Dive Brief:
- Wingstop saw a 5.8% decline in domestic same-store sales in Q4 2025, according to its earnings release. The chain’s average unit volume fell from $138,000 year over year, dropping to $2 million in the quarter.
- Despite this sales softness, the fast casual chain saw more than a 9% increase in systemwide sales in the quarter, thanks to 493 net restaurant openings in 2025.
- The brand is planning to launch a new loyalty system, Club Wingstop, this year after piloting it in 2025, as a means of driving traffic and frequency, executives said on the company’s earnings call.
Dive Insight:
Wingstop’s same-store sales growth is being undermined by low diner frequency, CEO Michael Skipworth said on the chain’s earnings call.
“We're still a low frequency occasion with guests averaging only one visit per month,” Skipworth said. A strong loyalty program could help change that: 50% of active guests in pilot markets have enrolled in Wingstop’s rewards program, and Wingstop’s heavy concentration of digital sales — 73% of its mix in Q4 — could help push consumers into the system.
“Frequency increased 7% among guests in the program versus their trend prior to the launch of the pilot. New guest retention rates are higher than benchmarks outside of the pilot market,” Skipworth told analysts. Loyalty programs can help shift value perceptions by offering discounts to repeat guests.
And Wingstop’s core consumers are feeling the squeeze from years of accumulated post-pandemic inflation. Wingstop CFO Alex Kaleida attributed the comps decline to macro pressures on consumers, a phenomenon similar to that seen over recent quarters at other fast casual segment leaders, like Chipotle and Sweetgreen.
Wingstop also faced traffic headwinds from winter storms in early Q1 2026. Two waves of temporary closures followed winter storms, with the first impacting 700 restaurants and the second impacting 400.
Despite these macro issues, the brand has seen strong consumer satisfaction and that softness in demand was primarily concentrated in the lunch and snack dayparts, which are secondary dayparts for the chain, Kaleida said.
For fiscal 2026, Wingstop is projecting flat to low single-digit same-store sales growth, per its earnings release.
Sharon Zackfia, group head of the consumer sector at William Blair, said that 2026 comps target was “achievable” given the loyalty launch and the full deployment of Wingstop’s Smart Kitchen system, which was completed in 2025. Zackfia noted that the brand’s same-store sales decline was less deep than William Blair’s 7% projection and than consensus estimates, which forecast the brand would see a drop of 6.7%.
Peter Saleh, BTIG’s managing director and restaurants and food distributors analyst,echoed this optimism about sales rebounding.
Among positive operational measures, the Smart Kitchen launch in particular has been a boon. The system launched first in company-operated stores, which strongly outperformed franchised units and saw comps grow and have an AUV of roughly $2.5 million, Skipworth said. The digital system replaces a process based on paper tickets and has helped cut average ticket times in many restaurants from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes.
“Roughly 50% of the restaurants are hitting 10 minutes, but that's us looking really at daily and weekly averages,” Kaleida told analysts.
Wingstop is focused on getting to that 10-minute ticket time in key dayparts as well, rather than just in aggregate across the week, Kaleida said. The full deployment of the Smart Kitchen has yielded continued improvements in speed of service, with 10% more orders meeting the ticket time target since the beginning of 2026, according to Kaleida.
Saleh said the brand’s tech-enabled kitchen management system could prove a marketing asset, in addition to improving guest satisfaction.
“In our view, the real benefit will begin to accrue when management markets this to consumers, which in our view could be a Wing Tracker, similar to the pizza tracker many of the QSR pizza operators have implemented,” Saleh predicted.
