A Shell jobber, a highway exit and a barrel of crackers.

Cracker Barrel Old Country Store started as a way to sell more petrol. English Wikipedia says the chain was founded in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee, by Dan Evins and Tommy Lowe, and that Evins, a representative for Shell Oil, developed the restaurant and gift-store idea to improve gasoline sales. CSP Daily News, reporting on 17 January 2012, described him as a Shell Oil jobber in 1969 who decided to open a restaurant with a small gift shop attached on Highway 109 in Lebanon, the community where he lived, because he expected the new interstate highways to put more people on the road.

The name was chosen for the picture it painted. CSP Daily News said Evins named the restaurant Cracker Barrel Old Country Store to recall the country stores of his youth in rural Tennessee, where people gathered to play checkers on top of an empty barrel that had been used to deliver crackers to the store, and that he decided to decorate the walls with authentic antiques. Wikipedia adds that barrels of soda crackers were sold in small-town stores across the American South in the early 1900s, and that people would stand around them to chat.

Wikipedia dates the opening of the original restaurant to 19 September 1969, close to Interstate 40 at the Gallatin Highway 109 exit just outside Lebanon. Evins incorporated the company in February 1970 and soon opened more locations. In the early 1970s the firm leased land on gasoline-station sites near interstate highways, and the early locations all had petrol pumps on site; during the fuel shortages of the 1970s, Wikipedia says, the company began to build restaurants without pumps. The link to the highway has stayed: Wikipedia says the bulk of the restaurants are still close to interstates and other highways, and that in 1998 the chain opened a store in Dothan, Alabama, that was not located near a highway.

Evins ran the company for more than three decades. CSP Daily News said he served as chief executive from 1969 to 2001 and as chairman until he retired in 2004, when he became chairman emeritus, and reported that he died in Lebanon in January 2012. It quoted the company’s mission statement as “Pleasing People”.

A public company in its home town.

Cracker Barrel became a publicly traded company in 1981 to raise money for expansion, Wikipedia says, and its shares were still trading when the Associated Press reported on them in August 2025; its headquarters remain in Lebanon, Tennessee. The legal entity behind the restaurants is given by Wikipedia as CBOCS Properties, Inc., doing business as Cracker Barrel. Between 1999 and 2013 the company used the restored Mitchell House in Lebanon, a former building of the Castle Heights Military Academy, which both Evins and his son had attended, as its corporate headquarters.

The concept was tested in other forms. In 1994, Wikipedia says, the chain tried a carry-out shop called Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Corner Market in suburban neighbourhoods, then closed the Corner Market operations in 1997 to concentrate on its restaurant and gift-store format. The company expanded into new markets outside the South in the 1990s and 2000s and reached the West Coast in 2017 with a store in Tualatin, Oregon, followed by a California store in Victorville the next year. In 2019 it bought the Maple Street Biscuit Company.

The name has a well-known neighbour on the supermarket shelf. Wikipedia says that Cracker Barrel licensed products are sold in grocery stores under the name “CB Old Country Store” after a 2013 trademark lawsuit brought by Kraft Foods, which sells cheese under the brand name Cracker Barrel. The restaurant chain and the cheese are separate brands with separate owners.

Music has been part of the brand’s marketing for years. Wikipedia says the company sponsored the Grand Ole Opry from 2004 to 2009, a relationship that opened connections in the Nashville music industry, and that it has worked with Dolly Parton on collector’s editions of her albums since 2009, as well as with Alan Jackson, The Oak Ridge Boys and other country artists. The gift shops sell country music recordings alongside toys, puzzles, cookbooks and classic sweets.

Design and documentation.

A casual-dining chain is recognised on the road before it is recognised on the plate. The sign is usually the first piece of the identity a guest meets: a pole sign near a highway exit, a lettered fascia above the door or a canopy that carries a colour from a long way off. Awnings, striped or plain, do a similar job at street level, giving a restaurant a face that reads the same in a city block and a suburban car park.

Inside, the identity moves from the façade to the room. Menus carry the logo, the typeface and the tone of voice into the guest’s hands, and they change more often than any sign. Interior décor — the lamps, the bar, the wall objects, the chairs on a porch or the booths along a window — is where a chain tells the story it wants to be known for, whether that story is a neighbourhood bar, a country store or a roadside coffee shop.

Because chains remodel, rename and change owners, the questions in each guide stay the same: who started the brand, who owns it now, and how its signs, rooms and marks have changed over time. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A man, a barrel, a porch and a room full of objects.

The Cracker Barrel logo is a drawing of a person. Wikipedia says that since 1977 the company has used a logo featuring “Uncle Herschel”, also known as the “Old Timer”, an illustration of a man resembling Dan Evins’ real-life uncle, Herschel McCartney. Dezeen, writing on 27 August 2025, described the mark as Uncle Herschel reclining in a chair with one arm leaning on a barrel, with the Cracker Barrel wordmark set to the right of the figure on a bean-shaped background in a serif typeface. The Associated Press reported on 21 August 2025 that the company described gold and brown as its signature tones.

In August 2025 the company introduced a simplified wordmark logo without the figure and then announced that it would keep the Old Timer logo instead, as Dezeen reported on 27 August 2025.

The buildings carry as much of the identity as the logo. Wikipedia says each location is themed around a traditional Southern general store, with a front porch lined with wooden rocking chairs and, inside, a stone fireplace and a common set of objects — a shotgun, a cookstove, a deer head, a telephone and a traffic light — together with a wooden peg solitaire game on every table. Each store also displays items tied to the history of its area, such as old tools, calendars, posters and photographs.

That practice began with the original restaurant, which Wikipedia says was decorated by the Lebanon antique-store owners Don and Kathleen Singleton; the Singletons decorated later stores until 1979, followed by their son Larry Singleton, who held the role until he retired in 2019. Items acquired for decoration are kept in a Tennessee warehouse, where they are cleaned, restored and catalogued until needed. Outdoors, Wikipedia says the chain changed its highway billboards in 2006 to show menu items, where the signs had previously carried just the logo.

For a design guide, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store shows how a brand can be built from a remembered kind of place — a porch, a fireplace, a barrel and a wall of objects — and how strongly a drawn figure can come to stand for that place. Compare it with Denny’s, another roadside American name, and Friendly’s, a New England family-restaurant brand. For this guide we use barrel brown, sign gold and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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