Good day all. About a year ago, news came out regarding the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store chain and how they were in the process of “Reimaging” themselves. Part of that was scrapping the original logo. This finally set off people who had been dealing with the menu changes and the remodeling of restaurants from their traditional settings into something that looked like an upholstered toilet.
There were a number of other things that people were complaining about. The menu for one thing. Major changes were made that people just flat out hated. (As an aside, I have no first hand knowledge. I’ve never been to a Cracker Barrel) Most of these changes were implemented by their CEO who, apparently, appears to have failed upwards into her position.
A few months after the roll out of the new logo, the explosion of comments, including some by President Trump, forced the CEO and the other managers to backpedal on all the changes. The original logo was restored and the restaurants that had been remodeled were being restored to their original settings. (No word on the food as I recall). Now the fallout has landed and the CEO has stepped down. Here are some of the details from the New York Post:
Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino is stepping down after the failure of her “woke” rebrand last year, which was rolled back following intense backlash from loyal customers, the company announced Monday.
David Deno, a restaurant exec who most recently served as CEO of Bloomin’ Brands, which owns Outback Steakhouse, will replace Masino on August 10, according to a Cracker Barrel press release. Masino will remain at Cracker Barrel in an advisory capacity until October 9 to ensure a smooth transition, the company said.
Basically, she will have an office and a phone and not much else. Her actions cost the company millions and seriously damaged the company’s reputation. I suspect there isn’t a lot that the new CEO is going to need to know from her, other than what not to do.
Her departure comes after less than three years at the helm, during which diners revolted against the company’s attempts to modernize the Southern dining chain last August by axing its beloved mascot Uncle Herschel and revamping restaurants without its trademark tchotchkes.
That went over about as well as Budweiser’s Brian Mulvaney debacle a few years ago. It wasn’t as bad as the Jaguar disaster last year. At least Julie Masino realized that they had gone to far and pulled back. Jaguar is basically a dead company now.
Following heated backlash from longtime customers and even President Trump himself, Cracker Barrel reversed the changes and leaned into its folksy charm – ultimately sending the stock up 100% so far this year.
Now if the new CEO fixes the menu issues, I think that Cracker Barrel might regain it’s market share and could look at expansions. Just not into Kalifornistan, which is not populated by people who want to eat at Cracker Barrel. (Burn it to the ground perhaps) It was trying to cater to that small group of potential customers that led to the rebranding debacle.
Masino’s exit “was certainly a surprise for me,” Benchmark analyst Todd Brooks told The Post.
“The company had never indicated a search was underway. Very surprising given the series of positive announcements that the company had early last week,” Brooks said.
Why does it surprise you? For all intents and purposes, Julie Felss Masino failed completely as the CEO and almost broke the company. If the rebranding and other moves had worked, it would have been a different story of course, but that would have required listening to the actual customers and not some marketing gurus who never ate there and didn’t actually know who the average customer was.
Last November, Masino told Glenn Beck, who hosts “The Glenn Beck Podcast,” that she felt she had been “fired by America” after he asked whether she was surprised that she managed to keep her job.
That same month, Cracker Barrel shareholders had voted to oust DEI marketing executive Gilbert Dávila from the company’s board – but spared Masino despite an activist campaign by investor Sardar Biglari, who accused them both of years of mismanagement.
With shareholder elections, generally the average shareholder doesn’t vote in them and it’s the institutional shareholders that do. I don’t know if it was the institutional shareholders who pushed out Davila, but it would explain why they didn’t go after Masino as well. It wouldn’t look good.
In early 2025, Cracker Barrel’s stock was in freefall after Masino admitted the chain was “just not as relevant” as it used to be. By August, the company had revealed its plans for a $700 million transformation across more than 660 restaurants – which had already started at some locations in the spring – in an attempt to add new customers to its dwindling fanbase.
The problems that they were having were actually easily correctable. The major complaint was the menu and the quality of the food. Due to cost cutting, the menu items that brought in the fans either went away or were not using the same ingredients or preparation method. They could have put a fraction of that $700 million to correcting those issues and I suspect they wold have turned things around. Instead, they went stupid.
It included white paint, bright lighting and decluttering the walls of knickknacks in restaurants, as well as erasing from the logo its folksy farmer mascot Uncle Herschel, who had been part of the design since 1977.
And how did that work out for Cracker Barrel?
Over the next week, Cracker Barrel watched its sales crater – losing its market share of Republican diners, its most loyal base, according to Consumer Edge data. Its stock also plunged, wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars in value, though it has since started to bounce back.
That was just the beginning of course. Everyone started landing on Cracker Barrel and the CEO for what was happening. I recall seeing YouTube channels talking about and not in a good way. Then President Trump chimed in and that pretty much finished the plans to overhaul eveything.
Five days after it initially defended the rebrand, Cracker Barrel reversed course.
During an earnings call in September, Masino admitted the rebrand was a misstep and pledged to “lean into Uncle Herschel and the nostalgia around the brand.”
And now she has resigned. What I think happened is that she was invited to resign and if she went without a fight, she would get a nice package, to the tune of $4.6 million dollars. There are people who are complaining about this, but if there had been a fight, it probably would have cost a lot more. As it is, Julie Masino will simply fade away into obscurity.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
