“With significant inflationary headwinds across commodities, labor and utilities, our company-operated margin percent will be hampered in the near term, and we expect full year 2023 company-operated margin percent will be slightly lower than our quarter four results.”

In context

“the same level as top-performing restaurants by the end of 2022. Additionally, as a result of this program, France saw increases of 30% in customer satisfaction scores at locations with the lowest scores. PACE clearly drives operational improvements, which provides a better customer experience that in turn drives business performance. This month, the U.S. also restarted PACE, and we expect to see similar operational benefits in our largest market in 2023. I'll now turn it back to Ian to talk in more detail about our 2023 outlook. Ian F. Borden: As Chris just discussed and as I talked about last quarter, we continue to operate in an extremely dynamic environment. Looking ahead to this year, we anticipate macro-related pressures will continue to weigh on both our consumers and our business. With significant inflationary headwinds across commodities, labor and utilities, our company-operated margin percent will be hampered in the near term, and we expect full year 2023 company-operated margin percent will be slightly lower than our quarter four results. This elevated cost environment is also impacting restaurant cash flow for our franchisees, particularly in our European markets. As we've previously mentioned, our financial strength and scale gives us the ability to provide temporary and targeted support, ultimately keeping our entire system aligned on proactively investing to drive long-term growth. We estimate that these efforts will have an impact of between $100 million to $150 million in 2023. Turning to G&A, the digital and technology investments that we've made over the past few years have been strong contributors to our top line growth. Moving forward, focusing on our evolution of Accelerating the Arches, and in particular accelerating the organization, will enable us to work more efficiently and effectively, harnessing our scale”