The Cracker Barrel Mini-Store Concept That Didn't Pan Out
Eating at Cracker Barrel is a little different than eating at any other restaurant. You sit in the dining room, there's a roaring fire in the fireplace near the wall, and the air is thick with the scent of freshly-made biscuits and fried chicken. The walls are covered in an eclectic collection of early twentieth-century knick-knacks and antiques, ranging from old portraits and antique farming equipment to vintage advertisements. This is all by design, of course, since Cracker Barrel's goal is to make you feel like you're sitting inside of a rustic, down-home country restaurant — even if where you are is a strip mall downtown.
In 1994, however, Cracker Barrel decided to do something a little different with how they ran its restaurants, debuting what would be known as the "Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Corner Market." Rather than build one Cracker Barrel that would be divided into the general store area and the dining area itself, Cracker Barrel decided to build a general store all on its own. By removing the dining area, there would be more room for merchandise and customer space, allowing more customers to purchase more products. Customers could still order food, of course (it wouldn't be Cracker Barrel without the down-home country cooking after all), but it was exclusively carry-out only.
Launched across several suburban areas across America, these "Corner Markets" would hopefully bring in a new era of business for Cracker Barrel. But what happened to them? Where did all of these corner markets go?
The Cracker Barrel Corner Markets closed in 1997
On paper, the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Corner Market sounds like a feasible idea. Customers can go to your store, shop for gifts, sundries, and trinkets, and then order their favorite meals to take home and enjoy. In fact, the idea doesn't sound too far off from something you might see nowadays. But even though this wasn't too wild or extreme of an idea that it would be a massive risk to do, you don't see any Cracker Barrel corner markets anywhere. What could have happened?
In 1997, Cracker Barrel announced that it would effectively close all operating Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Corner Markets. The reason for this, stated company's president Ron Magruder, was to renew focus on the company's "core themes," such as Southern hospitality and traditional meals in a country setting. Cracker Barrel could send out as many carry-out meatloaf dinners and fancy Christmas tree ornaments as it wanted but it seemed that, at the end of the day, the best route for Cracker Barrel to take was to simply remain true to what it did best. People came to expect sitting inside the rustic dining room and eating their meals, so why fix something that wasn't broken?
Nowadays, Cracker Barrel has mainly been focusing on its restaurants and gift shops, the same as they've been doing for the past few decades. It's not like they would ever try anything like the Corner Markets idea again in the future, right?
Cracker Barrel experimented with another spinoff in 2016
It seems that some old habits die hard, or perhaps the idea of another Cracker Barrel spinoff was an idea that just had to be tested again. Whatever the reason behind it was, Cracker Barrel announced in 2016 that it would once more be exploring another offshoot known as "Holler and Dash."
The idea behind Holler and Dash was that it would be limited only to breakfast and lunch, unlike Cracker Barrel's breakfast, lunch, and dinner options. Holler and Dash would also be more "trendy" than Cracker Barrel, experimenting with craft sodas, an iPad-based payment system, and self-ordering kiosks. The only thing that Holler and Dash would share with Cracker Barrel in terms of theming would be that the biscuits would still be made from scratch.
It seems that, like its earlier counterpart, Holler and Dash just wasn't right for Cracker Barrel. Cracker Barrel shareholder Sardar Biglari even wrote in a letter to Cracker Barrel's CEO Sandra Cochran that "from the outset, we believed Holler & Dash was an ill-conceived project that was destined to fail" and that a business like Cracker Barrel "has no business pursuing a start-up." Although Cracker Barrel officially gave no comment on the letter, the chain shuttered all Holler and Dash locations in 2019 and revamped them as the Maple Street Biscuit Company, a company Cracker Barrel purchased. It seems that perhaps Biglari is right: Cracker Barrel just isn't the company that should focus on a spin-off.