Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino on Thursday told CNBC’s Jim Cramer how her company is moving forward with its turnaround plan, adding that she doesn’t expect to see results in the immediate future.
“It is a three-year plan. Fiscal ’25, which starts for us in another week or two, is really an investment year,” Masino said. ‘We’ve got five pillars in our plan, we’re really bringing those together, starting to get those rocking and rolling, and then we’ll start to see the benefits in the back half of our fiscal ’26 and into ’27.”
Masino said Cracker Barrel’s improvement plan centers around location remodels, reworked menus and improved technology for its loyalty program and to-go business. The company is testing four versions of remodeled restaurants in Tennessee to figure out “which level of investment is going to drive the right return,” she said.
The chain is also embarking on “the largest menu test in the history of the brand,” testing out more than 20 items, she continued. According to Masino, Cracker Barrel will start serving some of the new dishes across the company in early August.
But Masino isn’t aiming to change everything about Cracker Barrel.
“Our goal is to take what people love about Cracker Barrel and open the aperture a little bit so that more people love Cracker Barrel,” she said. “So, we want to appeal to all generations.”
