The Untold Truth Of Cracker Barrel

Cracker Barrel has dotted the sides of U.S. interstates since 1969. With a loan of $40,000 (that turned a profit within a month), the restaurant's founder Danny Evins, an oil jobber from Lebanon, Tennessee, opened the first Cracker Barrel location with a gift shop attached — meaning the gift shop is just as OG as the restaurant — off Interstate 40 in his hometown. Evins had a hunch that the restaurants would be a hit among travelers looking for a pitstop food option that wasn't fast food, plus they could gas up their cars at the on-site pumps. Move over, McDonald's, Cracker Barrel and its general store bursting with novelty items was here to stay. 

Since that time, the company has opened over 650 locations in 45 states across the country. Customers love the hearty food and friendly service. Of course, despite its massive success, Cracker Barrel hasn't been drama-free all these decades.

Want to learn more? Settle in for some juicy gossip and fun facts about the family chain that even the most avid of Cracker Barrel enthusiasts might not know. This is the untold truth of the American road trip staple, Cracker Barrel.

Cracker Barrel does not mess around when it comes to the rocking chairs decorating the patios of its many outposts. It sticks to the friendly Southern front porch theme and nothing will stop it. Southern porch aesthetic aside, the iconic rocking chairs serve another purpose: You need somewhere fun to sit because the wait time to get a table at Cracker Barrel can be quite long. 

Those rocking chairs are made for Cracker Barrel by a source in Springfield, Tennessee (so yep, even the chairs are southern). The source is the Hinkle Chair Company, a family company that has been in the furniture-making biz for eons — well, at least since their triple-great grandfather started a side hustle from his farm almost 180 years ago. The company makes about 200,000 rocking chairs a year for Cracker Barrel restaurants. You can buy chairs through Hinkle directly, but if you want the Cracker Barrel logo on your rocker, you'll need to buy it from the Cracker Barrel store for $219.99. It's nice to know Cracker Barrel is true to its roots even with the furniture, which is not only American made, but also Southern made.

Let it be known: Cracker Barrel isn't in the business of doling out gratis grub. In fact, one of their employees was fired for giving a homeless man a muffin and some condiments at a Cracker Barrel location in Venice, Florida. The worker, Joe Koblenzer, a 73-year-old military veteran, claimed the man came in asking for tartar sauce and mayo to consume with the fish he was cooking (lot of questions there but we're rolling with it), so Koblenzer obliged with some free condiments along with a corn muffin for good measure. Then the general manager of the Cracker Barrel canned Koblenzer for violating a policy that prohibits giving away free food. 

To be fair to Cracker Barrel (and Koblenzer acknowledges this, too), he had already broken some rules prior to the tartar sauce incident. So legally, if someone's had a couple of slaps on the wrist already, they are within their right to fire him. Still, Cracker Barrel does sort of come off like the bad guy for telling a worker to deny someone in need of a very minute amount of free sustenance. But them's the rules, and CB's got a business to run. It seems as though Southern hospitality only goes so far.

If you're planning to dine at Cracker Barrel, may we not suggest the Southern Fried Chicken? Health-wise, it's easily one of the worst items on the menu. It weighs in at a whopping 1,640 calories (you better save those Weight Watchers points up for this), and has 100 grams of fat (23 of which are from saturated fat) and an astounding 4,730 milligrams of sodium — and none of those numbers even include the two sides and endless biscuits. 

And if you're dining on Sunday, watch out for the featured special — the Homestyle Chicken. The Lord's day is definitely not the heart's day in the case of Cracker Barrel. In fact, Eat This, Not That! ranks the Homestyle Chicken as one of the worst things you can order from the Cracker Barrel menu (besides, of course, the previously mentioned Southern Fried Chicken). It weighs in at 1,350 calories and 92 grams of fat.

Of course, you can order these chicken dishes if you're just dying to give them a try, but we certainly wouldn't recommend making it a weekly event. If you're going to take the plunge, maybe split the meal with your fellow Cracker Barrel patrons?

Cracker Barrel is very deliberate with its decorations. All of the locations are full of authentic antiques and the team at CB plan the layout of each new restaurant with a lot of care. In fact, there is even a mock restaurant in the headquarters in Lebanon to lay out the decor of new locations.

General stores used to be the name of the game in the late 19th and early 20th century, when they started to exist as a solution for peddlers sick of being on the road. General stores in the countryside were nothing fancy but they did serve as a one-stop shop of a lot of your basic needs, which explains why the items for sale in the Cracker Barrel store range from Cheerwine to gospel music CDs. 

While the historical vibe might not be exactly what the store vibe was a century ago (they varied depending on what region of the country you were in, and today's Cracker Barrels have both Northern and Southern general store attributes), the restaurant's commitment to preserving the American country general store, with both its retail items and its decor, really serves as a living museum of American history. And that museum also happens to have some pretty legit country fried steak. 

Oh, you know Cracker Barrel was going to get in on the fast-casual movement. In 2016, the company opened Holler & Dash, the way hipper young cousin to Cracker Barrel, which was designed with the millennial generation in mind. The "biscuit house" served up breakfast, brunch, and lunch, with a titillating array of savory and sweet options. The menus varied by (Southern) city, but the vibe was decidedly minimalistic and industrial. The Holler & Dash locations were very un-Cracker Barrel-esque, because they were trying to say, "Hey, we are not a cheesy chain restaurant but this breakfast is still the bomb.com, right?" — or something along those lines. 

Holler & Dash was basically the restaurant version of kids asking their parents to drop them off around the corner so they aren't seen with them (at Cracker Barrel). You know it's a millennial trap when the menu had a section labeled "Bowls." Still, props to Cracker Barrel for trying to make biscuits a novel concept.

But nothing lasts forever. By 2019, Cracker Barrel had decided to convert Holler & Dash restaurants into Maple Street Biscuit Company, a restaurant chain the company had acquired (The Tennessean).

Cracker Barrel hasn't always been on the right side of history when it comes to race relations in America. In the early 2000s, the Justice Department accused the company of acting with racial bias on several occasions. A civil rights investigation revealed instances of mistreatment of African American patrons at Cracker Barrels across several states in the Southern region of the U.S. Employees that participated in the investigation admitted that practices such as seating African American patrons after white patrons who arrived later than them and not responding as readily to complaints from black customers about poor service were basically encouraged by management. What's the most alarming part? This was in 2004. A rep for Cracker Barrel at the time said they didn't believe the accusations, but nonetheless were going to move forward with an aggressive plan to address the complaints. 

We're not really sure how far that got them though. In 2018, Randy Freeman, an African American man and veteran of the U.S. Air Force, was at a Cracker Barrel in West Virginia and was accused by a manager of cursing at a server. Witnesses at his table confirmed no such thing had happened. Freeman took Cracker Barrel to court over the behavior, and the company is yet again dealing with some extremely negative press. Hopefully, the company is working to resolve the systematic issues that have plagued it over the years.

Cracker Barrel offers many goods and services, including hot meals and sundries, capturing the vibe and business model of old-fashioned rural roadhouses and service stations. The very first Cracker Barrel fit in with that tradition, opening well outside of the town of Lebanon, Tennessee, on Highway 109, in 1969. And while today's Cracker Barrels are combination restaurants and shops (as in the adjacent Old Country Stores), that first outpost was part restaurant, part gas station. According to Cracker Barrel, founder Dan Evins wanted to open a gathering place where travelers could refuel themselves and their cars while also bringing a new sales channel for his family's oil company.

In less than 10 years, that Cracker Barrel had given rise to 12 more Cracker Barrels. By that point, it was the mid-1970s, also the era of oil embargoes, gasoline shortages, and long lines at filling stations. Cracker Barrel's response was to stop selling gas altogether. By 1977, the company was out of the fuel business and into the country store business.

A&E's "Duck Dynasty" was one of the most popular series on TV in 2013, the year its Season Four premiere was watched by 11.8 million viewers, an all-time high for a cable reality show, according to The New York Times. With that success came a line of "Duck Dynasty" merchandise such as bedding, clothing, and books, much of it designed in the camouflage worn by the show's duck hunters. Customers in 2013 bought $400 million worth of "Duck Dynasty" stuff, according to Forbes, at retailers including Walmart and Cracker Barrel's Old Country Store.

With that popularity came requests by the media to interview the Robertson family depicted on "Duck Dynasty," and during a 2013 interview with GQ in which he touched on his religious and political views, Phil Robertson labeled homosexuality as a sin and equated the LGBT community with practitioners of bestiality. In response, A&E suspended Robertson from "Duck Dynasty" (per Today), and Cracker Barrel pulled much of its "Duck Dynasty" merchandise from the shelves of its Old Country Store outlets. "We removed selected products which we were concerned might offend some of our guests," Cracker Barrel said on its Facebook page (via Forbes). Then Cracker Barrel's customers weighed in, strongly opposing the situation. Less than 24 hours after removing "Duck Dynasty" items, Cracker Barrel returned them to stores. "You told us we made a mistake. And you weren't shy about it," Cracker Barrel said on Facebook (via USA Today).

According to The Washington Post's obituary of company founder Dan Evins, Cracker Barrel gets its name from the food storage receptacles that patrons of old-fashioned country stores would use to play checkers on. The first word in that name can also be used as an anti-white racial epithet, according to NPR, derived in part from "whip-cracker," the term for white people who used a whip on the job.

That well-known usage, combined with Cracker Barrel's commitment to glorifying old-timey rural Americana, led to the supposition that the company's name and logo were racially insensitive. In 2021, a Twitter user named @DomoDaDonn went viral with a post explaining the alternative meaning of the word cracker and suggesting that the flourish coming off of the "k" in "Cracker" that meets a similar curve in the first "r" in "Barrel" represented a whip. That subtle design amounted to, per the post, "Racism in your face!!"

Cracker Barrel's media relations department responded to the accusations with a statement to press outlets, including Heavy. "The logo of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store does not depict and has never depicted a whip," the press release read. "The part of the logo being referenced in social media posts is a flourish, which is used in the calligraphy of the logos of many brands."

In serving up hundreds of thousands of meals each and every day, Cracker Barrel requires huge reserves of raw food materials to meet demand. According to the company website, Cracker Barrel relies heavily on domestic vendors, farmers, and food production companies for the ingredients it uses to craft country-style breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Cracker Barrel estimates that 90% of all of its ingredients are grown, produced, and sourced within the United States of America. More specifically, the company seeks out the best geographically-specific items, such as maple syrup made with real maple, bottled in Vermont, and blueberries for the blueberry pancakes harvested in Maine.

The vast majority of Cracker Barrel's kitchen stock comes from the United States, and when used by hundreds of individual restaurants, it really adds up. Each year, according to Cracker Barrel, the chain purchases 140 million bacon slices, 162 million eggs, and 13 million pounds of chicken tenders, and bakes up 210 million biscuits.