Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: Jeff Farmer - Gordon Haskett Capital Corp - Analyst : I'll use that last question as a bit of a segue. So I think when we last heard from you, the 2026 traffic guidance was down 7% to down 4%. So correct me if I'm wrong on that. But the question is what are you thinking about as it relates to an updated guidance range for traffic for the year? Craig Pommells - Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Interim Principal Accounting Officer Jeff, it's Craig. Yes, correct. Negative 4% to negative 7% was the guidance range we provided before, embedded in the $3.2 billion to $3.3 billion in sales that includes traffic that's about negative 8% to negative 10%. On top of that, the low end of the range includes a higher level of discounting and negative menu mix as well as a lower level of attachment with retail. All of that goes into the lower end of that range. So traffic negative 8% to negative 10%. The higher end of the range assumes that there is some recovery in traffic in the back half of the year as well as less discounting and some moderation in the attachment rates in retail. LSEG STREETEVENTS | www.lseg.com | Contact Us consent of LSEG. 'LSEG' and the LSEG logo are registered trademarks of LSEG and its affiliated companies. DECEMBER 09, 2025 / 10:00PM, CBRL.OQ - Q1 2026 Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc Earnings Call

Question: Jeff Farmer - Gordon Haskett Capital Corp - Analyst : Okay. That's all very helpful. And last one, and thank you for bearing with me. But you mentioned that caught me a little bit off guard that when you -- you had some challenges with rolling out Phase 1 of your operations initiative. It sounds like you've sort of pivoted from that. But the question is, did those challenges, that you faced, have a material impact on either same-store sales or traffic in the quarter that you just reported?

Question: Jake Bartlett - Suntrust Robinson Humphrey Capital Markets - Analyst : Mine is a combination of some of the ones that have been asked before. But I'm wondering if you can try to disaggregate the macro pressures on sales versus the aftermath of the rebranding. And there's been a deceleration in the second quarter to date to negative 11% from negative 9%. Would you attribute that all to the macro -- incremental macro pressures? Or is it possible that maybe some of the macro pressures are even worse than that or maybe bigger headwind, but you're getting some recovery in terms of sentiment around -- post your rebranding? Trying to understand how the rebranding and trying to disaggregate the two forces at play, so we can understand maybe how you go forward. Craig Pommells - Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Interim Principal Accounting Officer Jake, it's Craig. I'll start. First, I'll take -- let's talk about the change for Cracker Barrel in Q2 versus Q1. Our traffic has been pretty consistently between a negative 10% and negative 11% over the last couple of months. In Q1, some of what we saw there are -- some of the reason the results were a little bit better, and it appears that they may have decelerated is because the drop-off in traffic wasn't instant. It happened gradually over a period of weeks that's one. Also, some of the initiatives that we executed, for example, the Buy one, Get One and in particular, the All-You-Can-Eat Pancake, they were very, very short term in nature, but they did have a meaningful improvement for those short periods of time. They just weren't necessarily sustainable promotions. I don't know that we can necessarily break out the industry versus us, but you see all the industry results, and it's pretty clear that now relative to the summer, the industry has moved down.

Question: Brian Mullan - Piper Jaffray Inc - Analyst : Just a question on the retail business. Just any thoughts you could offer about the upcoming holiday season? How do you feel about the assortment, the team's ability to execute. And then maybe anything you could offer in terms of what we might be able to expect to see on retail gross margins here in fiscal 2Q? Just any puts and takes. That you could call out?

Question: Brian Mullan - Piper Jaffray Inc - Analyst : Okay. And then just a follow-up, a clarification on G&A. Can you give a sense of what you're assuming for either adjusted G&A dollars for the full year now? Or if not that, maybe just a good quarterly run rate to think about starting in fiscal 3Q after you're fully done with the restructuring actions? Craig Pommells - Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Interim Principal Accounting Officer I don't want to get too prescriptive on that one. What I would say is we have a $20 million to $25 million range on an annualized basis, and we expect to have that fully -- well, almost fully executed, almost fully executed by the end of Q2. So just that by itself would convert into an impact in Q3 and Q4. We did start some of that work, and we got some of the benefit into Q1 and we have some more in Q2. But the vast majority of that will occur in -- by the end of Q2.

Question: Isiah Austin - Bank of America - Analyst : Isiah Austin on for Sarah. Just after everything that's been covered. Just a quick question. You guys noted earlier that your Google star rating is correlated with your traffic. Any idea of how far ahead you guys lead that or how to think about, I guess, the spread on that? Craig Pommells - Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Interim Principal Accounting Officer It's Craig. I'll start. We have done a lot of work on the Google star rating, we're pleased with the improvements we're seeing there. The analysis approach that we use is a longer -- a bit of a longer tail. Just keep in mind, our typical guess comes in twice per year. So we look at this over about a year. So it's not like a light switch. It's something that happens more gradually. But bear in mind, the frequency of our guests.

Question: Isiah Austin - Bank of America - Analyst : Very helpful. And then just as a follow-up question on the topic of just cutting -- like having corporate restructuring in order to address the current situation. Any idea on whether that could cause concern around long-term performance? Just kind of thinking about what specifically you guys are thinking of cutting in that restructuring? Craig Pommells - Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Interim Principal Accounting Officer Yes, I'll start with that one, Isiah. What we're doing here is driving incredible focus. I mean we -- given the prior -- our highest priority is (inaudible) and guest experience. So we have -- that's always been there. We have elevated that even more. And there are some other work streams that are value creating, but over a longer period of time that we have kind of pulled back on for now. But in terms of regaining our momentum from where we are, we think we'll have the resources to do that, and we can make other decisions as it relates to G&A in the future. But we all -- another point is we also had previously committed to getting back to our historical G&A run rate. In some ways, what we're doing here is, we're accelerating some of those decisions.

Question: Jon Tower - Citi Infrastructure Investments LLC - Analyst : Just a quick one for me. Craig, I was just wondering if you could remind us what the plans are for the debt that's coming due later this year? LSEG STREETEVENTS | www.lseg.com | Contact Us consent of LSEG. 'LSEG' and the LSEG logo are registered trademarks of LSEG and its affiliated companies. DECEMBER 09, 2025 / 10:00PM, CBRL.OQ - Q1 2026 Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc Earnings Call Craig Pommells - Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc - Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, Interim Principal Accounting Officer John, the -- our plans are -- for the convertible that matures in June of 2026, our plans would be to pay that about the time that it matures by drawing down on the revolver. We repaid about half of that when we refinanced a few months ago. So we have about half of that original convert outstanding, and then we have the capacity on the revolver to cover that.