Cheesecake Factory plans to spend up to $175 million in the coming year as it opens as many as 22 new restaurants nationwide, responding to economic cues including an easing of staffing and cost pressures as customers return to full-service dining.

Speaking with analysts during a quarterly earnings call this week, company executives reiterated plans to expand the location footprint by 7% annually, even as the Calabasas, California-based company encounters delays in some regions in obtaining permit approvals and required building materials.

Chief Financial Officer Matt Clark, for example, cited South Florida as “a tough place to build right now because there’s so much demand and certainly, the hurricane last year didn’t help at all.”

Other regions are seeing delays in processing building permits. Local governments are still dealing with work backlogs stemming from the first two years of the pandemic, as permitting agencies worked with limited on-site staffs.

“While we continue to experience some delays in opening due to supply chain challenges and permit approval delays beyond our control, at this time, we expect to open as many as 20 to 22 new restaurants in fiscal year 2023,” CEO David Overton told analysts.

Those include five to six locations of the flagship Cheesecake Factory, along with five to six North Italia locations, three to four Flower Child restaurants and up to six others under Fox Restaurant Concept brands that Cheesecake Factory acquired in 2019. Target regions were not disclosed.

During the fourth quarter, the company opened eight new restaurants, compared with four in the year-earlier period, with the latest including locations in Nashville, Tennessee, and suburbs of Houston and Phoenix. It also opened a Cheesecake Factory in Mexico City under a licensing agreement with an independent operator in Mexico.

With staffing returning to pre-pandemic levels in many regions and food cost pressures easing in the early weeks of 2023, the company is standing by a previous goal of growing its location presence by 7% annually. The company currently runs 318 mostly company-owned restaurants in the U.S. and Canada.

To back development expansion this year and into early 2024, the company expects to spend between $165 million and $175 million for capital expenses, Clark said.

For its fourth quarter ended Jan. 3, Cheesecake Factory reported total sales rising 15% from the year-earlier period to $892.8 million, with a net loss of $3.3 million compared with net income of $2.1 million in the year-earlier period.

For full-year 2022, revenue rose 13% from a year earlier to $3.3 billion, as net income declined 12% to $43.1 million. Overton said full-year sales exceeded $3 billion for the first time in the company’s 50-year history, with dining room traffic back to pre-pandemic levels in many regions.

Company executives noted inflation is still weighing on profits, with Cheesecake Factory bracing for up to 12% annual food inflation and 6% labor inflation for the current first quarter.

The results came as eating and drinking establishments nationwide registered total sales of $95.5 billion in January, an increase of 25% from January 2022, according to the latest Commerce Department numbers.

The Labor Department reported the restaurant industry added 98,600 jobs in January, making it the top job-creating sector in the overall economy and marking the 25th consecutive month of job growth for the industry.