Darden Restaurants, Inc. (DRI) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Greetings and welcome to the Darden Fiscal Year 2026 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your line has been placed on this and only until the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star 1 on your touch-tone phone. We ask you to please limit yourselves to one question, one follow-up, and return to the queue. This conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I'll now turn the call over to Ms. Courtney Aquila. Thank you. You may begin. Thank you, Kevin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating on today's call. Joining me are Rick Cardenas, Darden's President and CEO, and Raj Manam, CFO. As a reminder, comments made during this call will include forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. Those risks are described in the company's press release, which was distributed this morning and in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We are simultaneously broadcasting a presentation during this call, which is posted in the Investor Relations section of our website at Darden.com. Today's discussion and presentation include certain non-GAAP measurements, and reconciliations of these measurements are included in the presentation. Looking ahead, we plan to release fiscal 2026 second quarter earnings on Thursday, December 18th, before the market opens. followed by a conference call. During today's call, all reference to the industry results refer to Black Box Intelligence casual dining benchmark, excluding Darden. During our fiscal first quarter, average same restaurant sales for the in...