Cracker Barrel had good reasons to rebrand. But after its new logo misfired, here's what's next

Like its namesake barrels that transported soda crackers until boxes replaced them, Cracker Barrel needed to change.

The restaurant chain's new CEO, Julie Felss Masino, laid out the argument to investors last year: Cracker Barrel’s customer traffic was down 16% compared to 2019. Research showed consumers thought the brand fell short of competitors in essential ways, from the quality of the food to value and convenience.

“We are not leading in any area. We will change that,” Masino said.

But over the past week, Cracker Barrel’s attempted revamp hit a wall. The company saw severe backlash over its plans to modernize and simplify its nostalgic logo – including from President Donald Trump.

“I don’t like the changes. I mean it’s always been Cracker Barrel like it is, so I’d like for it to stay like it is,” customer Sid Leist said during a visit to a Cracker Barrel in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Tuesday.

By that evening, Cracker Barrel had reversed course and said its old logo would remain. It features an overall-clad man – said to represent Uncle Herschel, a relative of Cracker Barrel’s founder – leaning on a barrel, with the words “Old Country Store” underneath.

Investors cheered the move. Cracker Barrel's stock price rose 8% Wednesday to close at $62.33 per share. That was even higher than its closing price on Aug. 15, before it announced the new logo.

Here’s how Lebanon, Tennessee-based Cracker Barrel got to this point and where it might go from here:

Cracker Barrel hired Masino, a longtime Taco Bell and Starbucks executive, in July 2023. She was chosen for her record as an innovator, with the hope that she would attract new customers to Cracker Barrel, which operates 660 restaurants in 43 states.

Masino introduced updated menu items, like Hashbrown Casserole Shepherd’s Pie, to increase Cracker Barrel’s dinnertime traffic. She also started remodeling the company’s dark, antique-filled restaurants, lightening the walls and installing more comfortable seating.

The changes appeared to be helping. Cracker Barrel's fiscal third quarter, which ended May 2, was the fourth consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth for the company. Same-store sales, a key metric for restaurants, measures sales at locations open at least one year.

Richard Wilke, a former executive at the brand consultancy Lippincott who helped lead rebrands for companies like Delta Air Lines and Walmart, said Cracker Barrel's existing logo is too detailed and fussy for the digital age, when companies have to think about how their brand appears in a smartphone app.

But Wilke said Cracker Barrel's new logo, featuring just the company's name in brown letters on a gold background, lacked character. The logo's rollout also seemed like an afterthought. In a press release about new fall menu items released Aug. 18, the company mentioned the new logo in the fourth paragraph.

The approach Walmart took in 2008 provides a better model for a successful rebrand, according to Wilke. Walmart wanted to broaden its appeal, especially to shoppers in urban areas. It redesigned stores, slowly adding a new blue-and-yellow color scheme and yellow asterisk symbol. It trained employees on the meaning behind its new slogan, “Save money. Live better.”

After a year or more, the company finally introduced its new logo, which added the yellow asterisk and dropped the hyphen from Wal-Mart in order to de-emphasize the discount term “Mart.”

“The logo change was almost a natural conclusion to this multi-year transformation,” Wilke said. “I suspect that if we did it in the same sequence as Cracker Barrel, we would have gotten the same noise.”

Cracker Barrel acknowledged Monday that it should have done a better job with the new logo's rollout.

The company said it should have emphasized all the things that would remain the same about Cracker Barrel restaurants: the rocking chairs on the front porches, fireplaces in the dining rooms and vintage Americana and antiques scattered throughout.

The company said it would also continue to honor Uncle Herschel on its menu and on items sold in the country-style stores attached to its restaurants. But it was too late, and Cracker Barrel pulled its new logo the next day.

Thomas Murphy, a professor of practice at Clark University School of Business, said returning to the original logo was a “positive course correction” given the intensity of fans' response. Now, Murphy said, Cracker Barrel should reinforce the message that it's not moving away from its values or heritage.

Murphy said Cracker Barrel can continue to “refresh” its stores, making them brighter and more welcoming to younger customers. But it doesn't really need to “rebrand,” he said, which would indicate a bigger change in direction or purpose.

Wilke agrees that Cracker Barrel should stick with the old logo but continue to revamp its restaurants in the short term. Eventually, the company will have to adopt a simpler logo, he said, but it should design one that retains more of the brand's heritage.

One difference with past corporate transformations — including a 2014 rebrand by Southwest Airlines to attract more business customers or Dunkin' Donuts 2019 renaming to Dunkin' — is the more divisive political climate.

Cracker Barrel caught heat not only from Donald Trump Jr. but from the president himself. On Tuesday morning, Trump said via Truth Social that Cracker Barrel “should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before.”

Later, Trump celebrated Cracker Barrel's decision to drop its new logo.

Wilke said he wishes both Republicans and Democrats would stay out of brand decisions like Cracker Barrel's. Rebrands are almost always about trying to attract new customers without alienating old ones, he said.

“This isn't a political story,” he said. “If politicians now turn every company logo design update into a debate about being ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke,’ we are headed into a damaging new era for corporate branding.”

AP Video Journalist Sophie Bates contributed from Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The new Cracker Barrel logo is displayed on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Wyatte Grantham-Philips)

The new Cracker Barrel logo is displayed on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Wyatte Grantham-Philips)

FILE - The Cracker Barrel Old Country Store logo in Pearl, Miss., is photographed, Sept. 12, 2023. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

The new Cracker Barrel logo is displayed on Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Wyatte Grantham-Philips)

BERLIN (AP) — The eight European countries targeted by U.S. President Donald Trump for a 10% tariff for opposing American control of Greenland blasted the move Sunday, warning that the American leader's threats “undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral.”

In an unusual and very strong joint statement coming from major U.S. allies, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland on Sunday said troops sent to Greenland for the Danish military training exercise “Arctic Endurance” pose “no threat to anyone.”

Trump's Saturday announcement sets up a potentially dangerous test of U.S. partnerships in Europe. The Republican president appeared to indicate that he was using the tariffs as leverage to force talks over the status of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark that he regards as critical to U.S. national security.

“We stand in full solidarity with the Kingdom of Denmark and the people of Greenland," the group said. “Building on the process begun last week, we stand ready to engage in a dialogue based on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity that we stand firmly behind. Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral.”

There are immediate questions about how the White House could try to implement the tariffs because the EU is a single economic zone in terms of trading. It was unclear, too, how Trump could act under U.S. law, though he could cite emergency economic powers that are currently subject to a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said China and Russia will benefit from the divisions between the U.S. and Europe. She added in a post on social media: “If Greenland’s security is at risk, we can address this inside NATO. Tariffs risk making Europe and the United States poorer and undermine our shared prosperity."

Trump's move was also panned domestically.

U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, a former U.S. Navy pilot and Democrat who represents Arizona, posted that Trump’s threatened tariffs on U.S. allies would make Americans “pay more to try to get territory we don’t need.”

“Troops from European countries are arriving in Greenland to defend the territory from us. Let that sink in,” he wrote on social media. “The damage this President is doing to our reputation and our relationships is growing, making us less safe. If something doesn’t change we will be on our own with adversaries and enemies in every direction.”

Six of the countries targeted are part of the 27-member EU, which operates as a single economic zone in terms of trading. It was not immediately clear if Trump's tariffs would impact the entire bloc. EU envoys scheduled emergency talks for Sunday evening to determine a potential response.

The tariff announcement even drew blowback from Trump's populist allies in Europe.

Italy’s right-wing premier, Giorgia Meloni, considered one of Trump’s closest allies on the continent, said Sunday she had spoken to him about the tariffs, which she described as “a mistake.”

The deployment to Greenland of small numbers of troops by some European countries was misunderstood by Washington, Meloni told reporters. She said the deployment was not a move against the U.S. but aimed to provide security against “other actors” that she didn’t name.

French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on social media that “no intimidation or threats will influence us, whether in Ukraine, Greenland or anywhere else in the world when we are faced with such situations." He added that "tariff threats are unacceptable and have no place in this context.”

Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in France and also a European Parliament lawmaker, posted that the EU should suspend last year’s tariff deal with the U.S., describing Trump’s threats as “commercial blackmail.”

Trump also achieved the rare feat of uniting Britain’s main political parties — including the hard-right Reform UK party — all of whom criticized the tariff threat.

“We don’t always agree with the U.S. government and in this case we certainly don’t. These tariffs will hurt us,” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a longtime champion and ally of Trump, wrote on social media. He stopped short of criticizing Trump's designs on Greenland.

Meanwhile, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who leads the center-left Labour Party, said the tariffs announcement was “completely wrong” and his government would “be pursuing this directly with the U.S. administration.”

The foreign ministers of Denmark and Norway are also expected to address the crisis Sunday in Oslo during a news conference.

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Leicester reported from Paris and Cook from Brussels. Associated Press writers Jill Lawless in London, Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, Aamer Madhani in Washington and Josh Boak in West Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this report.

A crowd walks to the US consulate to protest against Trump's policy towards Greenland in Nuuk, Greenland, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A boy holds a crossed out map of Greenland topped by a hairpiece symbolizing U.S. President Donald Trump, during a protest against Trump's policy towards Greenland in front of the US consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

People protest against Trump's policy towards Greenland in front of the US consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)