The ONE Group Hospitality, Inc. (NASDAQ:STKS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Our next question comes from Tyler Prause from Stephens.

Tyler Prause: Congrats on the quarter. So the strength of the consumer has been a large point of discussion industry-wide during this earnings season. And we really appreciate your focus on providing an affordable luxury through compelling entry-level price points and allowing some consumers to trade as they please. But I was going to see if you could talk more about what you’re seeing for consumers of your 2 concepts. And are you seeing any notable call-outs, such as trade-down, mix management or maybe variance of trends by region or daypart?

Manny Hilario: Yes. So thanks, Tyler and a very good question. I would say probably the only noticeable factor I probably see today different from maybe 6 months ago is perhaps the build of the business Monday through Sunday. I do think that the weekends are super robust, so Friday, Saturday business lots of appetite and particularly because we have focused on social occasions and including date nights, we see a tremendous amount of demand for our product. I think Mondays through Wednesday, I do think that — there — I think that if there’s a place where the consumer might be making more decisions about going out or not is on those days of the week. However, as you pointed out there, I think that our Happy Hour program, particularly with a $3, $6 and $9 price points, is super compelling.

So we still see tremendous strength on those days in Happy Hour. So people are coming out for that. And as you know, we go out of our way to convert that into the dinner business. And then the only thing I would say about the consumer, I do think that brunch which is a daypart that we focus on, is clearly becoming very important on Sundays and particularly for us, brunch is a very good price point, particularly for STK brand. So we do see a lot of excitement about the brunch daypart on the STK brand. But overall, from in-store behavior of customers doing less when they’re in the restaurants, we do not see that at the STK brand and Kona Grill, we don’t see that either. We do actually see more people trading up to Surf & Turfs at the Kona brand which is actually a higher price point.

And we believe that they’re doing that because the product is very good. So I think that’s — we’re managing perhaps the consumer behavior by having this great mix. So that’s what we’ve seen. So we’ve seen basically a little bit more velocity of visits towards the weekend. But other than that, it’s really all about managing a great product and a great experience in the restaurant.

Tyler Prause: Wonderful. I appreciate that. And I’ve got one follow-up, just kind of shifting gears here. Could you remind us how you’re currently contracted on commodities, specifically beef and kind of how those contracts are shaping up in 2023?

Manny Hilario: Yes. Good question. So on beef, we don’t have contracted quantities but we do have pricing arrangements with our vendors. And for us, that seems to be relatively stable — actually, very stable out for the next 90 to 180 days. The other one that we actually actively lock in is seafood and we’ve been able to lock at very good seafood pricing, so seafood, particularly shrimp and lobster and the frozen products. So I would say, overall, the stuff that we actually work in and we lock pricing or quantities, I think we’re doing very — we’re actually pretty good, favorable or equal to last year’s prices.

Tyler Prause: Awesome. And just one final question here. I know you kind of touched on price a little bit during the call but what was the price that you ran for the fourth quarter perspective?

Tyler Loy: Yes. From a consolidated perspective, it’s right around 6% and that’s pretty consistent across each brand.

Operator: We have a question from Nick Setyan from Wedbush Securities.