Cracker Barrel Sells Off Maple Street Biscuit Company Brand
Seven years. Thirty-six million dollars. And now it's someone else's problem.
Cracker Barrel just sold off its Maple Street Biscuit Company brand along with 35 restaurant locations to a competing breakfast chain called Biscuit Belly. Another 16 Maple Street spots are just being closed outright. The company also quietly sold the real estate under 26 of its own locations to an outside investor and immediately leased them back — a move that frees up cash but means Cracker Barrel no longer owns the ground its restaurants sit on. Total proceeds from all of it: roughly $77 million.
This didn't come out of nowhere. Less than a year ago, Cracker Barrel shut down 14 Maple Street locations, saying they "simply didn't meet our financial expectations." Now the whole brand is gone.
How It Got Here
Cracker Barrel bought Maple Street in 2019 for $36 million. The chain started in Jacksonville, Florida in 2012 and built a following around gourmet biscuit sandwiches. When Cracker Barrel swooped in, Maple Street had 28 company-owned locations and five franchises across seven states. On paper it made sense — a Southern comfort food giant adding a Southern breakfast concept with a cult following and room to grow.
It never really clicked. The brand struggled under Cracker Barrel's ownership, locations kept underperforming, and eventually the parent company stopped trying to turn it around and just started closing things. First 14 locations last fall. Now the rest, sold off or shuttered entirely.
Biscuit Belly Is Getting a Deal
The buyer — Biscuit Belly — is a Louisville-based breakfast chain that opened its first location in 2019 and had grown to just 15 spots across the Southeast before this acquisition. Buying 35 Maple Street locations basically overnight turns them into a regional player without having to spend years finding real estate, building out spaces, and hiring teams from scratch.
CEO Chad Coulter was refreshingly honest about it. "Acquiring an iconic brand like Maple Street was not on my 2026 bingo card," he said. "Two of the biggest headwinds that growing brands encounter are the time required to find and build locations, and the difficulty of finding great teams. When we looked at Maple Street's geography, footprints, and established teams, a light bulb went off."
The plan is to rebrand all 35 locations under the Biscuit Belly name over the next 18 to 24 months, starting with Cincinnati and Richmond. By end of 2028 the company wants to be operating over 60 locations total.
What's Really Going On With Cracker Barrel
The Maple Street sale is just one piece of a messier picture for Cracker Barrel right now. The company has been in the middle of a broader reset — new logo, menu tweaks, attempts to shake off the feeling that it's a restaurant frozen somewhere in 1987. None of it has been especially smooth.
The sale-leaseback deal tells you something about where things stand financially. When a company sells the buildings its restaurants sit in and immediately starts paying rent on them, it's prioritizing short-term cash over long-term ownership. It's not a sign of strength — it's a way to generate liquidity when you need it. Seventy-seven million dollars buys time. What Cracker Barrel does with that time is the real question.
Maple Street meanwhile gets a second life under new ownership. For the people who work at those 35 locations, that's genuinely good news. For Cracker Barrel, it's the end of a $36 million bet that didn't pay off.
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