Jeff Bernstein
Good morning, and thank you for joining us. My name is Jeff Bernstein, and I’m the Restaurant and Food Service Distribution Analyst at Barclays.
I did recently pre-announce my plans to retire, which is actually happening at the end of this month. So I guess I’m the official outgoing analyst with the next analyst still to be named, but it’s bittersweet, I guess they threw me a party to say goodbye. So this is great.
But I want to welcome all to Day 1 of our 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference. And I think even more importantly, this is the first year where we have combined our two consumer conferences. So we’ve got the Back-to-School Consumer Staples Conference, which has historically held this spot, and we have our Eat, Sleep, Play, Shop Consumer Discretionary Conference.
So within my world, we have 14 Restaurant and Food Service Distributors here with us. That’s the most we’ve ever had. I think the combination of Staple and Discretionary is going to work really well. Of those today, we have Cheesecake, BJ’s Restaurants and Kurasushi. Tomorrow, we have Bloomin’ and Dine Brands and First Watch Restaurant Brands, Sysco, Texas Roadhouse, Wendy’s, U.S. Foods, Yum! and Wingstop. And then day 3 all by themselves, we have Performance Food Group.
We hope you find the next 3 days a good use of time and we get to chat in the hall between meetings. But at this point, I’d love to introduce our first presenting restaurant company, which is the Cheesecake Factory. So with us on