The Cracker Barrel restaurant chain is expensive in the heart of many Americans: traditional cuisine in a “country” musical setting that have been attracting part of the country for six decades.
So when the company with 660 restaurants and the annual turnover of $ 3.5 billion decides to change its historic logo, it triggers a storm against “WOKE” culture on social networks, plunges its scholarship course, divides its employees and causes a son of Donald Trump.
The object of the wrath of part of conservative America: the refreshment and simplification of the drawing of the Cracker Barrel brand.
Disappeared “Uncle Herschel” – the real uncle of the founder Dan Evins – who was represented in overalls sitting on a wooden chair, the elbow placed on an imposing barrel.
Instead, a simple yellow hexagon struck by the brand “Cracker Barrel” now represents the restaurant chain founded in 1969 and piloted by its general manager Julie Felss Masino, who had judged last year that the company was no longer “as relevant as in the past”.
Except that in the United States that brought conservative president Donald Trump in power, his son Donald Jr. demanded on his X account to understand “Fuck, what’s going on at Cracker Barrel?”
He even picked up a message taken from an account on social networks, “Woke War Room”, accusing the chain of having “deleted an aesthetic that the Americans loved and having replaced it by a sterile and soulless brand”.
An elected representative of Florida, Byron Donalds, republican candidate for the post of governor of the State, expressed on X his attachment to Cracker Barrel where he claims to have worked.
“Their logo was emblematic and their unique restaurants in their genre represented the touch of American culture.”
“Getting a greatness to Cracker Barrel”
“No one has claimed this brand Woke’s overhaul. It’s time to make its size to Cracker Barrel, “wrote Mr. Donalds, taking up the Slogan” Return his greatness to America “by Donald Trump.
Cracker Barrel lost $ 94 million at the end of the weekend of its value and its action plunged 7.2% to finish at 54.4 $.
In one of its restaurants in the state of New Jersey (northeast), in Mount Arlington, the new logo is talking about employees and customers.
“They removed Mr. Herschel!” Will I miss I? Perhaps! ”, Risk a cashier of the souvenir store adjoining the restaurant, accusing his employer of” making everything bland “.
But his colleague who cleanses the tables contradicted it: “Nothing changes, apart from the logo. The kitchen and the menu remain the same ”.
Kathy Brondolo is of the same opinion. This longtime client, 67 years old, thinks that the new logo “makes no difference, as long as we can see it by the road”.
Traditional American dishes
In the restaurant of Mount Arlington some 70 kilometers west of New York, the guests feast on traditional and American robotive dishes: meat bread, roasted chicken, butter cookies.
In a decor of rocking armchairs, antiques, hunting trophies and trinkets hanging on the walls.
For the marketing teacher David Reibstein at the University of Pennsylvania, “it is not uncommon for a brand to refresh” and, in this case, “it is not a major change”.
But, he deplores, “for traditionalists, tradition has been broken and as the heart of Cracker Barrel clientele are these traditionalists who live mainly in red (republican) and conservative states, they are quick to react”.
Donald Trump, elected in November 2024, won an average of three -quarters of the country’s counties where at least one restaurant is located, according to electoral sociologist Dave Wasserman.
