Roughly 90 percent of stores are now open midnight or later as staffing improves.

Wendy’s in Q2 saw the late-night daypart generate double-digit sales growth as higher staffing allowed 90 percent of locations to remain open until midnight or later for the first time since the global pandemic. Late-night produced higher average checks and more delivery, said Wendy’s CEO Todd Penegor in a call with investors.

As a result, Wendy’s is advertising its late-night offerings for the first time since 2020, before the pandemic.

“We continue to see room to grow our share of this daypart versus our [QSR] competitors and are excited to continue advertising late night during the third quarter,” said CEO Todd Penegor.

“What we really want to do is make sure that there is awareness that we are open and we're consistently open, so we can build into customers' routines that we are there for them onto late-night dayparts,” Penegor said.

"We're seeing higher average checks and a skew towards delivery," Penegor said. "We can continue to drive sales without adding any labor, so [late night] is really margin accretive to us through the bottom line."

“It is incremental,” Penegor said of late-night. “We continue to see opportunities midnight or later. We do see a big opportunity to drive delivery business as well as folks coming to our restaurant. … And the more that we drive awareness and the more that we get consumers to come to us and see that we're reliably open in the late-night daypart, the more we become part of that routine.”