Dennis Geiger — Analyst, UBS
Thank you, and congrats on another great quarter and year, guys. I wanted to ask a bit more on fiscal 2027 guidance. I know we can back into select items, but anything more to share on specific assumptions for Chili's same-store sales for the year? Then just shifting over to margins and earnings flow-through, helpful with the inflation. But anything more on some of the key pieces there as far as reinvestment opportunities go, maybe versus prior years?
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Sure. Hi, Dennis. What we've done and what's implied in this guidance is we built in a little bit of upside for July, but basically for the remainder of the year, we have assumed mid-single digit same-store sales and positive traffic for Chili's. We feel really confident that we can continue to deliver those results. If this momentum continues that we started in the beginning of this fiscal year, there's absolutely opportunity to exceed those expectations. That is what we have built into the guidance. As far as the margins go and the flow-through, we are very protective of our value proposition. We've been very mindful of that. We are very aware of driving positive traffic over time. We have built in inflation. I talked about the inflation for commodities and for labor. There's also some inflation in some other pieces of the P&L.
For example, we have some inflation in rent, we have some inflation in advertising, inflation in our insurance costs. We've been just really mindful of baking in all those expenses and making sure that we're not putting too much pressure on the guest and the pricing strategy on the top line. We feel really good about the numbers that we've built in. I think we've been very conservative about the inflation that we put in, so we feel good about delivering the results and the double-digit EPS that we promised.
Dennis Geiger — Analyst, UBS
Thanks, Mika. Congrats.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Thank you, Dennis.
David Palmer — Analyst, Evercore ISI
Great. Thank you. Good morning, and congrats on the accelerating sales. I had a question about that. I wonder what reasons you would give for this pretty big acceleration you are seeing in July and August. I have heard a lot of theories, but would love your analysis, and what part or parts do you think are more clearly not sustainable in your mind?
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Yeah. So we have seen lifts like this in the past during this turnaround, David. What we seem to be is we bring people in, and then it just kind of becomes their habit, and we just do not look back. To answer your question more specifically about what we think is driving it right now, number one is chicken sandwich. So the chicken sandwich continues to build. It is doing everything that we thought it would do. It was part of our plan to continue the Better Than Fast Food campaign, continue to drive our value leadership in the industry, but most importantly, continue to give the guest unbelievable, abundant value that tastes great, and that is exactly what it is doing. We have had a couple of other things that happened from a social standpoint.
We had some pretty good success with our Bombshell Marg, which was the Margarita of the Month in July, that we saw some younger guests come in for. Then we also seized upon a social media thing that we did not do. So guests started asking for Molten's on top of skillet cookies. The marketing team wanted to get after it immediately. We said, "Hey, let us make sure we are operationally ready to do that before we turn that on." So, we were hard at work making sure we had the proper supplies on cookies and Molten's and ice cream. Then we recently put that into the business, allowing the servers to have keys to ring it up properly, as well as train the teams on how to make it consistently versus just looking at social media on how to make it. That is also been very successful.
It's actually reversed our incidence decline on desserts between that and then also upgrading a couple of our other desserts. We feel like it's just a collection, and then obviously the continued operational initiatives on removing friction and improving throughput. They're very hard things to pinpoint because like I said in my prepared comments, the throughput stuff is a collection of small things that add up.
For example, when you make the reduction of our loyalty rewards Supermarket Simple, and it reduces the number of times the manager has to come and change checks, that turns tables faster. We know, especially on the weekend, turning tables is traffic in the till. So, it's a collection of all the things that we're doing, and we've been relatively consistent, continuing to deliver comps on top of comps on top of comps, and it's because our strategy is built to just continue to plow through all this.
David Palmer — Analyst, Evercore ISI
Great. I'll pass it on. Thank you.
Jeff Farmer — Analyst, Gordon Haskett
Greg, good morning. Mika, what is your expectation for the restaurant level margin in 2027, and how should we be thinking about the benefit from the 53rd week?
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
That is a great question. What I would say on a 52-week basis, I am going to expect 20 basis points-40 basis points of margin improvement. Depending on where it falls in that range, the 53rd week could get you up to 50 basis points of margin improvement year-over-year. That is where we are now, Jeff.
Jeff Farmer — Analyst, Gordon Haskett
Okay. Then just one more quick one as relates to the, it sounds like you guys made the change in the compensation structure for the restaurant level manager. How are you guys thinking about the impact that would have on the business?
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Yeah. A couple things to answer that question, Gordon. I am sorry, Jeff. Number one, we are trying to simplify the amount of reports and the measurements that the managers use so that they can focus more on the behaviors, which is terms of coaching the team members, as well as being in the dining room with the guests. They are still going to have access to the GWAP metric, and they will be able to see it on a weekly basis, and they will be able to get verbatims from guest comments. We are going to use AI to help cultivate that for them so they do not have to go through all of the verbatims. But we are not going to give them GWAP per shift on a daily basis because we found that they were overly consumed with the daily metric.
They were using that more often with their teams, posting them up, and the team members didn't feel great about it. Even though we've been making incredible progress on GWAP with guests with the problem, we felt like it was taking them away from the things that we wanted to do. We're not going to have them look at it on a daily basis. We removed that from the bonus. The bonus is solely focused now on sales and profits. We co-designed this with them. We started with our vice presidents of operations, and we trickled it down. Overall, the feedback's been incredibly positive. It's like, hey, we can focus on the behaviors that we need to focus on, and we don't necessarily have to look at this thing and be consumed with reporting.
We also dramatically simplified the reports that they get on a daily basis. We got this laundry list of reports down to two main reports that help them with throughput, labor scheduling, and some other key things like guest metrics that they need to be able to see. I feel like that change is going to make them focus, number one, most importantly, on the behaviors to deliver a great guest experience. Then number two, because profits are a higher percentage of their total bonus, we think that's going to help us with that middle of the P&L to be able to flow through more of the dollars that we get with incremental sales. It doesn't mean we're not going to continue to invest in the business.
Mika talked about that in her prepared comments, but we feel like this is just a continuation of dramatic simplification in order to allow the restaurant teams to do their job, which is making guests feel special.
Jeff Farmer — Analyst, Gordon Haskett
Okay. Thank you for that.
Andrew Strelzik — Analyst, BMO
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe following up on that last answer, if you feel like you're going to be able to get more flow through because of the change in the compensation structure, why is 20 basis points-40 basis points still the right starting point for margin expansion?
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Andrew, I'll start with that. As I said, 20 basis points-40 basis points is what we have built in the model. Again, we've been very mindful of how much price we're taking. So, our pricing strategy had been 3% to 5%. We're on the lower end of that, and we actually have just a lot of inflationary pressure. So I talked about the commodities, even though they're in the low single digits, that's going to start at the beginning of the year. Commodities will probably be 4% in Q1, 3% inflation in Q2, 2% inflation in Q3, and 1% in Q4. That's what we're modeling now. So we do have a little bit of earlier pressure on that.
Also, we've had some inflation in some other areas such as insurance, such as delivery fees, things like that we've built in that we're not necessarily passing all the way through to the guest. So we've been very mindful of driving long-term traffic over time. When I take a step back and just look at the whole model, we know if we deliver mid-single digits, same store sales, over time, we deliver 20 basis points-40 basis points of margin improvement, and we deliver double-digit EPS growth, that we're going to deliver significant earnings in growth to the shareholders, if we can deliver those consistently over time. So we're not as concerned. We don't want to over-pressure the guests in the short term. You've heard a lot of our competitors have that same mindset where you don't want to overprice the guests right now.
We have a lot of inflation that we're facing, so we're being more conservative in those assumptions. Now, as the year progresses out, if our sales exceed our expectations or some of those inflation assumptions are a little bit less, I think we have the opportunity to outperform those metrics. But that's what we have guided in and worked in the model for now to start the year.
Andrew Strelzik — Analyst, BMO
Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Maybe if I zoom out on the margins, obviously, you transformed the restaurant level margins of the business. Is there a level at which you think about shifting how much flows through versus how much you reinvest, like a ceiling on restaurant margins for this business over time as you've continued to make these continuous improvements? How you think about that? Thank you.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
You know what, Andrew? That is also an excellent point that I should have made too. As you called out, we had, since this turnaround started, over 600 basis points of margin improvement over time. So we've significantly improved the margin profile of this business. Now, that is a reason why, because we have an invest to grow strategy that as we move forward, you're going to see the margin growth moderate a little bit. Really what that means is we're not trying to flow through every dollar. We're trying to make sure that we're mindful to invest back in food service and atmosphere.
What that means is we are investing back in the guest experience, the team member experience, and we don't want to overprice the guest, and we want to make sure we continue to make that value proposition as strong as it can be, because we know that is a secret to driving positive traffic over time.
Andrew Strelzik — Analyst, BMO
Great. Thank you.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
There's not a cap. I said all of that, and you did say, "Is there a cap?
Andrew Strelzik — Analyst, BMO
Yeah.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
We do think if we continue to grow the top line and the AUVs, we still think we can expand it. It's just not going to be as material as it has been during this turnaround. There will be a point as the AUVs grow. Right now, we still have plenty of capacity. Our restaurants are only at 80% capacity of our historical guest count. We have plenty of capacity to continue to grow traffic and grow some margins.
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Just one thing I would add is when we first started this turnaround, what I told the leadership team was, boy, and we were like at $3 million AUVs, we just get the $4 million AUVs. We'll have enough labor to service the guest. We'll have better restaurant margins. We'll have enough money to plow back into the business. That happened. Now we're at $5 million now.
You just get more of that. At the end of the day, when we study these North of 6 restaurants, they have dramatically higher margins than the balance of the system.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Right.
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
As long as we continue to invest in the business and grow those AUVs and delight the guests, good things will happen with margin. Every year, we start out the year with a pretty reasonable guidance on our margin growth, but then we have blown through it. We have blown through it because we keep delivering on the top line because we are winning with the guests. I do not know why we would change that approach. I would expect that if we deliver on the upside on the sales based on the acceleration that we have seen in the first part of the year, I would expect to see that also expand on restaurant margin.
Andrew Strelzik — Analyst, BMO
Great. Thank you very much.
John Ivankoe — Analyst, JPMorgan
Hi. Thank you so much. The first I think housekeeping and the second may be a little bit more important. In terms of the remodels at 60 units-80 units, I know you've looked at a number of different packages in terms of what you would spend per unit. Where are we landing in 2027 on a per remodel basis, and is that the right number to assume going forward as well with normal type of inflation?
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
John, that's a number that we're still finalizing right now. What I will tell you is we have taken our capital guidance up. The majority of that increase year-over-year is due to the reimages. We said we're going to do between 60 and 80. So you'll get an estimate there. We're continuing to refine that number. We're going to talk about it on Investor Day and give some more details around it then. I'm pretty happy with the number. The first 250 are probably a little bit elevated because we talked about those being some of the 911 restaurants that probably need a little bit of extra love. A lot of those are older prototypes.
In some of the early reimages, if they have the lower ceilings in the bar, we do an extra step where we open up the bar and actually remove a wall. That also has an incremental cost. So over time, I think this number is going to continue to evolve and come down as we get more scale, and then we work through the balance of the system. Again, more details on Investor Day, but the bulk of that increase in the year-over-year CapEx is for the reimage for now.
John Ivankoe — Analyst, JPMorgan
Well, we're definitely looking forward to the 17th. Okay, so let me ask another question on the menu. We've talked in the past about maybe opportunity, maybe today wouldn't be the time, but we talked about the opportunity to relaunch salads, bowls, maybe improving steak, to take another modern re-hit at the Guiltless Grill for how people are eating today. Can you talk about any major menu categories that could be addressed in the near term and could lead to future sales growth beyond 2027?
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Yeah. We have shuffled a little bit of our priorities in 2027 based on just what's happening in the zeitgeist. Let me just tell you what food innovation will be for 2027, and then I'll share with you what we're planning for 2028. So, number one, we're going to continue to ride the chicken sandwich all year. That was certainly up in the air as we were launching. The plan was if it does well, we're going to continue to drive it. That's the plan from an out-of-store marketing standpoint. Then we're going to continue each quarter to remind the teams on how to make the best sandwiches. It's not an easy thing to make a hand-breaded sandwich, so we're going to stay focused on that operationally. Secondly, we're in process of revamping the kids menu. We've launched the new kids menu.
This is about how do we just continue to get young families into Chili's. We know that kids are talking about Chili's. There's a very common thing we see in social media where if a kids team wins X, they want to all go to Chili's. So we think the time is right to go after the kids menu. So we have a new kids menu. We brought back grilled chicken tenders, which is a parent and kid favorite. Then next quarter, we're going to be adding mini Moltens back to that lineup as well as cheese quesadillas. Then we've recently launched a new floats with our new Blue Bell ice cream. So we've upgraded our ice cream to a much more premium ice cream, and then we've also added a top mocktail for kids, a Shirley Temple that's made with Sprite.
The new kids menu, part of that has happened now, and the rest of it will be finished next quarter. We finished renovating our pasta platform, so we've added sausage as a protein. We are hearing our chicken and sausage in our Q2 menu. Then we retrained teams on what we call pasta perfection. We did that last quarter. So the pasta is now going to be featured in Q2 in a bigger way. Then we also have a new cooking process to make it a little bit hotter. Then on a dessert standpoint, we've got a couple of things coming which we haven't done in a while. We just recently upgraded our skillet cookie. If you go in a restaurant now, you'll probably see it being advertised on our little table tent.
It's been upgraded with more premium ingredients, chocolate, brown sugar, and butter to make them oozier and gooier. We've obviously upgraded the ice cream, which I talked about earlier, to Blue Bell ice cream. Then lastly, we added this social media phenomenon, the Molten on top of the cookie, and that is now something that we're selling in the restaurants. Then next quarter, we're actually going to bring back cheesecake as a non-chocolate option for folks that want dessert. The other thing I would tell you about desserts that we're learning operationally is a lot of times in casual dining, servers don't sell dessert because they want to turn the tables on a busy Friday or Saturday. We think we have an unlock on that one.
The feedback that we've been getting from the servers is like, "Hey, when I get to dessert, it goes to the bottom of the kitchen display system on zone three. That's where we make desserts. It might take 15 minutes to make a dessert, so I really don't want to sell a dessert if it's going to take 15 minutes." What we're doing is we're going to test it first. Bump the desserts to the top of the screen so that desserts get priority, so we actually can get that sale. There's a lot of good things happening on the menu. In 2028, that's when we're going to launch in the fun half. We're going to launch salads. We pushed that out a little bit based on what's happening.
We'll have steaks and Guiltless Grill, hopefully in the back half of 2028 also.
John Ivankoe — Analyst, JPMorgan
A lot going on. Thank you so much.
Brian Harbour — Analyst, Morgan Stanley
Yeah, thanks. Good morning. Mika, just a quick clarification. Is it correct that you expect to run roughly 3% price through this year? Do you have any kind of directional color on mix impact that you're expecting?
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Yes. What I would say as far as price goes, like I said, for the full-year, it's going to be on the lower end, maybe just over 3%. If you're thinking about the cadence by quarter, it's going to be a little elevated in Q1, so I would model, again, nice round numbers, 4, 3, 3, if you wanted just some general numbers on how the pricing will go at Chili's. As far as mix goes, like we said, it was slightly negative in Q4. We had the 0.2 that was driven by alcohol and appetizers. For the full-year, the assumption, I would say it's basically flattish. We see, Kevin talked, we've had a little momentum in the dessert category. But really our strategy this year is to focus on driving traffic.
We've talked about that a little bit with the flow through, but it's really about the chicken sandwich. The chicken sandwich is designed to drive traffic. We've built up all these other businesses over the years, and those are all built into the run rate, and now we're really leaning into this one to drive traffic, and that's exactly what it's doing. So flattish mix for the year. You got the price just over 3%, and the balance of your sales will be from traffic.
Brian Harbour — Analyst, Morgan Stanley
Okay. Got it. Maybe you'll talk about this next month, but I guess any of the North of 6 initiatives that you'd expect to see visibly this fiscal year, or I guess any of those that you're giving yourself credit for sooner at this point?
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Well, let me tell you one thing we have done. We look at North of 6 to really study their throughput. As traffic continues to increase, we want to capture all that traffic. We just talked about we are really excited about the start of the fiscal year. When we think about the labor model, that is the main place that we are learning from then. For example, in Q4, we just talked about that flow through was a little bit challenged. I talked about tomatoes. We saw that food and beverage is up a little bit, and also beef. In our labor model, I will say, hey, we thought that labor would be a little bit more efficient. We have been telling our operators to staff for the sales they want.
We did have a little bit of, let us say they were not as efficient as we wanted in labor, but thank goodness we did that because traffic ramped up so quickly in July and August that they were all ready for it and are capturing it. We have actually built in a lot of that, where they exceeded the labor model last year. We built that into the model this year. A lot of it was built in the year over the year already because they overspent. We learned all that again from where are they leaning into this labor model. We are working on getting the base labor model exactly how we have it.
It is a great problem to have that every year we are growing the business so quickly that we are adjusting that labor model to make sure that we can capture all the guests and have the throughput improve. That is kind of where we are focused on.
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Yeah. As I said in my prepared comments, it is a lot of little initiatives that are going to help with throughput. The major one I think that we are mostly focused on in the front half is going to be host stand. This is this idea that when we are on a wait, the average wait of our guests is 15 minutes-20 minutes. Even if we cannot reduce that, we are going to try to reduce that. Even if we could not reduce that, even just managing the host stand better makes a huge difference for that guest. There are very different ways you can experience 15 minutes-20 minutes, and one way it can be a delighter, and another way it can be just the opposite.
We are going to focus on how they use the software to seat guests and to manage the seating of the restaurant, retraining the hosts on how to better work with the guests on waits. We are obviously going to work on how do we get tables seated faster, how do we get tables bused faster. There is a whole host of initiatives coming in Q2, then there is going to be just things throughout the year. For example, one of the pieces of feedback we have been getting from the North of 6 restaurants is some have tried to put in a second soda machine, but the reality is we just have a bottleneck on refills because we give a lot of free refills to our guests. During a busy Friday, Saturday night, that station can get clogged with both servers and food runners trying to get drinks.
We have got some initiatives that will help us with the KDS to unclog that. There is a lot of little things like that that are going to improve throughput, but it is very clear that those North of 6 restaurants that take on so much more traffic than our rest of our restaurants, they have the similar sized boxes, but they do things differently, and we are going to just continue to roll those things out, plus take new ideas from those North of 6 restaurants into what we need to work on from a system standpoint.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Brian, are you good? Okay, there we go.
Brian Vaccaro — Analyst, Raymond James
Hi, thanks, and good morning. Just on the quarter-to-date, just to make sure we're all on the same page and setting reasonable first quarter expectations, would you be willing to share what the quarter-to-date comp is at Chili's or provide a guardrail there? In the fourth quarter, could you also share what the 3 For Me mix was and the split between the $10.99 and higher tiers?
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Yep, sure. Brian, what I'll say and what I said in my prepared comments is that we did significantly accelerate in July and August. If Chili's was 6% in Q4, that means it's higher than that in Q1. I'm happy to talk about all of that when the quarter ends. We'll go over all of the results in quarter one. But we're just really, really pleased with the strong start to the year and the traffic drivers. Again, like Kevin said, the chicken sandwich is outperforming. The Margarita of the Month has been fantastic. It continues to help us drive traffic. The Triple Dipper, I wanted to mention that, the Triple Dipper is something that has grown our business year-after-year and continues to grow today and is up even in Q1 year-over-year.
We're happy with that. That's also built into our everyday value proposition. That is the first thing. The second thing you just asked is on the 3 For Me mix, and I'm very pleased to say that it's very stable. In Q3, it was just under 21%, and in Q4, it's just over 21% of our guests are opting in on the total platform for 3 For Me. Of that 21%, about 40% of the people are opting in to the $10.99 tier, which is very stable. That's what we reported every quarter. The takeaway would be 3 For Me continues to be very stable. We are very pleased that the chicken sandwich, and before that, the QP and the Smasher, they drive in new guests.
But some guests opt into the $10.99 that want it, but the majority of the guests then eat all over the menu and enjoy anything else they upgrade to, whatever they want on the premium options. So, that strategy continues to play out, and we are very, very pleased with it.
Brian Vaccaro — Analyst, Raymond James
That is very helpful. Thank you. And I guess as a follow-up, if I could, just on the topic of accelerating unit growth, which you have obviously talked about in recent quarters and this morning. I guess, can you just give us a sneak peek on just the opportunity you see there in the U.S.? It would seem that there are some pretty large states in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, and I saw you are acquiring Alabama this morning.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Yeah
Brian Vaccaro — Analyst, Raymond James
as well. There are several states out there where the stores per pop might be 1.5 to 2 instead of 3.5+, like the system average. So any early thoughts on the TAM in the U.S.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Yeah
Brian Vaccaro — Analyst, Raymond James
that you could be thinking about?
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Yeah. What I will tell you about is we do think there is an opportunity to definitely build more Chili's. We talked about the new unit growth as a percent of revenues ramping up. We are going to share all those details. Again, we have got to save something for Investor Day. What I will tell you, Brian, is that what I really love about it is we still have opportunity to expand in our three biggest states, California, Texas, and Florida.
We have a lot of opportunity in the Southeast to expand, like you said. We really have opportunity all over the U.S. And there is a lot of markets where we can continue to build out Chili's in just kind of those gray areas that we haven't built yet. There is a little bit of white space still in the Pacific Northwest, where we know we have opportunity there.
We have a great opportunity. I think we are going to be able to grow units over many, many years at Chili's and have a nice growth rate to build into our growth algorithm and a nice lever to pull for years to come. We are excited about the total opportunity for Chili's.
Brian Vaccaro — Analyst, Raymond James
All right. Well, look forward to the Analyst Day. Thanks for your time.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Okay. Thank you.
Andrew Charles — Analyst, TD Cowen
Great. Thanks so much. Mika, I had two different questions about the guidance. First, what contributes to the $0.70 adjusted weak impact? It is a pretty large impact relative to the revenue guidance. Is the interest savings piece of it from the new debt structure a piece of it? Just curious more about how the $0.70 came to be.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Yeah. What I would tell you is at a very high level, this is how we did it, and we will continue to refine that as the year goes on. But it is just an incremental week of sales. You will look at what our sales volumes are at the end of the year, and it is just a flow-through assumption. It is going to be probably at restaurant level margins. It is probably going to be in that 30%-35% range, and at the net income, it will probably be in the 20%-25% range. So it is just a flow-through assumption on that final week of sales.
Andrew Charles — Analyst, TD Cowen
Okay. The other piece is, the impact of the 12 store franchise acquisition, how does that impact EPS guidance? If you could also provide the purchase price you guys are paying for that as well, it would be helpful.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Let me tell you how it impacted the guidance. I am glad you asked that so I could clarify. We did get the 12 restaurants back. They are a little bit lower performing than the brand average. Also, remember, we have to net out the royalties we were already getting. The incremental revenues from those restaurants is probably around $30 million year-over-year. Then it is going to have a flat impact to EPS, basically, because it is a very small acquisition. With the opportunity of share purchase versus buying those back, it is probably a flat EPS impact. I do not know if I am going to share all the price on that. I think we will give some more details as it comes, but we did not put it in now.
But we got a really great price on those restaurants, and we are really happy to welcome them back.
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Very good. Thank you for that.
Sara Senatore — Analyst, Bank of America
Oh, thank you. Maybe just a quick follow-up on that and then a question about Maggiano's. I notice you are acquiring real estate. Is that a signal about how you are thinking about growth ahead in terms of approaching unit growth? I know there have been periods of real estate acquisition, but also sale-lease back. Just as I contemplate how you think about the outlook as you are accelerating unit growth. That was one quick question. I do have a follow-up.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Okay. Really, our approach to growing Chili's in the future is going to be that we are open. I will tell you, the majority of the opportunities are going to be to continue to lease our locations and have operating leases, which is what we are going to continue to do. I guess what I would signal is, if there is an opportunity that we could purchase the land, if it makes sense, we are not against that, if it helps us to continue to grow Chili's and it makes sense in certain areas. When we did the deal with Valenti, they own that real estate, and we were happy to take it back. We will continue to hold it. We will look at it to see what we think the long term is. I do not know that we have a lot of sell leasebacks in our future.
We prefer probably just to hold the real estate. Some of these are older units. We do not want to burden them with some really high and long rents on there. That is not going to be a big strategy moving forward. What I would say is, primarily, we are going to lease. If the opportunity comes to buy, we are not against it. We are not overhauling our strategy to be an all-buy strategy by any means.
Sara Senatore — Analyst, Bank of America
Got it. Thank you. I guess maybe just two quick modeling questions. One is, the negative mix, is that sort of a continuation of the check management you saw in April? Can you give any color on Maggiano's? You mentioned it was being contemplated in the 2027 guidance. I know to Kevin's point, it is less than 4% of operating profit, but just curious about that. Thank you.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Yeah. As we move forward on mix, I think because the chicken sandwich is just going so great, we are just modeling, I would say, flattish for the next year. The -0.2 was just a continuation of, like we said, a little bit of check management with alcohol and appetizers. Also, Kevin Hochman talked about desserts. Those are hanging in there a little bit better. So we feel good about mix. Again, I like to remind everyone that we have spent so many years building the mix up. When we built up the Crispers business, we built up the Triple Dipper business, the fajita, the rib, and all those are maintaining, which is wonderful. That is why we are back to this flattish. There is a little bit of check management, but it is very small. As far as Maggiano's goes, I will give you some high level assumptions.
What we have done is we have basically assumed in this guidance that Maggiano's is going to have flat revenues and flat profits year-over-year. That just gives us a little bit of room so that we have seen some green shoots, like Kevin said, so that we just have room to have Maggiano's to be able to have the pressure off of them where they can just really focus on improving their food service and atmosphere, and they can get that traffic rolling again. But those are the assumptions at high level built in for Maggiano's.
Sara Senatore — Analyst, Bank of America
Thank you.
Chris Carril — Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets
Hi. Good morning, and thanks for the question. On the chicken sandwich platform, can you maybe expand a little bit more in terms of what you saw around guest demand, around the different tiers and price levels you offer, maybe relative to your expectations? Kevin, you gave us some detail around the number of chicken sandwiches sold per day and how that's continuing to build. Can you talk maybe about how advertising and awareness drove that growth versus maybe other factors, and how the trajectory of chicken sandwich compares to what you saw with Big Smasher and Big QP? Thanks.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
I'll start with the 3 For Me question on the chicken sandwich. We're very mindful about maintaining our $10.99 level of the 3 For Me. When something new comes in, the other one moves out. In this case, the Big Smasher moved up to $12.99, and the Big Crispy moved in at $10.99 and Big QP. Like I said, those levels have stayed very similar. As far as the 3 For Me goes, we're selling about a similar amount as we did before of the Big QP and the Big Smasher. The rest of the chicken sandwiches and the increases that Kevin talked about are really on the base menu because we have all the sauced versions, we have the premium, the deluxe, and that's where we're selling the bulk of our incremental chicken sandwiches are on, I would say, the base menu.
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Yeah. As far as the driving trial and awareness, when you look at the curve, it looks almost exactly like the QP and the Smasher curve, just higher. It started off at a certain level, and then a few months in, it starts to accelerate, which is what we saw on the others, too. That makes us feel good that it's kind of behaving like the other two. That's why we'll just continue to drive advertising on it. A lot of folks have seen it quite a few times in the investment community or in our four walls, but the reality is the vast majority of our guests haven't seen a Chili's ad. I hate to tell the marketing team. As they continue to drive and build the awareness of it with a very similar campaign, that awareness will compound over time.
That's why we stay on these things. We don't do it for four weeks and then move on to something else. That's had incredible success for us since we've started the 3 For Me campaign, so we don't plan to change that. As long as the customer's responding well to the item, which is what it appears to be on the Big Crispy, we're going to continue to drive that. Then we'll reassess whether in year two of Big Crispy, do we continue to advertise that or do we bring new news to Big Crispy, or do we move to another item on $10.99? But we've done the same thing every year for the last almost four years now, and we've had success, so we don't plan on changing that formula. We think that is creating value certainty for the guest and really repositioning us in the market.
Chris Carril — Analyst, KeyBanc Capital Markets
Great. Thank you. I will pass it along.
Jon Tower — Analyst, Citi
Great. Thanks for taking the question. Kevin, you earlier had talked about the cycle time efforts and what you got lined up for 2027, in terms of what you are tackling. I am just curious how you are thinking beyond that. Are there larger chunks or areas that you can go after in 2028 and beyond? I am just trying to get an idea of how long this runway is for you to continue to improve the cycle times.
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Yeah. I think there are two areas I think that we will continue to work on, that we are going to learn about, which is the actual dining experience. In that one, I think there is a ton of upside just because it is a big part of the business, and we continue to uncover basically places where things bottleneck, and so we are just going to continue to walk through those things.
For example, host stand is a big one. That is a major initiative for us, but we also know that the order time is a little bit of a blockage, and so when we are finally finishing rolling out the new UX for the order tablets, that is going to speed up ordering. And what we are learning at the soft drink station, the fact that it is harder to get refills as fast, and that is going to speed up time.
Then this idea of dessert bottlenecks. When people do order dessert, it ends up being a long time. That is going to improve cycle time, but it is also going to improve the server being more willing to sell desserts, right? I think we are just going to continue to uncover things from a dining room standpoint, and I think we got at least three years of runway on that one. The other one, which we have not even scratched the surface on, is to go. It is 25% of our business, and we have a huge opportunity to figure out how to get friction out of that to make it seamless.
When you look at the players in QSR that win on digital, meaning they create habits of their guests that they can rely on to get a quick take-home meal, it is all about a fast app, a seamless pickup experience, and accurate pack-outs. We think those three things we can go nail over the next couple of years, and we think that we are uniquely positioned in casual dining to go after those transactions because if you look at the things that we are winning with, it is all around the Better Than Fast Food campaign.
These are things that people think about when they think about take-home meals. So burgers and chicken sandwiches and chicken tenders and some of our Tex-Mex offerings. These are all things that we think are positioning ourselves well, but we have got to figure out that operation. I think that is a huge task. We are going to talk a little bit more about it when you guys come in for Investor Day, but that is the next big frontier I am excited about because there are so many more transactions in QSR that we could go after with the off-premise occasion.
Jon Tower — Analyst, Citi
Awesome. Thank you for that. I guess one more follow-up. I guess I have asked this question before in previous calls, but I am curious if you have any data behind it now in terms of the guest behavior. A lot of those guests that had been lapsed and now have come back to Chili's over the years, how they are using the brand perhaps differently than maybe you thought, or maybe they are using the brand or the menu as you had expected. I am curious if you have got that customer journey, how they have been coming back in.
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Yeah. We do not really have that detail. The level that we have with the token data is basically that we are bringing a lot of new guests in, so a little bit more than half of the tokens that we see each month are new. When we track them, now we do it within nine months, we can understand what their repeat behavior is, and it looks a lot like existing guests. That is basically what we know. We have some broad things of younger guests that tend to order more Triple Dippers. Older guests tend to order more of the 3 For Me. We have some of that, but I do not have the data to answer your specific question of how our lapsed users, when they come back to the brand, are using the brand differently. We do not have it to that level.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
You know what, Jon? What we do know is we continue to draw in new guests every quarter. We talk about how 3 For Me is pretty stable, so we are not seeing an over-index to value. All of the categories, they have grown over time, but they are all pretty stable. We are not seeing any huge mix shifts in the menu with new guests. It is kind of like we said, we are attracting new guests in, and they quickly fall and look like existing guests over time and then just keep coming back. They are utilizing the menu basically the same. We are not seeing any big changes in the run rates of all the different particular categories or a run-up in 3 For Me.
Jon Tower — Analyst, Citi
Awesome. Thank you for the time.
Margaret-May Binshtok — Analyst, Wolfe Research
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. This is a two-parter. I wanted to ask, I know you guys have talked about the success of the Big Crispy platform, but anything to call out in terms of the incremental traffic? Is that a younger guest? Anything between the different income cohorts, the type of guests that that's bringing in? The second part I just wanted to ask, since you guys launched the Margarita of the Month Club earlier this year, have you seen any sort of sequential improvement in alcohol incidents? Thank you.
Mika Ware — CFO, Brinker International
Thanks for the question, Margaret. You know what the great thing is about Chili's and about burgers and chicken sandwiches? Everybody loves them. Our traffic's been up, and we're growing all. We're growing all income levels, low, medium, high. We're growing all of our different demographics. Historically, we had a little pop in our younger guests with the initial success of the Triple Dipper. We've maintained that and we continue to grow and attract all the different demographics and cohorts. We're really pleased. The chicken sandwich, again, has behaved just like the burgers. It's a huge segment, and it's broadly appealing to everyone. We're not seeing one particular group drive the traffic. It's all the groups, which we love because it's not very specific to one group. It's very broadly appealing.
As far as the Margarita of the Month Club goes, it's been a huge success for us just in general as an everyday value platform for us. I know our guests really appreciate that $6 margarita. It's fun, it's colorful. They enjoy seeing what's next. It's culturally relevant. The one we had in July, Kevin mentioned it was really successful. I would say overall, the Margarita of the Months have been very successful. They're driving margarita incidents. They're driving traffic. Now, if you take a bigger step back and look at the whole alcohol category, we're feeling a little pressure like everybody else, for the category as a whole. We continue to sell market share, and we're topping market share, but we're feeling a little bit of that macro pressure like everyone else is.
Margarita of the Month, specifically, great value in helping us drive traffic.
Kevin Hochman — CEO and President, Brinker International
Yeah. Then one other thing I would add is I think maybe five years ago, the prior team viewed Margarita of the Month as just like a, "How do we get more drink attachment?" It does play a great role to do that. Still does. We tested it years ago when I first got here, which I took it off the table, and it was a mistake. We know that it drives drink attachment, even if the broader macro trends are against alcohol attachment and what's going on with gas prices. But the second thing I think that is important to note is the new marketing team has done a phenomenal job of figuring out what are different Margarita of the Month we can use to drive traffic. We saw that in last November with our witch-themed margs.
We saw it with the most recent Bombshell Marg in July. I think they are doing a better job. Not every month is going to be this big traffic creating margarita. These guys are very planful about which ones they are going to do and how they are going to surround it with advertising and social. But they have done an exceptional job of creating a second growth lever on Margarita of the Month. It is not just about attachment and an entry price point, but it is also now about traffic driving for certain margs, and I think that is going to continue. When I look at the innovations they have planned, I think it is not going to be every month, but often they are going to be looking at things that are actually going to drive the total box traffic, not just alcohol attachment.
Margaret-May Binshtok — Analyst, Wolfe Research
Thank you.
Kim Sanders — VP of Investor Relations, Brinker International
Thank you, Holly. That concludes our call for today. We appreciate everyone joining us and look forward to presenting an update on our long-term growth plans at our upcoming Investor Day in September and updating you on our first quarter fiscal year 2027 results in October. Have a wonderful day.