Brinker International is investing in throughput and store-level operations at Chili’s, as strong marketing and menu innovation drives sustained traffic and sales growth at the chain, executives said on the company’s fiscal Q1 2027 earnings call.
Chili’s three-year same-store sales are up 52%, capped by a 10% increase year over year in the last quarter, according to Brinker’s earnings release. That strong sales growth has been driven by 28% traffic growth over the past three years, as the brand’s value messaging and investments in food quality have attracted many diners and pushed its average unit volume to $5 million.
Traffic has continued to drive the bulk of the brand’s sales growth this quarter, with additional visits accounting for about two-thirds of the increase in sales while price increases comprise the remaining growth. Such a sustained increase in visits could place strain on restaurant operations, but Chili’s is investing in labor and equipment to help its restaurants turn new visitors into frequent guests.
“We're really leaning into labor. We do the opposite of what everybody else does. Labor is one of our secret sauces where when those guests come in, we want to make sure that we're taking care of them and capturing all those guests, so we don't shy away from that,” Chili’s CFO Mika Ware said.
Standardizing best practices
Chili’s is drawing lessons from the performance of its top-tier restaurants, which make more than $6 million in sales in a given year — dubbed “North of Six” in the brand’s parlance. At those restaurants, a combination of labor productivity and strong management lead to better sales, faster service and higher food grade scores.
“Productivity is better. They save on the labor line, and ticket times are lower just by having way more volume,” Brinker CEO Kevin Hochman said. Now, Chili’s wants to generalize different labor procedures from the North of Six cohort to the remainder of the system in hopes of boosting volumes and managing the brand’s booming traffic.
“We've retrained all of our above-restaurant leaders on how to write proper labor schedules, and have incorporated all the best thinking and best practices for the North of Six restaurants into the business,” Hochman said.
Better scheduling impacts almost everything in the restaurant, Hochman said. Throughput and kitchen labor are obvious places where more labor and better shift coverage directly impact how the business functions. But there are more indirect effects, as well.
In terms of wait times, inaccurate or underscheduled shifts can lead to unexpectedly long waits or inaccurate estimates for consumers.
Additionally, the chain is rolling out new handheld order-taking devices for its waitstaff, “which eliminates over half of the tasks that are required in order to ingest an order from a table, which would help with ordering time,” Hochman said.
Leaders, greeters and seaters
One particular operational chokepoint Chili’s is looking to fix is the host stand, Hochman said.
“Five years ago, there were a lot of restaurants that didn’t even have a host,” Hochman said. Chili’s has begun staffing the position more aggressively, sometimes assigning three or four workers to the host stand. The chain also re-established talent standards for the host position.
The brand now has differentiated labor roles at the host stand, Hochman said, a leader, a greeter and a seater, with each worker responsible for a different aspect of hospitality. Chili’s retrained its front-of-house staff in using its host stand tablets, as well.
Another common problem was seating large parties, Hochman said, which could clog up operations at the front of house. Now, Chili’s is working to ensure its managers get involved in seating bigger parties, avoiding some of the disruption caused by such groups.
So far, Hochman said, these changes have yielded a slight decrease in ticket times, but nothing substantial enough to be worth divulging. On the whole, Brinker is satisfied with the operational tweaks and labor changes at Chili’s.
“We feel very good about what's happening,” Hochman said.
The investments in additional labor and a 2.6% increase in wage rates have not substantially altered the company’s margins, Ware said. Productivity improvements and incremental sales have offset absolute increases in labor spending.
