Cracker Barrel over the past decade has worked closely with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), changing its company culture to be more inclusive and LGBT-friendly ahead of its controversial store rebrand.
The restaurant chain’s former management and training leader, Steve Smotherman, who spearheaded an LGBT employee resource group at Cracker Barrel, went on to sit on the HRC’s Business Advisory Council, Upward News reported.
“For more than ten years of my time at Cracker Barrel, I had an emphasis on Diversity & Inclusion, especially with LGBTQ workplace inclusion. My training background allowed me to understand the steps of adult learning, facilitate difficult conversations and be effective at it [sic] Diversity & Inclusion content,” Smotherman, who joined the company in 2005, wrote.
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Smotherman said at first he was reluctant to join Cracker Barrel due to it having a bad reputation with the gay community. In 1991, the chain instituted a corporate-wide policy stating that any employee who failed to demonstrate “normal heterosexual values” would be fired. After 11 employees were fired due to their sexual orientation, protests and boycotts were staged throughout the country.
Smotherman left the company in 2020
After a few years with the restaurant, Smotherman founded an LGBT resource group that originally had six members. Over time, the group was successful at changing Cracker Barrel’s culture and making the “Old Country Store” more welcoming towards LGBT employees, Smotherman said. The former Cracker Barrel employee would go on to sit on the HRC Business Advisory Council.
The HRC has wielded immense power in the corporate world in recent years with its Corporate Equality Index. The index, which is defined as a “national benchmarking tool on corporate policies, practices, and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees,” would assign companies a score based on how inclusive the HRC determined they were to gay employees. Companies would then jockey to increase their scores by instituting more DEI-related policies, some of which, critics alleged, went too far.
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Cracker Barrel was originally given a score of zero when the CEI debuted in 2002. Later that year, the franchise added “sexual orientation” to its list of characteristics protected by its employment discrimination policy. Over time, Cracker Barrel’s score increased. It achieved a score of 80 in 2021 after it had taken some high-profile pro-LGBT stands.
In 2014, it pulled “Duck Dynasty” products from its shelves after star Phil Robertson made remarks that many deemed to be homophobic. In 2019, the restaurant chain barred a pastor from hosting an event at one of its 660 locations after he preached that homosexuals were “freaks” and “animals” who are “worthy of death” in a sermon.
In 2023, the “Old Country Store” celebrated Pride by unveiling rainbow-colored rocking chairs. Cracker Barrel sponsored the Nashville Pride Parade in 2024.
Cracker Barrel is now in the crosshairs of consumer backlash after it unveiled a new logo and restaurant redesign. The logo, which drops the imagery of a man leaning over a barrel and instead just has the restaurant’s name in black text over a yellow barrel-shaped backdrop, has elicited sharp criticism online.
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A redesign of the restaurant’s interiors, which dropped the kitschy American aesthetic it was known for in favor of a slick modernist motif, has also roiled their longtime fans.
A representative for Cracker Barrel told Fox News Digital in a statement about the new logo that the company’s values had not changed.
“Our values haven’t changed, and the heart and soul of Cracker Barrel haven’t changed,” the company said. “And Uncle Herschel remains front and center in our restaurants and on our menu. He is the face of ‘The Herschel Way,’ the foundation of how our 70,000-plus employees provide the country hospitality for which we are known.
“Cracker Barrel has been a destination for comfort and community for more than half a century, and this fifth evolution of the brand’s logo, which works across digital platforms as well as billboards and roadside signs, is a call-back to the original and rooted even more in the iconic barrel shape and word mark that started it all back in 1969.”
Fox News Digital reached out for additional comment from Cracker Barrel.
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