Cracker Barrel’s new logo has triggered more outrage than its food ever did — and that’s the real issue. For all the noise about abandoning nostalgia, the truth is fewer people are eating at Cracker Barrel, and investors have noticed. Even before its branding controversy, the chain’s stock was down more than 50 percent over five years, and guest traffic has been stagnant while competitors like Texas Roadhouse and Olive Garden kept pulling in crowds. Average check growth has come mostly from raising menu prices, not attracting new diners.
The logo furor instantly sparked parallels to Bud Light’s disastrous 2023 marketing fiasco, when then–Vice President Alissa Heinerscheid, an Ivy-educated insider who didn’t strike many as a Bud Light drinker, rolled out the infamous Dylan Mulvaney social media campaign. Mulvaney posted photos holding a Bud Light while taking a bubble bath. Heinerscheid became the fall gal for Bud Light’s brand implosion, despite pressure from the company’s top brass to embrace wokeness, which at the time was seen as a way to boost the stock price.
Admittedly, when I saw Cracker Barrel was modernizing its image and no longer evoking nostalgia, I too assumed its chief marketing officer must be another woke elitist who had never eaten the food.
Turns out, I was wrong. Cracker Barrel’s CMO, Sarah Moore, doesn’t fit the Madison Avenue mold. She spent 16 years at MGM Resorts before joining Cracker Barrel, has a degree from Roger Williams University — the most conservative college in Rhode Island — and is married to a U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel with more than two decades of service. Together they’re raising two daughters. Moore’s résumé suggests a life lived far closer to the Cracker Barrel parking lot than to the Ivy League quad.
Moore faces a formidable marketing challenge: trying to modernize a brand that’s become increasingly irrelevant. When my neighborhood Cracker Barrel closed, I thought the chain had gone out of business, like the Rite Aid across the street and the Starbucks nearby that also shuttered. Prior to its brand redesign, Cracker Barrel could have declared bankruptcy and attracted scant media attention, except perhaps in Tennessee, where the company is headquartered.
The bigger story isn’t Cracker Barrel’s new logo — it’s the declining quality of its food, part of a much broader restaurant industry trend.
“The restaurant is failing because YOUR FOOD QUALITY and SERVICE HAS SLIPPED HUGELY! Logo rebranding and tons of white paint are not going to fix that,” posted one angry critic on Monday. “Get rid of the SYSCO truck that pulls in with all that processed food and start cooking for real!”
A loyal Cracker Barrel customer named Rachel Love, 38, said she was shocked by the restaurant’s decline when she visited in June. The biscuits that once defined the chain had, in her words, turned into “hard and flat dinner rolls.” Love said her meatloaf passed muster, but the green beans tasted canned, and the mashed potatoes were “dry, lumpy and sticky.”
Maybe Love’s experience was a fluke, but I doubt it. Chains under pressure nearly always cut corners, and quality control becomes collateral damage. I was once a regular at IHOP, but the quality varied wildly by franchise. Shake Shack can be wonderful, but I’ve walked out of more than one Los Angeles location wondering how founder Danny Meyer allowed his vaunted name to become associated with such mediocrity.
This pattern is pervasive. Once-proud chains that built their reputations on freshness are quietly cutting the very corners that made them popular in the first place.
Take Panera Bread. Founded in 1987 as the St. Louis Bread Co. by Ken Rosenthal, who apprenticed for a year in San Francisco to learn the art of sourdough. The chain’s identity was built on fresh bread made daily from scratch. That legacy is gone. Panera recently announced it was shutting down its fresh dough production facilities and outsourcing its bread to third-party contractors — who will prep the dough, partially bake it, freeze it, and ship it to stores for defrosting and final baking. The chain should be rebranded as “Panera Fresh Frozen Bread.”
The shift was the brainchild of Paul Carbone, a former Starbucks CFO who became Panera’s CEO last March. At the time, he said his goal was to return the brand to growth with “tastier food and better-run cafes.” Panera is what happens when you put a bean counter in charge of a restaurant. Not surprisingly, Panera is controlled by a private equity firm, Luxembourg-based JAB Holding Co.
The Habit, a California-based burger chain once fastidious for its quality, shows how standards erode after an acquisition.
On my last visit a year ago, the place had become sterile, and the staff seemed disinterested. When I asked the kid behind the counter what changed, he told me the chain had been acquired — and lower standards were in place. Fresh lettuce delivered daily was replaced by prepackaged lettuce from a central commissary. He cited other examples, which I can’t recall.
The acquirer? Yum! Brands, the parent of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. No further explanation necessary. Taco Bell, in fact, has become the restaurant industry’s equivalent of Law & Order in Hollywood. Just as legions of actors cut their teeth on the crime show, Taco Bell alumni seem to be running almost every major restaurant chain.
Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino is a Taco Bell veteran. So is Jason Kidd, now COO of Chipotle; Liz Williams, CEO of El Pollo Loco; and Rich Pinnella, CEO of Luna Grill. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is another Taco Bell alumnus, and he’s surrounded himself with fellow veterans to keep Starbucks “competitive” in the restaurant industry’s race to the bottom.
Starbucks is a case study in that race. Niccol’s predecessor Laxman Narasimhan, a former McKinsey consultant, swapped the chain’s industrial brewing machines for Keurig-style single-cup brewers. Presumably the goal was profit efficiency — less waste, more control. The result: slower lines, weaker coffee, and residue in the cup. Imagine a coffee chain whose once-premium brew has little flavor. That’s Starbucks today.
It’s not only publicly owned chains hollowing out the dining experience. For years my favorite Los Angeles restaurant was South Beverly Grill, owned by George Biel’s Hillstone Restaurant Group, which also operates Houston’s, Gulfstream, and Rutherford Grill. When I visited after the pandemic, the restaurant had raised its prices, cut some of its most popular items, and was serving its steaks a la carte. Even the martini glasses had shrunk.
Many upscale restaurants now boost profits by imposing hidden fees, like surcharges for employee health costs. Customers have become their personal ATM machines. Six months later, I’m still steamed about the 18.5% surcharge a Beverly Hills restaurant called Matu slapped on my $24 Wagyu Philadelphia cheesesteak I ordered for takeout.
The credit card bill also left space for a tip. Even if I had Warren Buffett’s wealth, I wouldn’t pay an 18.5% surcharge on a to-go order. Admittedly, it was far and away the best Philly cheesesteak I’ve ever eaten, but Matu’s greed left me with financial indigestion.
The hollowing out of American dining isn’t just happening to customers — it’s hitting those who prepare and serve the food and drinks as well.
Consider Philz Coffee, once a beloved — and grossly overrated — San Francisco chain with a cult following. A Los Angeles-based private equity firm recently acquired the chain, wiping out all the common shareholders in the process.
Among those who were screwed were 47 baristas who bought stock, some investing as much as $10,000. They believed they were buying into a company that valued them as partners. Instead, they learned what happens when private equity gets involved: the financial engineers walk away richer, while the people who did the work and created the value get short-changed.
It’s all part of the growing wealth inequality in America. Yet the biggest news of the day concerned a faded restaurant chain altering its logo in a Hail Mary attempt to stave off a trip to bankruptcy court.
Americans are blissfully unaware of what truly ails them — and their country.