Cracker Barrel, an American chain of gift stores and restaurants changed direction with their new CEO Julie Felss Masino and marketing team by rebranding on August 19th 2025. It flopped causing them to lose $100 million in market value. They changed the logo back on August 26th after public backlash.
The change, according to the CEO and VPs, was to make it more relevant and appealing to younger generations but many customers say,
It strays from what the store is about.
According to several sources, including The New York Post’s article by Ariel Zilber, the public strongly opposed the change while there is also much division expressing views on the direction of the store and its values. On YouGov, Allen Houston did a poll posting it on August 27th, 2025 stating that,
“23% of consumers viewed the new logo positively, while 38% disliked it. When asked about priorities, 37% of consumers want the brand to preserve its “country store” heritage, while 25% say improving food quality should come first.”
Everything from the menu to the inside environment has changed in multiple stores across the country to embody this vision. People from that poll and The NY Post’s conclusion of the public have both sides of the aisle either appreciating the change while others disapproving. The disapproval claims that it goes against traditional values, and it seems soulless. While 9% of people polled were more encouraged to go to the store because of the change. Regardless of whether it was generally good or bad, “the customer is always right” as they say.
The customer voices changed the stores to revert back but it’s shocking how many people who strongly opposed the change actually go to Cracker Barrel. Houston also shed light on the fact that,
“Despite the national debate, only 6% of Americans eat at Cracker Barrel regularly, while 32% say they never visit.”
At Pitman, we don’t have any Cracker Barrel around here but I asked Kylie Eudy (9th) here at Pitman High School what she thinks since she has some experience going to the store. Kylie used to go to Cracker Barrel on multiple occasions in Texas. She said,
“I don’t agree with the change. It kinda ruins it.”
I also asked which logo she preferred,
“Probably the old one, it just made it more visual. It makes it more appealing to somebody than like, just that regular and boring cracker barrel logo. No one wants to look at that and be like “Oh my gosh, lets go to Cracker Barrel.” “What’s that?” I don’t know. It’s just a yellow sign. That’s my opinion.”
This “yellow sign” is something that Cracker Barrel’s Marketing team reported that they spent about $700 million to set into full scale on all of their products. This money was taken from capital expenditures, which Sardar Biglari warned would cause a value decrease in stocks in November 2024. Biglari is a stock owner and long time rival of the restaurant chain being the CEO of Steak ‘n Shake. Even without a rival warning, it still showed a dramatic decline to be foreseen ahead by the store’s revenue. This came from a 2024 report from the CEO which said that the customer traffic was down 16% compared to 2019 with the store barely reaching 1% growth in a year.
With such a decline, Cracker Barrel chose a logo change for a solution to bring more people to their store initially. With this clearly being not what the majority of the public and what the consumers of the store want, it created a backflash in the tenfold. From the daily customer to the President of the United States, their voices were heard on August 26th, and Cracker Barrel can only hope to gain back the customer’s favor.