comment on that. Hopefully, it landed OK. And then secondly, when I do think about unit development, obviously, it to follow up to Lauren's question by asking it in a different way. A little bit of a tweak down in 26. It does seem like, or at least from what I'm interpreting, you know, 27, you know, has an opportunity to perhaps be a little bit less. You know, my experience is that, you know, one of the easiest ways really to drive same unit economics is to focus on what's already open as opposed to what would open in the future. And, you know, Domino's as a brand in the U.S. has closed nearly nothing in the past, in my experience covering the company since 2004, has closed nearly nothing. So do we have an opportunity to maybe remap some of the U.S. and just kind of think, okay, what's the best way to optimize same unit profitability and not just maybe rethink of what was previously planned to be open, but maybe in some cases actually consolidate and some stores that perhaps we could have oversplit certain markets in order to enhance same-unit profitability. So how are we thinking about kind of remapping U.S. businesses? I think we have an opportunity to maybe rethink some things. Thank you.

Thank you, John. And if we could get it to you in 30 minutes over the pond, we would, but even the new orchestration agent can't do that. But I agree, it's a very, very good product. You know, what I'd say is, you know, I'm not sure I agree with the thesis that we should be remapping our stores. You know, what we did this last quarter and the last couple of quarters is we grew order count. Growing order count leads to more store growth. And so, as you said, if there had not, I think we had like six, seven stores closed over the last couple of years in the U.S., and so there's really no need to redraw anything I think there's an ability to open up more stores and more stores gets driven by more orders. So what you've seen here in the quarter, franchisee profitability is the other piece of it, but more orders, that's key to future store growth. And so I'm bullish at that part, that outcome in the quarter and its effect on long-term store growth.

And I'm just going to add on this, John. I think Russell said this many times before on previous calls and so have I. When we open up a store, the carryout business is about 80% incremental. And with the scale that we've actually already achieved, we have tremendous opportunity to drive incremental growth with our share just about 20% on carryout. So it continues to be a very compelling vehicle for growth for us and does offer great returns for the franchisees when they open those stores.

Your next question comes from the line of Zach Fatum from Wells Fargo.

Your line is now live.

Hi, good morning and congrats, Russell and Joe. Following up on the innovation, Domino's has a history of implementing or testing new products overseas and then bringing them to the U.S. So my first question is, if you can update us on what products you have tested internationally of late and any thoughts on results Chicken Dippers, etc. And then with respect to your pizza innovation, is this something that's been tested overseas? And is there anything that you can share about performance? Thanks.

Hi, Zach. Yeah, you know, the chicken dip is, is, has been launched by DPG, Delmo's Pizza Group. and they reported in Q1 they were very happy with the launch. We're not going to get ahead of reporting their results, so I'll go ahead and let them do that. But I would remind everyone that through kind of what is currently in a Domino's store, currently, you know, the ovens and all that. So if they're excited, you know, we are certainly excited. And we look at products internationally all the time. The lava cake that we launched, you know, years ago came from international. This particular product, the team developed here in the U.S., and we're excited at watching it because I actually believe that this is an occasion that can help pizza potentially expand a little bit more outside of pizza because of the occasion that it hits. And if it works here, hopefully this is something we can bring abroad. So tune in for that.

Your next question comes from the line of Sarah Senator from Bank of America. Your line is now.

Oh, thank you. I wanted to follow up on the comment about, you know, your your share of the market being half what it is and other segments. But I guess. The independents seem to be maybe more formidable challengers in this segment than elsewhere. And you mentioned Dinan Channel in particular, this now seems to be driving growth. I guess one, I would have thought that this normalization from COVID might have happened already. If you can give some insight into maybe where dine-in is as a share of channel and whether that's different from historical. And then two, as you think about kind of competing with independents, is that something that concerns you in terms of going forward, if in fact they seem to be on the upswing? Thanks.

Thanks, Sarah. Yeah, you know, I'm just excited that we had another quarter and year to date where the pizza category grew. And as we said, we grew order counts. And so we're happy when both of those things happen. You know, what we did call out in our opening remarks was that dine-in pizza saw some positive momentum. When I look back over the years, what you see for a quarter or for half a year, it's really important to step back at the end of the year and take a look. If you remember last year, the pizza category started out, it was a little bit rough, and folks wondered, hey, are you going to hit the 1% to 2%? And we did. And so we're open to all growth on the pizza category. Dine-in is obviously something that we don't compete in directly, but more people coming into pizza is only helpful for us, especially while we continue to grow order counts.

And Sarah, I'm going to add something on that. I think, as I mentioned, the prepared remarks, we posted an investor deck on the IR website. and if you go back there, we've got two pieces over there. We've got one piece which actually gives a retrospective to what we shared back in December of 23 at our analyst day where we'd gained nine points of share over eight years Three of those nine points came from independence. So we can actually take share from independence. And essentially, when you look at things, just like Russell said, you don't look at a quarter or maybe six months. You don't look at things even in a very short time frame of years. You look at it over a longer period of time. We have done it before. We can do it again.

And I think that's the way we focus on all our competition and what are the best ways to compete occasions away from them.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Charles from TD Cowen. Your line is now live.

Great, thank you. And Russell and Joe, just wanted to send my congratulations as well. I wanted to reconcile your thoughts on the U.S. business. You talked about strength in the aggregator business in 2Q. And I know you've said earlier in this call, the thesis for getting into it is around the premium pricing if you don't offer the $6.99 mix and match. But I'm curious if part of 2Q's ticket mix can be explained by the value offers being offered in recent months on both Uber and DoorDash, such as $3 medium pizza, among other value offers here to help attract more guests.

Yeah, Andrew, thanks. No, the ticket miss, at least versus our plan, can be explained by the premium series.

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Carroll from KeyBank Capital Markets. Your line is now live.

Hi, good morning. And Russell and Joe, congratulations on your new roles here going forward. So I did want to ask about the international business. I was hoping you could expand a little bit more on that beyond what you've already said today. You know, maybe, you know, areas or geographies that were perhaps a drag in the 2Q where there might be opportunities for improvement. and also where you saw strength. And Sandeep, I know you mentioned World Cup benefit or at least World Cup as part of your guide for the year. Curious if that was a 3Q specific comment. So any clarification there will be great. Thank you.

Sandeep, you want to start with World Cup and then I'll take it from there?

Yeah, I'll start with World Cup and I'll probably give a little bit of color on the comp as well. So Thank you for joining us. But in terms of the performance that we had in the quarter, there was obviously lots of puts and takes when we get to the final comp that we had. And we're really not going to get into too much specifics on geographical variation. What I will say is two things actually impacted us.

The macroeconomic and geopolitical environment was definitely an overhang that we anticipated and we experienced.

and as I called out in the prepared remarks, Domino's Pizza Enterprises was definitely a drag on our same store sales because their performance continued to be impacted by the approach that their management have already talked about, which is they've actively decided to actually reduce the lower margin transactions and as a result of that, they've actually had a reduction in order counts where the ticket increase has not been able to compensate it And that same store sales drag that they've experienced impacts us pretty materially. And that's the other driver that I would say is embedded in the numbers.

Yeah, and just maybe on the DPE comment, their new CEO, Andrew Gregory, is going to be starting in August. And we're really looking forward to working with Andrew. He's got 30 years in the restaurant business, majority of those with McDonald's. and what we'll be focusing on is, like Sandeep said, there's been an initial kind of reboot on the profit side at the expense of orders. We think, I think they think as well, now we need to go in with the right kind of value to recapture order counts. It's important for folks to remember that with Domino's Pizza Enterprises, yes, there are some struggles going on right now and some of them are purposeful, resetting kind of the profit piece here. But they are the number one pizza player in the majority of their markets. And so they're coming back from a position of strength. And I think that's super important to understand. Also, just shouts out to China and India that continue over time being standouts for us.

Your next question comes from the line of John Tout from Citi. Your line is now live.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe just going back to the new product that that might be on its way in the third quarter here or is on its way. I'm just curious if you could kind of kind of trying to read through the tea leaves here. You know, Russell, you had mentioned that this is effectively a new occasion for Domino's and while also protecting the core pizza occasions. And I think about your business and you guys hit really well at nighttime, maybe not daytime, particularly around lunch. So seems to lean in the direction of, you know, something around that lunch occasion, maybe even more single serve. So if that's the case, how should we think about, you know, protecting the aggregate ticket if you're moving in the direction of, say, single serve occasions here or something more geared towards, you know, smaller portions?

Yeah, thanks, John. You know, I would definitely think about this a little bit differently. You know, stuffed crust for us was a part of the category we didn't participate in. I think this is an occasion that, you know, pizza doesn't participate as well in. You know, we're not going to go into pretty good hypotheses, so we can check on the next call. I think that the key for us, though, is that this is an incremental occasion. We believe there's a lot of incrementality to this. and so even in the case if there were pressures one way or the other on ticket, you're also bringing in new customers as well. And so we're going to look at that balance overall. If we can bring in more customers, as I said before, more customers lead to more profits, more profits and more customers lead to more stores. We're doing the right thing. And this was really looked at after understanding what do customers who think about pizza but order something else, what do they order? And how, through pizza, can we address that?

Your final question comes from the line of Jacob Aiken Phillips of Mellius Research. Your line is live.

Hi, good morning, and congrats to both Russell and Joe. So you described order growth as profitable, and I understand the ticket mix, but you also cited franchisee profitability as one of the constraints to the development pipeline. Can you give us any color or direction on where franchisee profitability is trending this year versus the $166K you have in slides for 2025? And then maybe break apart what are the things that are

So Jacob, I think on this one, as we look in the first half of the year, we definitely saw the order count growth that we were looking to have. But I think especially on the second quarter, we talked about the premium series not mixing to the extent that we were planning on. And that has a negative impact on franchisee profitability. So part of what happened was a discrete event in the second quarter that actually impacted franchisee profitability due to the ticket drag that we talked about. Now, we're fully cognizant of it. We know what we need to do. We need to go and fix it, and we are fixing it, and that's all embedded in our plans. But I think on a short-term basis, there was that impact in the second quarter, but in no way should this be an impact to long-term franchisee profitability. The whole point that Russell was making on the prepared remarks is, if you look at the long-term relationships between franchisee profitability and what drives it, It is driving order count, customer acquisition, building frequency behind it, but doing it with healthy ticket, with disciplined pricing. So if you are in balance over time across all these elements, you're going to drive franchisee profitability.

We had a one-quarter blip on ticket. We're not going to have another blip.

Thank you, Jacob. That was our last question of the call. We want to apologize for the technical issues we experienced this morning that were the result of our third party conference call provider. We very much appreciate your patience and flexibility as we work through that. We look forward to speaking with you all again soon. You may now disconnect.