Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. has ramped up to serve 1.4 million adult meals and hundreds of thousands of pies this Thanksgiving week in its busiest sales days of the year.
The Lebanon, Tenn.-based family-dining operator tackles the cornucopia of operational challenges from several fronts. It adds restaurant shifts, offers supply-storage diagrams to maximize space at its 634 units, supplements cashiers for its increased to-go business and trims a few items — such as baked potatoes — from its menu.
Cracker Barrel expects this year’s sales to be higher than ever. Pie sales — which typically total 600,000 between Thanksgiving and Christmas — are already running 10 percent ahead of last year, said Tony Guadagno, Cracker Barrel’s vice president for restaurant operations.
The days around Thanksgiving have long been Cracker Barrel’s top sales days, said Guadagno, who has worked at the company for more than 26 years. Cracker Barrel aims to maintain its top-dog position.
“Everybody would like to get a piece of our pie, but they can’t,” Guadagno said of holiday sales at the chain, which has many of its restaurants on major traffic routes.
“Thanksgiving is our busiest day of the year,” he said. “We will go through 23,600 cases of turkey on Thanksgiving Day.” Each case contains six turkey breasts and provides about 60 servings, the company said.
Guadagno said Cracker Barrel gets a running start on Thanksgiving Thursday by adding a third shift on Wednesday night.
“That third shift does nothing but prepare pies and build to-go Thanksgiving dinners to be baked off on Thursday,” he said.
Restaurant kitchens set up two steam lines on Thanksgiving Day, one for the dining room and the other just to handle to-go meals, which make up about 30 percent of day’s sales, Guadagno said.
The company also alters employee shift schedules on Thanksgiving Day, breaking them when possible into three parts rather than two.
“Wherever possible, we run three shifts, so the shifts are shorter, with three six-hour shifts,” Guadagno said. “That way employees can pick and choose which shifts they want to work so they can be with their families.”
Staffing for the front of the house mimics a busy Sunday at Cracker Barrel, but additional employees serve as cashiers to handle to-go business and cooks to prepare meals.
“In addition, many of the 600 corporate employees, who are scheduled off on Thanksgiving and the day after, will work in the units,” Guadagno said, adding that they sign up to fill slots in restaurant.
“Many will help in areas they support: Information services will go out and maybe work the register to see what the process looks like on such a busy day; product development will go out and work with the cooks,” he said. “We try to put them in their area of expertise.”
Average units employ about 113 workers, Guadagno said, but for the holiday, “Where it gets costly is the overtime. Sometimes you just have to push through the peak volume.”
Looping in the locals
(Continued from page 1)
Cracker Barrel restaurants, which typically seat about 178 people, are open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Most of the traffic is from 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
“During the peak at lunch, it’s not unusual for a Cracker Barrel to be on a 20-minute wait,” Guadagno said, which gives customers a chance to patronize the holiday-decorated retail shops. Retail sales increase on Thanksgiving as well, he said.
While the company’s strategic sourcing division has mastered purchasing for the high-sales holiday, storage in the restaurants is a challenge for the one-day explosion.
“That whole week is busy, but Thanksgiving Day especially so,” Guadagno said. “We give pretty clear diagrams on how to organize the walk-in, how to thaw out the turkey, how to handle the supplies and where to put them. The amount of to-go supplies on that day are tremendous, so we give as much guidance as we can on where to store and handle those products.”
The company will also tap local churches and civic organizations for additional hot boxes to hold to-go orders, especially the order-ahead bulk meals that serve six, for $59.99, he said.
The company will serve about 3.6 million slices of pie between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Guadagno said. Much of those are sales of whole pies, which are priced at $8.99.
For dine-in customers, who typically are in parties of six and seven, about 95 percent of the regular Cracker Barrel menu is offered, in addition to the Thanksgiving turkey meal. The chain makes a few changes to its regular offerings.
“There are a few things that we don’t offer, primarily because we need the oven space to handle the Thanksgiving offerings,” Guadagno said.
“For example, we don’t offer baked potatoes on Thanksgiving Day,” he said. “They will take up an entire oven set at a certain temperature, and we need those for pies and baking off the Thanksgiving meals.”
To prepare for Thanksgiving, Guadagno said that this weekend he and several other executives flew to Chicago and drove back to Tennessee, stopping along the way to visit about 14 locations and thank employees for their extra efforts during the holiday.
“I ate a lot of Cracker Barrel food,” Guadagno admitted. “I had to wear Spandex pants.”
Cracker Barrel has units in 42 states.
This story has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: Nov. 25, 2014 An earlier version of this story misstated Cracker Barrel's closing time on Thanksgiving Day. Restaurants close at 10 p.m.
Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @RonRuggless
