Is the Cracker Barrel we had loved going to vanish?
The Crisis
Cracker Barrel has had unwanted attention in the past few weeks with its “woke” changes going viral. Once again, loyal customers were being subjected to another marketing disaster, all in an effort to “broaden our customer base.” News services and podcasters were declaring that Cracker Barrel was becoming another Bud Light or Jaguar. Gone would be the iconic logo, the cluttered walls filled with antiques and ancient photographs of nameless people, and the slow compromise of its menu of fresh-cooked Southern dishes. What appeared before customers was an all-to-familiar pattern: a corporate CEO who was very much disconnected with them, changes that struck at the most loyal customer base, and an indifferent corporate board room.
The affect on the stock value of Cracker Barrel was immediate. It was a significant decline (about 10%), but not catastrophic. Yet combined with the explosion of negative coverage in social media, corporate leadership was quick to begin the healing process. First to go was the new logo. Uncle Herschel would remain sitting next to his barrel. The stock value stabilized and started to inch upward. Bud Light’s recovery was much longer having associated itself with a trans influencer. Jaguar? Well, its ad campaign will go down in history as the closest thing to marketing insanity in the history of capitalism, literally destroying the Jaguar division of Tata Motors. A separately listed stock fell from $10.76 per share to the current value of $.12 (listed under ECDA).
These three examples are unique. Yet what ties them together is not necessarily their “wokeness”, but the fundamental flaw in the governance of large corporations. What binds these three instances together are corporate boardrooms consisting of hedge funds and filthy rich stockholders who have only an interest in the increased value of their stock through growth. This fixation on growth is so predominant that they lose sight of the core customer base. I don’t drive a Jaguar. I don’t drink Bud Light (haven’t for 25 years). But I do eat at Cracker Barrel. So this is getting personal.
I have been a customer of Cracker Barrel since the day they arrived in Columbia, MO. Gosh. When was that? 1990’s? It was a favorite of the family, not far from where we lived. And my mother loved the place. She really like the collard greens and the okra. Alas, we moved up to Alaska in 2003 and for twenty years our family had to survive without a Cracker Barrel near by. But our visits to the lower 48 usually included a trip to Cracker Barrel. The emotional tie to the restaurant was so strong that my father could not return to the place after my mother passed away in 2014.
Since returning from Alaska to live in Missouri, we have spent our winter months in southern Georgia. Invariably, we stop at a Cracker Barrel along the way. So when Cracker Barrel announced its crazy marketing scheme, we went into panic mode. Why endeavor to “fix” something that was very clearly not broken? Were we about to lose something special?
Is it as bad as they say it is?
Watching stuff on YouTube can distort reality. You know the pattern. The algorithm escorts your mind down into this “silo” of similar videos. Before you know it, you begin to think that everything people are saying negatively about Cracker Barrel is true. They show these empty parking lots, the empty restaurants, the dismayed employees with nothing to do. The rock-hard biscuits. Where have all the people gone?
So we checked it out for ourselves. The parking lot was about ¾ full. There was a waiting “line,” all seated, of course, in rocking chairs. The old logo was still in place. But the first hint of wokeness was in the rocking chairs. They still had the high quality woven, wood rocking chairs. Then they had this line-up of composite wood chairs. Absent were the classic raw timber chairs. Remember, we were out of the loop for twenty years, so all this about the chairs may mean nothing.
The next innovation was that there was an employee standing outside the door taking your seating requests. This borrows a page from Chick-Fil-A (and many others). This was my first experience with an outdoor check-in at a Cracker Barrel. I asked the employee how long they have been doing this. She had personally been doing this throughout the summer as long as the weather was pleasant.
I relaxed in a rocking chair for about five minutes before being called inside to take a table. The place was the same: fireplace, checkers, antiques cluttering the walls, and the restaurant packed with people. But then came the “woke” part – that new logo! It was on the menu! Gads. And the menu. Gone was the brown paper, hand-calligraphed menu. Whether there was less being offered is hard to tell, for this menu was much more readable and better organized.
My next step was to test out the food. I ordered my tried and true plate – the Country Boy breakfast: sugar cured ham, hashbrown casserole and spiced apples. It came with two biscuits and gravy. Alas, in my advanced age I have less capacity for food – I had to skip testing out the biscuits, packing it into a doggie box with an extra slice of ham. What I did eat was good. No surprises here. For drink, I ordered an iced mocha.
So there you have it. Nothing much has changed – at least in Columbia, Missouri.
Saving Cracker Barrel – Option 1
Regardless of my personal experience at one Cracker Barrel, I am concerned about the direction the company is taking. So how is Cracker Barrel going to recover from this fiasco? It is remarkable how fast things change in the world of capitalism. I began writing this article about two weeks ago. A lot has happened since.
The first thing considered was to fire the CEO, Julie Masino, and other staff related to this misfired marketing campaign. It misfired because its core objective was totally at odds with its traditional customer base. IT IS A SOUTHERN FOOD RESTAURANT. Everything about the place screams SOUTHERN. Stop making it into something New Yorkers or Californians would like. If they don’t like Southern food and culture, they can go elsewhere. If they don’t like barn wood and antiques, they can eat somewhere else. Yet it is clear that the CEO, in conjunction with the corporate board, seemed bent on transforming Cracker Barrel from a Southern experience, into this sanitized “thing.”
As of this date, the CEO has remained and to her credit she has recognized her mistakes and taken corrective action. Maybe firing her is premature. Stay tuned. Whether she remains or is replaced, the CEO needs to identify with the culture of the South and love Southern food, respect the history of the brand and understand the customers that support it.
A second consideration is a renewed marketing campaign to take advantage of the controversy. Show the old logo, bring back the old menu layout periodically, keep the décor. And – focus on fresh-cooked food! One of the unfortunate consequences of a viral social media event is all the extra stuff that is brought into the thread – which were whistleblowers pointing out the short cuts the company had been taking in regards to their food. Whether these things were fair or not does not matter. Make your biscuits fresh! Return to making meatloaf in-house. It may cost more in materials and personnel, but it will re-establish customer confidence in your product. It appears that as of this date Cracker Barrel has done that very thing.1
The third consideration is to tone down the DEI. Cracker Barrel does not need to be virtue signaling. Focus on hiring the best and rewarding the best. Running a restaurant is super-hard work. It’s tough enough to keep morale up without having to distract your employees and your customers with social engineering. Don’t advertise aspects of DEI that only serve to alienate the company from its customer base. As of this date, that is being done.
So overall, as far as what can be done now, under the same leadership, is being done. Good for them and good for the company and its customers.
Saving Cracker Barrel – Option 2
The second option addresses the other problem area of Cracker Barrel – its corporate board. CEOs just don’t pop up with their bad ideas. There is usually a supporting cast which thinks the world of them. As of this date, Option #2 is far less probable. But Cracker Barrel is sadly an exception in this case. Other companies have not been so fortunate. Sometimes correcting course from a bad marketing decision is not a matter of management. It is a problem with corporate board composition. It needs to be replaced. The problem with replacing the board membership is the reality that their presence is usually a function of stock ownership. What has guided them is the wrong-headed idea that growth is an end in itself. By golly, we are going to have Cracker Barrels in California and New York City. They aren’t interested in a company that is content to be a sustainably profitable enterprise of restaurants located in the South and Midwest.
And this is a problem with publicly traded corporations. An individual or family are hugely successful. Before retiring, they decide to go public. With the sudden injection of cash, there is phenomenal growth. But the corporate board begins to take a new look. Gone is Uncle Ted and Aunt Sally. In their place is Blackrock and some billionaires that they never knew. For these newcomers, the closest they ever get to a Cracker Barrel is at their board meetings. More and more of them are no longer from the South. They have no obvious connection with the typical customer. The CEO they hire checks all the right boxes, boxes that did not exist before.
Option #2 will come into play only if Cracker Barrel begins to “fail.” It may still be profitable, but it will become a mature enterprise that has a flat trajectory. And a flat trajectory may not interest the typical board member of Cracker Barrel. A buy-out becomes more likely. And the buyer will be an individual, a family or a privately held corporation. You know what I mean. Something like Chick-Fil-A?
Changing Cracker Barrel into a privately held corporation will better ensure that is governance culture is more closely aligned with its customers’ culture.
Why This Concerns Me?
I don’t currently own stock in Cracker Barrel. So I have no monetary concerns. As I noted above, I have been a long-time customer and I have liked everything about Cracker Barrel. And as my experience can attest, it is not the nightmare that podcasters attest. The proposed changes and the “atmosphere” of the company’s governance were alarming. Yet, to their credit, they have done a good job owning up to their mistakes and changing course.
Yet our concerns are a bit more basic than that. If Cracker Barrel turns into just another sanitized, “efficient” operation, where are we going to eat on our trip to Georgia? This really bums me out. Yet I have some room for optimism.
1“Cracker Barrel returning to handmade biscuits, latest in series of changes after customers speak out,” MSN, by Anders Hagstrom, September 10, 2025.
© Copyright 2025 to Eric Niewoehner