Tommy Lowe, the 93-year-old co-founder of Cracker Barrel, says CEO Julie Felss Masino and the company's board have no grasp of the brand's identity, its food, or its customers, and a $700 million overhaul proved it.
Lowe, who helped launch the first Cracker Barrel in 1969 alongside Dan Evins, told FOX Business that Masino's leadership has been a mismatch from the start. The CEO took over in 2023 after stints running Taco Bell and Mattel, two companies with almost nothing in common with a Southern country-cooking chain built on rocking chairs and biscuit gravy.
Lowe did not hold back about the gap between Masino's résumé and the restaurant she inherited.
"She knows very little about Cracker Barrel's operation, the history, the food. The idea she's come up with... doesn't fit the customer. If she'd go out and sit on the front porch and talk to all the customers that come in there, she'd have a little bit of a different outlook."
That quote alone captures the core complaint: a leadership team that never bothered to learn what made the place work before deciding to tear it apart.
Under Masino, Cracker Barrel rolled out a sweeping rebrand across its 660-plus locations. The company revamped its menu, decluttered its dining rooms, and, most controversially, dropped the iconic "Old Timer" man-and-barrel logo that had symbolized the brand for more than five decades.
The price tag, by Lowe's account: $700 million. His verdict was blunt.
"They were talking about $700 million for their redo, and it was worth nothing."
Customers and investors agreed. The logo swap alone wiped more than $140 million off Cracker Barrel's market value at the height of the backlash. Even President Trump weighed in, urging the chain to return to its roots.
Cracker Barrel eventually reversed course and brought back the original logo, a retreat that Lowe praised. But the damage extended well beyond a single design decision. The broader overhaul signaled a company chasing trends instead of serving the people who actually eat there. As Masino herself later acknowledged, the pivot back toward nostalgia and classic menu items was what finally started to stabilize things.
Lowe reserved some of his sharpest criticism for the Cracker Barrel board of directors, which he said has enabled Masino's missteps rather than correcting them.
"And the board is evidently still supporting her... And if they were any kind of board of directors, they'd have cleaned house a long time ago."
He questioned whether any of them had spent real time inside the operation. "I doubt that they've ever been in a Cracker Barrel kitchen or have an idea of what their clientele is," Lowe said.
That accusation, that the people steering the company have never stood behind the line or sat in the dining room long enough to understand it, carries weight coming from a man who built the chain from scratch. Cracker Barrel did not immediately respond to FOX Business' request for comment on Lowe's remarks.
The chain has faced broader financial pressures beyond the rebrand fallout. Cracker Barrel divested its Maple Street Biscuit brand and closed restaurants as part of efforts to reduce hundreds of millions in debt, moves that suggest the $700 million overhaul left the company in a deeper hole than leadership anticipated.
Lowe's most memorable line cut straight to the identity problem. "Taco Bell is not Cracker Barrel," he told FOX Business, a five-word indictment of the assumption that a fast-food executive could parachute into a heritage dining brand and apply the same playbook.
He also zeroed in on the operational basics that he believes Masino's team has let slide. Food quality, particularly temperature, matters to Cracker Barrel's core customer in a way it might not at a quick-service chain.
"Do you ever try to eat grits cold or any kind of country vegetables? It's got to be piping hot, and they're just not training the people."
If Lowe had his way, the fix would start at the top. "I'd bring somebody in there that knew how to run a Cracker Barrel," he said. He called for leadership "familiar with the business and the food", not imported from a different industry with a different customer.
The company's stock did eventually see relief. Cracker Barrel posted a surprise profit and raised its outlook as the logo controversy receded, suggesting that undoing the rebrand's worst excesses was more effective than the rebrand itself ever was.
Cracker Barrel also parted ways with Prophet, the consulting firm behind the rebrand, after the customer backlash mounted. The decision to dump the consultants came only after the damage was done, a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched corporate boards pay outside firms to reinvent brands that customers already loved.
Masino's tenure has since reached its conclusion. The CEO exited the company after the botched rebrand wiped significant value from the chain, an outcome Lowe's interview all but predicted.
Legacy restaurant brands across the country have struggled with similar identity crises. Hooters has continued closing locations after its own restructuring, a reminder that once a chain loses its footing with the customers who built it, the road back is long and expensive.
Lowe called the $700 million overhaul "the biggest waste of money in the world." He is 93 years old, more than half a century removed from the day he and Evins opened the first location. And yet his diagnosis, know your customer, serve the food hot, stop chasing trends that don't fit, is the kind of common sense that no consulting firm should have to teach a board of directors.
When the man who built the porch has to explain what the porch is for, the problem was never the logo.