Cracker Barrel Old Country Store – the brand best known for rocking chairs out front, a gift shop of tchotchkes inside, and for being the restaurant of choice for road tripping families — has been struggling for a long time.
After several quarters of negative traffic and sales, new CEO Julie Felss-Masino announced last month that the family-dining chain would be undergoing a brand makeover to become more relevant, with five pillars of change, ranging from store remodels and tech investments to menu changes and pricing. While brand makeovers are not unusual (Domino’s and Papa Johns both announced new strategic overhauls at the start of the year), Cracker Barrel needs to walk a pretty narrow balance beam of modernizing the brand without drifting from the kitschy, homey vibe the chain is famous for.
During Cracker Barrel’s investor update call, which was hosted just two weeks before the company’s Q3 quarterly earnings, Massino broke down the ways in which the company is trying to dig itself out of the red and onto a positive path forward. While these company updates typically don’t pique the interest of the public outside of investor and restaurant news circles, mainstream media picked up the story, and Cracker Barrel was trending on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.