By: Jason McClure
Julie Felss Masino, the current CEO of Cracker Barrel, has a bachelor’s degree in communications. Nothing wrong with that—I’ve got a master’s in communication myself. But communications isn’t a quantitative field. It’s about narratives, culture, and presentation. It’s about talking about the numbers, not necessarily analyzing them.
And when you look at Masino’s record—first at Taco Bell, now at Cracker Barrel—that difference comes into focus.
From Taco Bell to Cracker Barrel
If you remember, Taco Bell got rid of the Mexican Pizza and several other low-selling but beloved menu items under Masino’s leadership. Customers revolted. The backlash wasn’t just about one item—it was about loyalty, comfort, and consistency.
Now at Cracker Barrel, she’s running the same play. This time it’s not menu cuts, it’s cosmetic renovations. The restaurants are being rebranded with sleeker designs and a new logo. The food? Still the same. Maybe worse. Customers aren’t asking for Cracker Barrel to look like a millennial burger joint they saw on TikTok. They’re asking for decent food at a fair price, served in a place that feels familiar.
For working families, Cracker Barrel doesn’t have to be stylish. It has to be clean, affordable, and consistent.
Elective vs. Essential Eating
Julie Masino probably ate Taco Bell in college in the ’90s. Who didn’t? Even affluent kids swung through the drive-thru after a night of drinking. But there’s a difference between eating Taco Bell because you’re drunk and eating Taco Bell because you’re broke.
The first makes you a tourist. The second makes you a customer.
The same holds for Cracker Barrel. Affluent families don’t plan Sunday dinners around Cracker Barrel. Working-class families do. For them, it’s a tradition, a treat, a weekly rhythm of life. For Masino, it’s a brand to modernize. That disconnect explains why so many of her decisions land flat.
And you can see that disconnect play out online. On TikTok, Cracker Barrel has become both a punchline and a protest. People poke fun at the new logo, the remodels, the “millennial burger joint” look. They laugh, but they mourn. To an upper-middle-class observer, caring this much about a chain restaurant might seem silly. But that’s the point—they can’t understand. For the people who relied on it, Cracker Barrel wasn’t just a building—it was part of their lives.
Privilege as a Career Path
This disconnect isn’t accidental; it’s often baked in from the start. Masino is 52, which means she graduated college in the early-to-mid 1990s—an era when tuition was lower, debt loads lighter, and graduates had far more mobility than they do now.
If you had family support, you could graduate debt-free and wait for the right job instead of grabbing the first one you could find. You could intern for prestige companies without worrying about rent. You could “follow your passion” without starving.
That freedom of choice is the unspoken fuel of executive careers. Most graduates today don’t get that. They don’t choose—they survive. And once you’re locked into survival jobs, the C-suite isn’t on the horizon.
The Executive Club
This is the bigger truth: once you break into the executive tier, you’re in the club. Results matter less than pedigree, presentation, and the ability to stay connected.
That’s why a communications degree is a perfect credential for the boardroom. It’s not about mastering the math of business—it’s about mastering the message. Investors want reassurance. Boards want someone fluent in buzzwords like “modernization” and “cultural refresh.”
But customers? Customers don’t want a brand refresh. They want cornbread that tastes like last year’s cornbread. They want a Mexican Pizza that doesn’t disappear.
When Good Ideas Don’t Rise
And here’s the real problem: good ideas don’t propel you into the CEO’s office.
Frontline workers know what’s broken. Customers know what they value. So why don’t their ideas reach the boardroom? The answer is simple: they lack pedigree, network, and corporate fluency.
What rises instead are the people who can speak the language of corporations. They can deliver a sleek deck, spin decline into “opportunity,” and reassure the right stakeholders. That’s who gets rewarded.
And that’s the irony: at Cracker Barrel, the biscuits are supposed to rise. The rolls are supposed to rise. But in corporate America, it’s the fluff that always rises—the buzzwords, the presentations—while the real substance stays flat.
The TikTok Truthers
You can see this dynamic play out on social media. On TikTok, consultants and small-business owners point out the same flaws—brands ignoring customers, executives chasing aesthetics over substance. Some of these voices have ten, twenty, thirty thousand followers. They’re not small. They’re not wrong.
But they’re not in the right network. They don’t speak the corporate dialect. They’re like me: telling the truth, but not invited into the air-conditioned rooms where decisions are made. And that’s the whole point—our system doesn’t elevate substance. It elevates style.
The Disconnect That Never Gets Fixed
So here we are again. The CEO’s focus is on the furniture, not the food. On the logo, not the loyalty. On the narrative, not the numbers.
That’s the story of Julie Felss Masino—not just at Taco Bell, not just at Cracker Barrel, but as a symbol of the larger executive class. The class that doesn’t have to eat its own food, because they’ve always had the privilege to choose something else.
Closing Thought:
There’s a difference between growing up with Cracker Barrel as your Sunday meal and growing up with it as a case study in brand management. The first makes you a customer. The second makes you a CEO—and that gap is exactly why good ideas never make it past the boardroom door. The only time the CEO eats their own food is when it’s plated in a test kitchen—not served under the heat lamps where the rest of us line up.
Jason’s other websites include: AlgebraHelpDesk.com, AlgebraStepbyStep.com, and RepublicanFanFiction.com
McClure Magazine 
Leave a comment