Thank you, and welcome, everyone to the call. We’ll be discussing the 2021 first quarter results for both Boston Pizza Royalties Income Fund, or The Fund; and for Boston Pizza International, or BPI.

For complete details on our financial results, please see our first quarter materials that was filed earlier today on SEDAR or visit the Fund’s website at bpincomefund.com.

Thank you Michael and welcome everyone to Boston Pizzas first quarter investor conference call. Today I'll be discussing our first quarter results and sharing a brief outlook.

Michael will summarize our key financial highlights. As usual, we'll leave time for your questions at the end of today's call.

The first quarter continued to present challenges brought on by COVID-19 adversely affecting the business of Boston Pizza restaurants across Canada. Overall guest traffic remained weakened as a result of public health restrictions having a negative impact on in restaurant dining.

With the rise in COVID-19 cases due mainly to COVID-19 variants, and the resulting increase in local government restrictions, we anticipate that the business of Boston Pizza restaurants will continue to be negatively impacted during 2021 and particularly during the first half of 2021. Throughout the first quarter, approximately 375 Boston Pizza restaurants were providing takeout and delivery services with a low of approximately 100 Boston Pizza restaurants and a high of approximately 350 Boston Pizza restaurants also having their dining rooms, sports bars and patios open with reduced seating capacity.

Looking forward, our focus continues to be on the safety of our guests and our restaurant staff, serving our communities with takeout and delivery and on-premise dining were permitted and helping our franchisees managed through these challenging times.

Thank you, Jordan. The Fund posted royalty income of $5.2 million for the quarter compared to $7 million for the same period one year ago.

The fund posted distribution income of $1.7 million for the quarter compared to $2.3 million for the same period one year ago. Royalty and distribution income for the quarter were based on 387 Boston Pizza restaurants in the royalty pool that reported franchise sales of 129 million for the quarter.

For the same period in 2020, royalty and distribution of income were based on the royalty pool of 395 Boston Pizza restaurants reporting franchise sales $174.1 million. The Fund's net and comprehensive income was $11.6 million for the quarter compared to net and comprehensive loss of $16.9 million for the same period one year ago.

The $28.5 million increase in the funds net and comprehensive income for the quarter compared to the first quarter of 2020 was primarily due to a $30.2 million increase in fair value gain, lower income tax expense of $0.5 million, lower interest expense on the Class B units of $0.2 million and lower administrative expense of $0.1 million all partially offset by lower royalty and distribution income of $2.4 million and higher interest expense on long term debt of $0.2 million. While net and comprehensive income or loss is a measurement of the Fund's earnings under International Financial Reporting Standards or IFRS, the Fund is of the view that net income or loss does not provide the most meaningful measurement of the funds ability to pay distributions because the calculation of net income can contains non-cash items that do not affect the funds cash flow.

Non-cash items include the fair value adjustments on the investment in Boston Pizza Canada Limited Partnership, the Class B unit liability, interest rate swaps and changes in deferred income taxes. Consequently, the fund reports the non-IFRS metric of distributable cash and payout ratio to provide investors within the Funds opinion more meaningful information regarding the Funds ability to pay distributions to unitholders.

Thank you, Michael. We continue to be pleased with the efforts of our team and our franchisees during these challenging times.

Also up to the end the second quarter of 2021 with our NHL call the shop promotion, customers can participate in predictive hockey trivia, while enjoying a pizza fly trio and a Molson Canadian beer, either in restaurant or at home. Also during the second quarter, we continued our meal deals promotions supported by significant television, digital and social media ads.

As mentioned, this promotion provides our guests with extra value when ordering special pizza wing and pasta combinations. With respect to our outlook, the main focus of BPIs management is to continue to monitor the evolving COVID-19 situation and to modify the operating procedures of Boston Pizza restaurants to ensure the safety of our guests and our staff.

Our goal is to responsibly and safely operate the dining rooms, sports bars and patios of awesome pizza restaurants across Canada, when permitted by applicable health authorities, maximize the opportunity to grow our takeout and delivery business and adapt our plans to responsibly address the challenges and opportunities presented by COVID-19. Management of BPI anticipates that sales levels for the first half of 2021 will continue to be challenged as a result of COVID-19.

With that, I’d like to turn it back to the operator for the question-and-answer session. Operator?

Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. My first question is just to do with the restaurant sales.

You provided the disclosure for April. Can you provide any comment on the impact of lockdowns Alberta on the network in May?

And maybe I'll start and ask Michael to add color here. But we're only about a week into the patio restrictions in Alberta.

So as mentioned, going back to October we've had earlier last calls in most parts of the country. We've had other hours operating restrictions, seating sizes, capacity limits on total number of seating in order to ensure social distancing as part of the health regulations.

Most recently, we've had additional restrictions on in on-premise or in restaurant dining on patios and sports bars. Ontario currently has no patio access, it's only takeout delivery.

And that was followed by Alberta. Last week, the announcement came and I believe that actually just started the patios on Monday.

So obviously that has an effect because we have patios at almost all of our Boston Pizza locations across the country. And given the preference for guests to eat outdoors and help guidance around that.

We've invested in making those patios more accessible, more attractive, and even extending them into parking lots or other parts of the surrounding areas, wherever possible to allow for more guests to enjoy the patio when we see that continuing throughout the summer as people return to on-premise dining and have a preference to dine outdoors.

Yes, thanks Jordan, I can add a little more detail, running a specific answer. So for three weeks of closing down the patios in Alberta, that equates to roughly 2.2 million in franchise sales that will no longer materialize as a result.

And so I think that just gives a kind of a sense of the order of magnitude. But as Jordan was saying, really our push at this point is to make sure that as a system, we're ready to capture all those patio sales once the patios in Alberta, but also nationally, start to open up.

Great. That’s good color.

And then just broader question, have you seen any change in input costs across your network? And have you been able to implement price increases to help offset those?

Thanks, Nick. So, the short answer is yes, I mean, we are seeing our supplier network faced pressures related to COVID.

The same way other industries and certainly the food service industry has in terms of limited operating capacities in their production facilities, costs relating to absentees and, and other factors that would affect their production costs and raise their rates. The one of one of the benefits of being a larger system like Boston Pizza is that we do negotiate using economies of scale and we often walk in multiyear contracts to avoid shorter term fluctuations.

The other element for us is that we have gone to re printing our national menu twice a year. So we used to do that annually.

But now we do it a couple of times a year so that we can adjust for pricing where needed. We obviously want to be very cautious about taking price.

We do prefer to grow our sales in other ways. But when it when it comes to mitigating the costs of operating our restaurants and dealing with specific supply increase, we do have the ability to take pricing on our menu twice a year.

Good. And then just the last question, really, with the pandemic, being almost 12 months now, how has franchise health been?

And do you have any concerns of what the impact of another lockdown in certain regions might have on your franchisees?

That's a great question. And obviously something that we are incredibly focused on as a pure franchise organization.

We have only four corporate restaurants out of over 380 across the country, they are predominantly owned by local independent franchisees. And it's been, the most challenging year I would say, in the 56 year history of the Boston Pizza brand in Canada.

When we closed our dining rooms and sports bars across the country, in the middle of March 2020. At that time, takeout delivery was only 18% of our total national sales.

So we are dominantly an on-premise business. And, we've been able to, obviously lean heavily into takeout and delivery, we reported doubling of that sales last year, and we saw a great rebound.

In the third quarter of last year when we reported our July August September numbers, we demonstrated that guests will return to Boston Pizza restaurants when they're permitted to do so by health authorities. And we definitely sense that there's pent up demand.

And that we will see some positive momentum return once we were allowed to open the dining room sports bars and patios and some reasons that are all closed at this point. But it's been incredibly difficult from a financial perspective, from a team perspective, reducing our staff numbers dramatically because of closures and because of limited operating hours and low sales as a result of that.

And really, I have to give a ton of credit to the franchisees themselves. They have done a great job I think of leaning into protecting their restaurants, but doing so leading through protecting their guests and their staff, its health and safety first.

They take every precaution, they follow every municipal health guideline, we've spent probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on everything from social distancing, personal protective equipment, health checks, sanitization. And, and then as I mentioned, those extended patios and, and other things as a way to protect our businesses, but also to protect our staff and our communities.

So I think the health of the system is as good as can be expected, given the circumstances. And we're just really looking forward to, the end of this third wave, and some of the loosening of restrictions and return to normal abilities in our private and commercial lives that we can see in other countries like the U.K.

and the U.S. that are further ahead of us on vaccinations and lowering of COVID rates.

So, overall positive, but not to take anything away from what the last 14 months have been like for restaurants across Canada and for Boston Pizza restaurants as well.

That's all for me. Thank you.

Thanks, Nick.

My apologies. I am here.

Thank you. As there are no further questions I'd like to take this time to thank say thank you to our unit holders for their patience, understanding and support during these unprecedented times.

2021 continues to be challenging for Boston Pizza and for the Canadian restaurant industry. Thank you to our franchisees and restaurant staff for their commitment and hard work to keep Boston Pizza restaurants open.

Adhere to provincial and local help orders and ensure the safety of our customers and employees. Finally, a thank you to our BPI corporate staff who have worked tirelessly to help safeguard the health of restaurant guests and employees and to support our franchisees in all aspects of their business.

Thank you for taking the time to listen in, continue to stay safe and healthy. And we look forward to speaking with you all again at our second quarter 2021 conference call in August.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks everyone for that.