About Katherine Fogertey
Katherine Fogertey, Chief Financial Officer of Shake Shack, discussed the company's financial performance and strategy during recent earnings calls and media appearances. On the Q4 2024 earnings call in February 2025, she noted that the company generated a record $36 million in free cash flow and ended the year with $320 million in cash and cash equivalents. She guided for adjusted EBITDA of $205 to $215 million and restaurant-level margins of approximately 22% for the year. In a March 2025 Bloomberg interview, Fogertey stated that Shake Shack has navigated inflationary pressures by raising wages, introducing tips, and managing impacts from the California Fast Food Wage Act, and she described the company's consumer as "more middle-income to higher-income." She also outlined growth plans, including adding 45 domestic company-operated locations and 35 to 40 licensed Shacks in the year.
In earlier calls, Fogertey addressed margin improvement and cost pressures. On the Q1 2023 earnings call, she reported that the company grew revenue by 25% year-over-year and expanded restaurant margin by 310 basis points to 18.3%, while noting high single-digit food and paper inflation and uncertainty around beef costs. She stated the company planned to take a 2% menu price increase in the second quarter. On the Q4 2022 call, she reported total revenue of $238.5 million, up 17.4% year-over-year, and outlined a four-point plan for sustained profitability, including building back sales, labor efficiencies, improving off-premise profitability, and strategic pricing. She also noted that 36% of Shack sales came from digital channels and that kiosks were the highest-margin channel.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Katherine Fogertey's recent appearances.
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Transcript (11 segments)
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Interviewer0:06
Joining us now at the conference on site is Katie Fogertey, Chief Financial Officer of Shake Shack. Katie, thanks so much for joining us. I'd love to get a sense — everyone's talking about tariffs and what they might do to economic growth, what they might do to the consumer. Who is the consumer at Shake Shack and what is that consumer telling you these days?
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Katherine Fogertey0:28
Great. So, who we think of as our consumer — we have this amazing real estate strategy. We've put these great community gathering places in a lot of great communities, and what we've attracted is really more of a middle-income to higher-income guest. We've seen that guest be able to weather a lot more of the economic headwinds than the low-income consumer has been facing. What we continue to see is that by leaning into our strength — delivering a fine casual experience — bringing all those great guts of fine dining, elevated food, premium ingredients, doing things that other fast casual and QSRs are not willing to do, putting that in an amazing hospitable environment and getting great guest service — that together has been a winning formula to help us out-punch what have been some consumer headwinds facing the industry. We are going to continue to lean into that. It's helping us differentiate and pull apart from the pack, and it's been our strength.
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Interviewer1:42
Where are our samples? I know — I mean, what is this about? Who doesn't want a burger at 10 AM on a Wednesday? We're getting close to open. So, who are your competitors? If you're middle- and high-end consumer, who would you say is a competitor?
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Katherine Fogertey1:55
Yeah, I mean, we sell burgers, shakes, fries — I think the best chicken sandwich out there in the business. We view our competitors as being anybody you might consider having lunch or dinner at, so that is a pretty wide array. It can also be food at home — that can be an area where you would have some share of stomach. For the vast amount of our restaurants out there, we are competing with a lot of people. Now, we are differentiated and we are kind of in that category of one in the fine casual sector, but at the same time we know that people have lots of different options where they can go out to eat.
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Interviewer2:34
Katie, there's a lot of concern out there about inflation. If inflation were to come into your business, where would you see it and how do you plan for that?
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Katherine Fogertey2:42
We actually have been navigating through inflationary pressures for a number of years here and doing so quite successfully. We've had wage inflationary pressures. During COVID, it was very hard to get restaurant talent in our restaurants to staff and to deliver our food. It was not a desirable job at the time. We raised wages and had a very competitive and compelling opportunity for our team members. We also introduced tips as a way to compensate our team members and give them added benefit. Last year, with the California fast food wage act, we fared through that as well. We've also had on the food side inflationary pressures that we've been navigating for a number of years. Through all of this, by leaning in on our strength — delivering that elevated experience to guests, giving them that $25 black truffle burger that we are actually selling for $10, giving them that great value — we've been able to both grow sales and grow margins at a faster pace. Just last year, we expanded our margins in the fourth quarter by 300 basis points.
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Interviewer3:51
I've never had Shake Shack, but it looks like I may be able to now on Delta. This also goes to your expansion plan. Delta is going to offer Shake Shack burgers on additional domestic routes this year and that could expand to international flights next year. Talk about these expansion plans.
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Katherine Fogertey4:09
Yeah. If you look at Delta at its core, this is an opportunity where we're able to surprise and delight our guests, give them that thing they weren't really expecting. You have your expectation for what airline food is like, and this opportunity to get a Shake Shack burger — and we have a special brownie that we've made for Delta as well — people are just absolutely elated at the opportunity to have that on their flights. So much so that it's exceeded our internal expectations. We're rolling it out to more airports — you're going to be able to get it in New York, Atlanta, a number of airports, and that will probably continue to grow. If you look at that opportunity, I can make so many different parallels to how we've gone into an area where the consumer had a certain expectation and we just really raised the bar on it and out-punched above our weight and transformed what people were expecting from airline food, roadside food, and across the board.
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Interviewer5:14
Katie, in terms of growth, how many locations do you have today and what's your outlook for the next year or two?
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Katherine Fogertey5:19
Yeah, we have across both our company-operated and our licensed business about 550 to 570 locations. But we are growing very fast. We're going to add another 45 domestic company-operated shacks this year, and we're going to open about 35 to 40 licensed shacks as well. Those licensed shacks are ones that our partners operate. We have locations in the US, but most of that is outside of the US in Asia, the UK, the Middle East, Mexico, and most recently we opened in Canada.
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Interviewer5:58
Well, great stuff. We really appreciate it. We know you've got to run. Katie, thank you very much. Next time, snacks. Katie Fogertey, Chief Financial Officer at Shake Shack.
