The Weekly Croissant: Little Known Secrets of Cracker Barrel Pt. 2

How the Barrel is Built

Hello, My Croissants!

What’s the next best thing to a Croissant? That would be a biscuit! Back in October, I wrote a column for No Depression about my love for a Cracker Barrel breakfast while on the road. I have to say that despite all of my serious and sad-sack writing for ND, this Cracker Barrel column has gotten possibly the most feedback of any I’ve written. Numerous people reached out to me personally about the piece, and when I was introduced to a buyer for a gig recently, she said “Hi Rachel! I just loved your column about Cracker Barrel!”. I mean, wow, not how I thought the sentence was going to end, but I’ll take it!

Somehow, this column made it onto the desk of Cracker Barrel’s SVP – General Counsel & Corp. Secretary, Richard Wolfson, who, it turns out, is a huge music fan. Richard was very excited about the piece and invited me and George (my husband) on a VIP tour of the Cracker Barrel headquarters in Lebanon, TN, complete with a delicious meal and gigantic take-home boxes. Richard and everyone at the HQ were so kind, and it was a great way to spend a Tuesday morning.

My main reason for wanting to visit the HQ was that it includes the decor headquarters for all 600+ of their restaurants. If you know me, you know I’m an interior design junkie, and I have a special love for old and broken things. We wandered around an enormous warehouse of old Americana antiques; shelves and shelves of cast iron pots, vintage kids toys, old brand signage, family photos, broken down instruments, etc. The CB design team sources these items from all over the country, cleans them up, and then builds them out into the displays you see in your local restaurants. They also tailor the antiques for each restaurant so that they reflect the local history of the area. There is a model store they use to place each item before sending an intricately detailed layout plan for installation which shows exactly where each item should go on the wall. They are really good at reusing old supplies and explained how they were framing out new shadow boxes with floorboards from a now-closed Cracker Barrel. This was as much of a dream job scenario as I had imagined in my original article!

I also learned that folks like to go into cracker barrels and hang their own decor on the walls, to see how long before it gets discovered. Sometimes the company will leave it up, just for fun. Here’s a little rundown of that phenomenon.

Cracker Barrel has a problematic past, as outlined by this article (If someone has a better source than yahoo, please post below) and they are working to repair their racist and homophobic history. One interesting way they are doing this is by diversifying the decor that they include in their stores. When we walked into the warehouse I picked up a framed poster of Dr. Martin Luther King, and said “Wow! This is a new direction!” (I can’t help myself, I’m a shit-stirrer! George looked at me like Seriously Rachel?!).

Anyway, Richard was super gracious about it, acknowledging the company’s past wrongdoings, and explained that they were paying attention to the way that the decor made patrons feel and diversifying the antiques and faces on their walls. It’s so interesting that even interior design can be, and mostly has been, racist, but of course, this is the kind of thing that white people like myself rarely see at first.

So, big thanks to Cracker Barrel and to all of you who have been following this random story. I will leave you with this fact, (my only source is Richard) - Cracker Barrel buys 6% of the WORLD’s maple syrup. Yum.

Until next week,

Rachel