Julie Masinoâs ordeal as CEO of Cracker Barrel has come to an end. Except it hasnât and it never will.
Masino stepped down 356 days after she announced Cracker Barrelâs new logo â which lasted seven.
Itâs August 2025.
Masino is fronting a three year plan to update Cracker Barrel. Somewhere between lockdowns and DoorDash, folk just arenât coming back in as much.
Sheâs betting $700 million, more or less half the companyâs valuation.
Cracker Barrel has already started serving beer. Now, Masinoâs cut twenty things off the menu and begun whitewashing the interiors.
She also thinks the logo needed a refresh.
The âbeanâ has been around since forever, housing the words Cracker Barrel alongside an ink drawing of a gentleman in work dungarees, sat forward on his rocking chair, arm draped over said cracker barrel.
If you believe in brand data, Kantar scores âUncle Herschelâ or âOld Timerâ at 154 on the distinctive-asset index, where brand characters average 98.
But Masino thinks heâs messy, so sheâs retiring him.
Manhattan, NYC. Held in the soft-box lighting of Good Morning America, Masino leans in from her stool, all breezy, hands waving, answering questions from television host Michael Strahan.
Lowered gaze, sideways smile, Michael asks: âWhat if customers are coming hard enough at you about the look of the restaurant and they wanna go back to the old way?â
Masino lets out a squeal.
âHonestly, the feedbackâs been overwhelmingly positiveâŚpeople like what weâre doing.â
She punches the air at him.
âIâll give you another sound biteâŚâ
Masino has over-prepared.
Two days later, and two stops downtown, a group of ring-lighters turn up at Gansevoort Plaza. A pop-up is dressed in gingham, with a Jordan Davis set, line-dancing, and plenty of Cracker Barrel food.
Itâs a pop-up because Manhattan doesnât have a Cracker Barrel.
Videos go round of the Plaza with nobody in it. But thatâs the least of the problems because social media has already noticed the new logo with no Uncle Herschel on it.
Noticing is the wrong word: Masino might as well have walked out into the street and shot an old man off his rocking chair.
BANG.
The President of the United States values the viral damage at a billion dollars of free publicity.
To help, he posts an AI video of himself dancing with Old Timer to the Village People.
Seven days after the logo change:
We thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel⌠Our new logo is going away and our âOld Timerâ will remain.
Masino gets a lifeline: Fire the branding agency.
Prophet, founded by Scott Galloway, steps onto the scaffold in October. The press release lowers around its neck: Cracker Barrel is ending its engagement with the firm responsible for the logo and restaurant redesigns.
The Prophet team never want to see a Cracker Barrel again, which is lucky because theyâre based in San Francisco, which doesnât have a Cracker Barrel.
20 November 2025, shareholders vote to keep Julie Masino.
That same day, she goes back on camera, in Lebanon, Tennessee, which does have a Cracker Barrel.
Not alone this time, sheâs flanked by SVP Doug Hisel, 18 years in the field.
A dark-panelled booth, breakfast, Masino holds an emotional support mug of refill coffee. Their guest is conservative podcaster Glenn Beck, who has zero interest in the brown plate of eggs in front of him.
Theyâre all chewing on camera, and Masino has to cover her mouth to get her lines out.
This is the second booth ever built in a Cracker Barrel, Masino explains. Sheâd spotted a regular bringing his own stadium cushion to use on the ladder-back chairs. And see the table? Rounded off at the corner, because a Bible study group comes in three mornings a week and kept catching their hips on the edge. They call themselves the Corner Crew now.
Glenn Beck steps out of frame, unplanned, and when he steps back in he urges Masino to stop spinning yarns.
Were you surprised you werenât fired?
Masinoâs chest rises.
Um. I feel like Iâve been fired by America.
Beck chuckles.
Somewhere out there, Uncle Herschel chuckles too.
On the day the Beck interview aired, stock closed at $25.97, down 52% for the year.
It takes eight months to become official. Cracker Barrel confirms Masino will step down as CEO on 10 August 2026; the details are a page attached to a standard 8-K filed with the SEC. All requests for comment are refused.
Today the stock trades back where it was before this whole darn-tooting thing began.
As if sheâd never been there. Except she was.
Letâs head back to Wednesday the 20th August 2025, the day between Good Morning America and Gansevoort Plaza.
Zoom the microscope in.
14:19 â @FatKidDeals, a consumer deals account posts the new logo. Exactly as it would a special on rotisserie chicken.
Cracker Barrel rebrands for the first time since 1977
Patient zero. 1,783 likes.
14:42 â @GabTheGem, an ordinary user reposts @FatKidDeals and makes a joke.
Now why would they remove the cracker & the barrel?
565,936 likes.
The single-most liked post of the entire episode.
16:17 â Sandy Petersen, the game designer that created Call of Cthulhu and built levels for Doom, posts three logos: Cracker Barrel, Burger King and Burberry.
One day I would like to see a logo redesign that made it look better instead of soulless and terrible. Can anyone give a counter example?
29.1 million views.
The single-most seen post of the entire episode.
So far, so standard.
But there are lots of smaller posts. Much smaller, like maggots. A few just sort of appear, then theyâre crawling all over each other, and every one takes a bite.
14:59 â End Wokeness, anonymous, 3.8 million followers.
Cracker Barrel has fallen
15:00 â Benny Johnson, conservative media host.
âŚitâs absolutely horrible. When will they learn?
The last four words make the difference. That gets quote-tweeted.
15:16 â Alex Bruesewitz, Republican political consultant, shares Johnsonâs words, embellishing.
The CEO of Cracker Barrel is as woke as they come. She is destroying a once great American brand.
57 minutes in, and Masinoâs already in the sights.
16:57 â John Rich, country musician. His reference point isnât Burger King or Burberry.
Will you go to Cracker Barrel now that itâs going woke? This could be a âBud Lightâ moment in the makingâŚ
17:22 â @WokeWarRoom, anonymous. 30,000 followers.
Cracker Barrelâs new logo isnât an accident â itâs CEO Julie Felss Masinoâs project.
She should resign and be replaced with leadership that will restore Cracker Barrelâs tradition.
17:26 â Donald Trump Jr. re-tweets the post. 16 million followers.
WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!
17:49 â Robby Starbuck, who boycotted Tractor Supply, John Deere and Harley-Davidson out of their DEI programmes. 800,000 followers.
Another little known fact: Cracker Barrel was a Nashville Pride sponsor.
YOU have to ask yourself: Do you want to fund people or companies that hate your values?
Boycott talk spooks a market. Next morning the stock drops seven per cent, and CNBC reports it. Then Fox, then the Journal, then the BBC.
Now itâs news.
Half of it, anyway.
PeakMetrics pulled 52,000 Cracker Barrel posts on X, from the first 24 hours.
44.5% were bots. Among the posts calling for a boycott, 49%. Seven in ten of those used identical wording. Super-repeater accounts pushed the same boycott message ten, fifteen, twenty times each.
The dark part? Cracker Barrel was flattered.
This is a themed restaurant chain and gift shop from 1969, not 1869, and its biggest shareholders are Vanguard and BlackRock. Every American has heard of it. Going by the numbers, they shouldnât have.
Cracker Barrel has 660 stores.
McDonaldâs has 14,000.
Starbucks has 17,000.
Famous out of all proportion to the number of people actually eating there. And Masino ran with it. She got on the next earnings call, with a share price to defend, and called Cracker Barrel âthe front porch of Americaâ.
And of those 660 stores, how many had been âupdatedâ?
0.6%.
Four.
In April 2025, before the logo was changed, Rachel Love, just a Mom from Smyrna, posted that Cracker Barrel had taken away the last piece of nostalgia she had left.
The 2 million views and 8k comments got picked up by the Wall Street Journal, and Rachel became TikTokâs Unofficial Spokesperson For The People Of Cracker Barrel.
Masinoâs team even reached out to Rachel and sent her a box of swag, including a $54.99 Cracker Barrel cable knot cardigan in ivory popcorn.
âWeâre not changing who we areâ, Cracker Barrel commented on her feed.
But later it deleted the comment.
That summer, Rachelâs grandmother, a Cracker Barrel regular, was in a care home, getting the last few sleeps with her great-grandson and granddaughter by her side.
This part, I get.
The day my motherâs cancer progressed, I knew because sitting in her favourite Italian, she wanted to know why the mozzarella and tomato salad had swapped its beef tomatoes for cherry ones. Something about families and toddlers finding them easier to share. Mum couldnât let it go. The jumped-up parents and the cotton-wool kids and why every-bloody-thing has to be easier now.
We didnât need the scan results that day.
For Rachel and her grandmother, the green bean recipe had been tampered with and the buttermilk biscuits werenât the same.
On Rachelâs feed sheâs holding her grandmotherâs hand, nails painted for the last time:
Death isnât like the movies. Itâs counting breathsâŚuntil the rally before the last goodbye.
Dorothy Ann Moulder-Costa. Muddie. A sister, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother, but most of all Rachel Loveâs best friend.
Died the first of October 2025.
Five years to the day after Mum.
In the weeks before, Rachel had reposted the âMake Cracker Barrel Great Againâ video. A crane lowering a giant hoarding with Old Timer on his rocking chair, back on top of the old country store, like a homecoming. The footage was AI.
âOur job is to make people love Cracker Barrel the way that our guests do.â
That was Masino pleading with Glenn Beck.
Masino wasnât brought in to care about Muddie. She was brought in so the whole chain didnât end up in the care home too, counting breaths.
If it isnât already.
A Cracker Barrel customer spends about $15 a visit, and it takes about fifty people per restaurant to look after them.
Which poses a second problem.
In 1991, Cracker Barrel told its staff to show ânormal heterosexual valuesâ or go. As many as sixteen were fired. Cheryl Summerville, a cook at the Douglasville store in Georgia, got the reason in writing: The employee is gay.
Thatâs real.
When Dan Evins, founder, walked the policy back a few weeks later, he described it as a well-intentioned overreaction. He said the company would hire gay people wherever it didnât âdisrupt businessâ.
By 2024, Cracker Barrel was a Nashville Pride sponsor. Robby Starbuckâs little known fact.
It takes a big family to run a roadside restaurant. Cracker Barrel has 70,000 employees, and restaurant staff are three times more likely than the rest of America to be under 25.
Gen Z is 23.1% LGBTQ+. Boomers, 3%.
Two days after the old logo came back, so did the old Cracker Barrel â the Pride page came off the website.
If Cracker Barrelâs customers are dying out, whoâs going to serve the ones that are left?
Julie Masino isnât a CMO. But this is why CMOs get fired. I imagine sheâd sat in a lot of consumer groups, but had never really sat in a Cracker Barrel.
That was the idea though.
Masino was told to find new growth. She looked where any of us would: strip things back, freshen them up. So she started sanding the grain out of the place, and found it runs deep.
Really deep. The grain is the place.
After that, she became the target, and the whole thing had an unsaid edge. The pleasure of watching a woman lose.
A loss she will never live down.
By which I meanâŚevery time New Coke or Gap or Jaguar get mentioned on LinkedIn.
Luckily, Masino wonât be needing LinkedIn. She leaves with $4.63 million, paid over two years.
Oh, and bodyguards. Bloomberg reckons that was the one thing she insisted on â company security, for as long as the board sees fit.
BANG.
The country fried steak and sawmill gravy is America in all its glory, so good youâll want to lie down after.
And yet Cracker Barrel sits on a road between woke and whatever the opposite of woke is. Drive it end to end and youâll want to lie down for other reasons.
Back in Lebanon, Tennessee, three mornings a week, the Bible group squeezes into their booth, and nobody catches a hip.
On the table, as on every table since the very first Cracker Barrel, is the peg game: a little wooden triangle with golf tees for pegs.
You jump pegs over each other, like draughts, and try to leave just one. The card underneath judges you. Leave one peg and youâre a âgeniusâ. Two, âpurty smartâ. Three, âjust plain dumbâ. Four, an âeg-no-ra-mooseâ.
Any regular can end up with one peg.
Not because theyâre a genius. Just because theyâve been to Cracker Barrel a thousand times.
The Corner Crew might put it another way.
That thereâs more love, more grace and a humbler walk with God in the eg-no-ra-moose with four pegs left, who puts the puzzle down and looks up from the table.
And sees the whole room at once. Every table, and the fifty people looking after them. All on the same side.
We can only hope theyâre praying. For Cracker Barrel, for America, for the rest of us.
Markets
UK economy grows 0.4% in July, beating forecasts amid resilience | Financial Times
Inflation outpaces wage growth again, squeezing American paychecks | CNBC
Meet generation screwed: young peopleâs economic struggles | New Statesman
Brands
Cracker Barrel stock doubled, but analysts say donât buy | Barronâs
Instagramâs redesigned logo sparks immediate mockery from users online | Variety
KFC appoints first global chief brand officer as it overhauls brand identity | Marketing Dive
Appleâs new CEO revives Steve Jobs strategy from 25 years ago | TechCrunch
Apple enters foldable smartphone market with $1,999 iPhone Duo | The New York Times
CMOs must reconnect with business metrics to reclaim strategic leadership | Digiday
Brands now court everyday creators with tiny social media followings | The Wall Street Journal
Molson Coors speeds up creator workflows, quadrupling engagement with looser briefs | Digiday
ClearScore founder: brands need to be better, not necessarily novel | The Drum
Minerals companies are rebranding with more American-sounding names | The Wall Street Journal
Neutrogena responds to backlash over Hayden Panettiereâs postpartum depression claims | Variety
Did Tate McRaeâs controversial Neutrogena ad make or break the brand? | Hello Partner
Gap hires Paramount executive to expand brands beyond clothing | Business Insider
Ben & Jerryâs to name new board members after lengthy rejection process | The Wall Street Journal
Logging off becomes luxury: how brands must adapt | Business of Fashion
Fashionâs newest engagement metric: AI visibility explained | Vogue
Why Number 10âs TikTok hiring shows social media is now career critical | The Guardian
Sonyâs investigation alleged WPP ran a global rebate scheme, lawsuit claims | Business Insider
UKâs John Lewis deploys AI agents to navigate difficult economy | Reuters
Startups
Byron Sharp argues marketing growth laws apply to small brands too | The DCA
Harveyâs valuation surges to $15.5B in just months | TechCrunch
Jonnypops popsicles gain traction in competitive ice pop market | The Wall Street Journal
Energy drink entrepreneur launches ÂŁ1 fibre soda after ÂŁ20m success | The Times
Tech
Anthropic researcher quits over urgent AI safety concerns for humanity | Wired
Meta agrees to pay $17.1 billion in landmark social media addiction settlement | The New York Times
Meta deploys new AI agent to employees while scaling back tokenmaxxing efforts | Wired
BBC chief proposes public service algorithm with user-generated content | The Guardian
Inside the Leopold Aschenbrenner AI prophecy saga | New York Magazine
In the AI era, work output matters less than these new priorities | Fast Company
First jailed anti-AI protester urges tech giants to âregain your humanityâ | The Guardian
Money
Americans are losing faith in capitalism. The problem isnât capitalism | Fortune
The American dream is alive and minting millionaires | The Wall Street Journal
Sheinâs Hong Kong stock debut disappoints with 10% initial share slide | The Guardian
Reddit joins the S&P 500 as one of the fastest-growing companies | Reddit
The future of venture capital depends on who controls the capital | Forbes
Design
Instagram unveils first brand refresh in decade with new wordmark and typefaces | Creative Boom
Apple turns the new Mac mini into a claymation superhero | The Drum
Freelancers increasingly hired to clean up low-quality AI-generated content | The Guardian
Oculus mall struggles with 25% vacancy despite 60 million annual visitors | Curbed
Happiness
Dolly Parton, the icon who united a divided America through music | Vulture
Secondhand book sales surge amid concerns over AI-generated content | BBC
How a 9/11 first responderâs funny story led to a missing artist | Vulture
The summit and the rope: a metaphor for human connection | The Good Human Practice
The science of developing creative talent in organizations | Harvard Business Review
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