Dive Brief:
- More than 1,200 Burger King restaurants have expanded operating hours to meet consumer demand for late-night occasions, Restaurant Brands International CEO Josh Kobza said on the company’s Thursday earnings call.
- Those hours expansions, the brand’s barbell pricing strategy and store renovations contributed to Burger King U.S.’s 1.5% growth in same-store sales, which Kobza said was modestly ahead of the burger QSR segment overall.
- RBI also has sped up the timeline for refranchising the 1,000 Burger King restaurants in its Carrols portfolio by about two years, RBI CFO Sami Siddiqui said on the call. RBI plans to refranchise between 50 and 100 Carrols units in 2025, Siddiqui said.
Dive Insight:
RBI acquired Carrols in 2024 in part to help speed up remodels of the operator’s enormous Burger King system, which included 1,022 stores at the time of acquisition. Remodeling Carrols units has helped these restaurants outperform both the burger category generally and Burger King specifically, with former Carrols locations posting a roughly 2.9% bump in same-store sales growth, according to RBI’s earnings release.
“Those portfolios are making significant investments in remodels and the returns from those remodels have been very good,” Kobza told investors. “That is what gives us a lot of confidence in where the rest of the system can go.”
The goal of refranchising, Kobza said, was to get the Carrols units into the hands of effective operators. Burger King has worked since 2023 to reconcentrate its system in the hands of geographically concentrated operators, following a number of major franchisee bankruptcies. Despite that program, operator bankruptcies continued into 2025 with a highly leveraged balance sheet and macroeconomic headwinds pushing Consolidated Burger Holdings into Chapter 11 in April.
For a glimpse of the end result of that process, J. Patrick Doyle, RBI’s executive chairman, pointed to the chain’s 47 company-operated restaurants in the Miami area, which have seen significant investments in marketing, operations and reimaging under the Reclaim the Flame program.
“These are restaurants where we are leading by example and everything is lining up, operations, marketing and image, and they're performing well above the system average, comping into the double digits, driven by mid-single-digit growth in traffic,” Doyle said. “As we execute Reclaim the Flame, more markets should start to look and feel like Miami.”
Kobza said other operational investments include the expansion of operating hours, which was a response to consumer demand.
