Cracker Barrel worked closely with Human Rights Campaign to be more ‘inclusive’

Cracker Barrel’s controversial rebrand is bringing all kinds of information to light, including its commitment to DEI.

A report by Fox News indicates that the beloved restaurant chain has previously “worked closely with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), changing its company culture to be more inclusive and LGBT-friendly” prior to the rebrand that outraged the internet.

Steve Smotherman, former management and training leader at Cracker Barrel, led an “LGBT employee resource group” at the business and would eventually go on to sit on the HRC’s Business Advisory Council, according to Upward News.

“I am Steve Smotherman. I am a husband and have been with my soulmate for more than twenty-five years. I’m fortunate to be a father of two and a grandfather of four. I have a very rich and busy life! I worked at Cracker Barrel, a restaurant-retail company for the last 15 years. Cracker Barrel is infamous for their homophobic policies instituted back in 1991. In 2009, I was a founding member and led the LGBT Alliance, an Employee Resource Group, promoting LGBTQ awareness and building workplace inclusion,” he wrote in an article.

“I knew there was a lot of work to do for making this new workplace inclusive, but during the interview process, I realized – they needed me more than I needed them. My friends were surprised. They asked me, ‘What are you doing? How can you work there?, They hate gay people.’ For me it was simple: the work was what I wanted in Training, it was a short commute, and I enjoyed the people I worked with! The issue of being gay in the workplace is that it should not be an issue!” Smotherman continued. “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.”

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Cracker Barrel made it clear that they have “not participated in the Human Rights Campaign Index or had any affiliation with HRC in several years.”

“The HRC has wielded immense power in the corporate world in recent years with its Corporate Equality Index. The index, which, on its website, 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,” Fox News reported.

Upward News broke down the history that led the company down the path of “wokeness”:

This is the story of how Cracker Barrel went woke.

It isn’t about a bad design firm botching a rebrand, or a struggling restaurant trying to win over Gen Z.

Keep reading to find out what really happened.

It started in the early 1990s, when Cracker Barrel was caught in a… pic.twitter.com/cxxnXf71ti

— Upward News (@UpwardNewsHQ) August 21, 2025

“This is the story of how Cracker Barrel went woke,” they wrote in an X post. “It isn’t about a bad design firm botching a rebrand, or a struggling restaurant trying to win over Gen Z.”

“It started in the early 1990s, when Cracker Barrel was caught in a scandal for discriminating against gay workers and customers. As a symbol of the South, the chain quickly became a target for the growing progressive establishment and its new institutions,” the post continued. “Chief among them was the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), built to rank corporations on their adherence to progressive ideology — a tool to keep companies in line. The former HRC president later admitted that Cracker Barrel was ‘under fire’ from the organization, saying even that was ‘an understatement.’”

“By 2005, Cracker Barrel had a failing grade from HRC. Then came Steve Smotherman, a corporate leader who launched internal LGBTQ reforms, steadily raising the company’s HRC score. He even sat on an HRC advisory council, linking the chain directly to the group’s agenda. Over the next two decades, Cracker Barrel reshaped itself — changing internal policies, pulling ‘controversial’ items from stores, blocking certain figures from dining events, funding Pride parades, and chasing higher woke scores.”

But it didn’t stop there.

“The latest rebrand — removing Americana décor and the white man from its logo to make the chain ‘more welcoming’ — is not a fresh marketing pivot. It’s the culmination of a decades-long effort to bring Cracker Barrel into the good graces of the progressive establishment,” the outlet explains. “And it’s certainly not what everyday Americans expect from the chain. Instead, it reflects what corporate leaders — fully bought into the ‘woke’ ideology of recent years — want to impose.”