This week on Nation's Restaurant News the top story was Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol foreshadows possible layoffs. Starbucks Corp. CEO Brian Niccol, in a message Friday to all partners, said the company is looking at its support organization and considering streamlining it, including possible layoffs, with a March deadline.
“Our size and structure can slow us down, with too many layers, managers of small teams and roles focused primarily on coordinating work,” Niccol said in a message, “Back to Starbucks: Transforming our support organization,” filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In other news, Darden’s most recent quarter was certainly something to write home about, with systemwide same-store sales up 2.4%, including 2% at Olive Garden and 7.5% at LongHorn Steakhouse.
Chief executive officer Rick Cardenas and chief financial officer Raj Vennam painted a bit more color on those results during the annual ICR Conference this week in Orlando. LongHorn, which represents about 25% of the company’s revenues, has benefitted from years of work and investments that pre-dated COVID. Cardenas said the company eliminated price-point promotions, for instance, and shifted those marketing dollars to “put more food on the plate and talk about quality.”
Also, In Nation’s Restaurant News’ second year of analyzing the Technomic America’s Favorite Chains data, we found some surprising restaurants and some not-at-all surprising ones. Like last year, consumers skew toward steakhouses when dining out, but in the past year they’ve added snack brands to their rosters of most-loved chains. Check out the gallery of America’s Favorite Chains.
See what else was trending on NRN.com this week.
