Wendy’s 2025 Investor Day Recap

This week, Wendy’s® hosted the investor community at our Restaurant Support Center in Dublin, Ohio for our 2025 Investor Day. This event provided an important opportunity to share our vision for the brand and provide additional insights about how we will reach our potential to grow the brand and maximize value for our shareholders.

The timing of this event was particularly special for me, as I recently celebrated one year in role as President and CEO of this iconic brand. In reflecting on the last year and our brand’s 55-year history, I am incredibly proud of the steps we’ve taken to put the customer at the center of everything we do. This is evident in our new Brand Promise – Fresh, Famous Food… Made Right… For You – and it will continue to be our North Star, as we take on the opportunities ahead of us.

During the event, members of our senior leadership team highlighted the strength of the Wendy’s brand and outlined our three strategic pillars to accelerate profitable growth – Fresh Famous Food, Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience and Accelerating Global Unit Growth.

Doubling Down on our Fresh, Famous Food

Guided by our customer first approach and enduring commitment to providing the highest quality food at a great value, we shared our plans to expand into areas of the greatest opportunity in the market, updating our craveable core menu items, driving impactful innovation, and delivering uniquely relevant branding, marketing and collaborations.

This will include a continued focus on our iconic square hamburgers and fresh, never frozen beef* as our quality differentiator while also expanding our chicken offerings to provide a modern, craveable options for our customers. We also announced our plans to launch Frosty Fusions™ and Frosty Swirls™ this spring, giving fans the option to add toppings and mix-ins to our legendary Chocolate and Vanilla Frosty®.

We also shared upcoming plans for collaboration with the popular Takis® snack brand – another example of how we plan to create unique experiences for our customers by leveraging meaningful brand partnerships that excite our fans.

Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience

As part of our commitment to deliver an exceptional customer experience that’s perfect every time, we shared plans to increase operational intensity across the U.S. System as well as investments we’re making to help drive performance.

Further, we will continue doubling down on technology and building tools to drive digital engagement. From enhancing our mobile app and scaling our loyalty program to implementing digital menu boards and expanding Wendy’s FreshAi™, technology remains an integral element of our strategy to deliver a seamless experience for our customers in our restaurants.

Accelerating Global Unit Growth

From a development perspective, we highlighted our plan for expansion to meet the growing consumer demand for Wendy’s globally, opening more than 300 net new restaurants in the U.S. and scaling to 2,000 restaurants internationally by 2028. To do so, we are increasing investments in company led development, regional recruiting resources, investing in localized marketing and culinary experiences, and building global supply chain capabilities that leverages our brand’s collective buying power. Internationally, Wendy’s is scaling rapidly in our stronghold markets including Canada, India, the Middle East, the UK and Mexico. With this solid foundation, we are well-positioned to accelerate our growth trajectory even further, positioning Wendy’s as globally great, and locally even better.

Investing in a New Financial Algorithm

Our strategy, built around our three new strategic pillars, is designed to drive accelerated financial performance. We shared with investors our new financial algorithm, which outlines our expectation to achieve, over the long-term, 3-4% annual net unit growth. This growth is expected to power 5-6% annual systemwide sales growth.

By staying focused on executing our strategy and delivering on our financial algorithm, we see a clear path to reaching 8,100-8,300 restaurants, $17.5-$18 billion in systemwide sales, and $650-$700 million in adjusted EBITDA by 2028.

With this roadmap for growth in place, I’m confident that we will deliver on our strategy in partnership with our franchisees, employees and supplier partners.

“Gotta be Wendy’s.”