G.J. Hart knew he was in trouble. He had retired from Torchy’s Tacos in early November 2021, and, within a few months, calls began to come in. Would he consider becoming a CEO again? While not unexpected—Hart’s 35-plus-year career included top roles at Texas Roadhouse and California Pizza Kitchen—his answer confirmed what he knew deep down: He had never really hung it up.
“I said, ‘Well, I’ll never say never,’” Hart says with a laugh. “As soon I said that, I realized, OK.” Hart sat on Red Robin’s board of directors since August 2019. The initial reason he joined was a measure of competitive respect. When Texas Roadhouse was a young, challenger brand in 2004, Hart helped guide it through an initial public offering. Red Robin was one of the casual-dining sector’s trailblazers on this front when it did so two years earlier.
Yet beyond laying an IPO trail for Texas Roadhouse to follow, there were traits of the 1969-founded burger brand Hart long admired. It wasn’t a restaurant Where’s Waldo. The brand was easy to spot for value, food, and family strength as it rolled to 500 or so units across America. And its local-store marketing was the envy of peers. “I always thought of it as, ‘Gosh, it’s a fun place to go have lunch or dinner,’” Hart recalls during his Texas Roadhouse days, where he served as president, CEO, and board member from 2004 to 2011, watching it scale from 60 units to north of 450. “The brand knew exactly where they were positioned and did it extremely well.”
So when Red Robin began looking for Paul Murphy’s replacement (he was retiring) in the summer of 2022, Hart expressed interest. Board chair David Pace, a former Jamba CEO who also came onboard in 2019, said they “quickly determined” Hart fit.
About eight weeks later, it became clear what Hart had in mind.
Drift and Return
At the 2023 ICR Conference in Orlando, Red Robin reeled a video with the song lyrics, “Are you ready for the comeback?” It was the same event five years earlier when the brand informed investors it had a strategy to counter rising wage costs and save millions. Red Robin was going to eliminate the role of busboys and expeditors and cut the kitchen manager position to become more generalists within the restaurant. Servers would now clean tables and take on additional section duties. The expo station became less important as well, and Red Robin removed a certified training center in favor of teaching at home restaurants.
And this switched as guest satisfaction scores and revenues had begun to soften going back to 2017. The brand previously exceeded the casual-dining average on the former until about 2015. Sliding food quality and labor reductions began to turn that line, Hart says—consumer facing and internally. That 2017 calendar, with 566 restaurants, Red Robin earned $1.39 billion in sales. It dipped to $1.34 billion in 2018. A year later, it went to $1.32 billion.
Although there were multiple stressors at work, the 2018 busser call, Hart says, is the one that fully triggered the drift. It was a vivid departure from Red Robin’s “unbridled” DNA late CEO Michael Snyder fostered, and which still is listed on the chain’s website as “Unbridled Generosity,” or providing “boundless kindness, abundance in service, and a ‘do-whatever-it-takes’ attitude and hospitality.” That summer, the company reported what it termed a “blinking red light.” Dine-in traffic sank, and 75 percent of it—across a single quarter—dropped from peak hours. Walkaways soared 850 basis points. Ticket times out of the kitchen, as well as wait times, climbed a minute on average. Two factors collided: One, off-premises expansion (an industry-wide revelation those days) drove complexity into Red Robin’s system, and the brand wasn’t staffed to handle it. Hosts raced to serve carryout and third-party delivery orders and left walk-in guests idling in the lobby.
However, the other drag related to the busser decision, which had hoped to cut $8 million and soften labor pressure. What happened instead was guests showed up and joined a testy crowd. It wasn’t always a result of the restaurant simply being crowded; there was a queue of not-yet-cleaned tables stalling turns.
Hart says the approach wasn’t communicated well within Red Robin, either. “It wasn’t really understood,” he says. “And, of course, when you make a decision like that it affects everybody.”
A host of fixes and path swerves, from training to expanded staffing to technology to a “TGX” (total guest experience) model with an emphasis on runners, worked to address the concerns in the coming years. Hart found, although improving, more than 10 percent of Red Robin’s guests in 2022 reported waiting more than 15 minutes to be seated. CFO Todd Wilson adds the brand would see this metric pop randomly on a Wednesday afternoon, not just surge Friday nights. Why was Red Robin on waits? Was it because the brand was at capacity? Or was it something else?
Red Robin and Hart worked to staff properly again versus merely raising numbers. It put training programs back and materials in place to execute a more traditional setup.
It was a reset in running great restaurants, and it was just beginning.
The North Star
Hart says the 2018 busser call got expounded by some leadership changes and other disruptions. All told, long-tenured employees were affected, and you started to see churn. “There was a lot of turmoil that was created as a result of some of those decisions,” he says.
So where to begin in the aftermath? Hart went right on tour once he became CEO. He met executives (as wide-ranging as Red Robin’s first president from 44 years ago), visited stores, and dug into the business. One of the realities of Red Robin and its decades-long history is there are employees who have been there a while, whether it’s at the store level or otherwise. And those who stuck it out, he says, had a consensus of belief in Red Robin. They wanted to understand the decisions and for Hart to see how they manifested in the day-to-day.
“I would tell you, in large part,” Hart says, “it was more around how do we get back to giving the experience we used to? How do we go back to quality food?”
“This wasn’t done in some ivory tower,” he adds. “This was done by talking to people.” Before getting into some of the sweeping changes, Hart had to begin with Red Robin’s bones. In a casual-dining business, he says, you must have good coverage and a complement of managers to be able to run a restaurant. And when you go from kitchen and service managers and GMs to, at the time, just the GM and assistant GM and hourlies, it creates a major chasm. How can you operate, teach, hire, train, open, close, and so on?
“So they had to figure it out,” Hart says. These crews got resourceful and managed. But it wasn’t exactly at the benefit of the brand and/or the customer. It was more survival for the sake of drawing another breath than creating an operating environment other restaurants would study, like Hart did at Texas Roadhouse all those years prior.
And there was clear visibility, if done right, Red Robin could still work. Hart says he had never seen such a dramatic flip from top- to bottom-quartile performance. The upper tier had 38 percent higher same-store sales, 32 percent better traffic, and was winning on guest satisfaction levels by 7 percent. One staple: longer-tenured managers. That offered hope you could take the pulse of.
Management turnover improved 5 percent in 2023 compared to the prior year. Hart believes that’s a sign store-level employees are buying into Red Robin’s newfound direction.
Red Robin also of late revamped its market-partner compensation program for multi-unit operators. It’s a structure not unlike what’s practiced at brands like Texas Roadhouse or Outback Steakhouse in its early days, where people who lead restaurants also view themselves as owners. Red Robin rewards partners based on profits.
Returning to the wider picture, though, Hart does a tour every year to visit managers, or what the company labels “Rallies.” These are listening exchanges, but they’re also opportunities to be transparent on what’s happening at Red Robin and what needs to change. The first one, he recalls, earned Hart some respect because he was able to go through, from 2018 to present, the challenges of being a restaurant GM. He’d see heads nod and people say, “somebody understands what the hell we’ve been going through,” Hart remembers. “And so that, I think, helped us to start to formulate the plan and get these folks behind it.”
A full-fledged, five-point “North Star” plan was unveiled in January 2023 (also at the ICR Conference). The first tenet, as noted, was to become an operations-focused restaurant group. Nothing else would work if the foundation didn’t support the ambition.
That 10 percent alarm from before? By May 2023, it was down to 2 percent. Guest times and “false waits” declined substantiality, Hart says, and customer satisfaction scores were up 5 percentage points over 2022. Red Robin broke 700 sales records in Q1 2023, and that’s not a typo.
Part two of the North Star blueprint was to elevate guest experiences, from employee investment to food quality to restaurant facilities, a new cooking platform, and a menu refresh. Additionally, a modified service model where servers can focus intently on fewer tables.
Let’s pause here. Red Robin’s market standing is right in its name: “Gourmet Burgers.” And yet, the brand was essentially using a fast-food piece of belt-driven equipment. You’d put a patty down, it would go through the machine, come out the other side, and get finished on a charbroiler. “Then, out they’d go,” Hart says.
He adds, from what he could gather at least, it was done to ensure consistency and speed way back. “And if you think about how the burger category has changed and the number of players and the quality levels and all that stuff, I was a little surprised,” Hart says. “While Red Robin has done an amazing job in terms of being creative and innovative and mixing and taking unique flavor profiles and presenting it uniquely, they hadn’t really changed the cooking process. And that was surprising to me. Really surprising.”
When Hart thinks of “gourmet burgers,” he imagines a flat top. That’s how you lock in flavor profiles, he says. Also, the yield is better versus the conveyor belt, so the presentation on the plate follows suit.
Red Robin said the switch delivered guests a 20 percent larger and juicier burger. The flat tops were tested in Q1 2023. A full, systemwide rollout began that April and fully covered midway through the year. It happened in a 90-day window.
It was hardly a singular decision. The flat-tops cascaded change through restaurants. They reduced repair, maintenance, and clean costs (the company estimated this at $2 million). But more holistically, it was a culture beacon.
Last February, Hart brought over Brian Sullivan as VP of culinary and beverage innovation. Sullivan had spent 34 years at California Pizza Kitchen. Hart was there from 2011 to 2018, responsible for the “Next Chapter” of growth agenda that introduced a fresh, contemporary look, new menu, and service model centered on per-store average sales and profitability.
Sullivan, who’s authored three cookbooks on California cuisine and pizzas, recalls walking into the Red Robin test kitchen at its Denver HQ. It needed to be painted, cleaned, and rearranged. But he agrees it had to begin with the flat tops. “The amount of pride that came into restaurants just exploded,” he says of the move. “We brought pride back in.”
What followed was an ingredient-by-ingredient dissection of what had gone astray. The chain switched from using a frozen pre-vetted chicken breast to freshly hand-battering in-restaurant—a change that created nearly $5 million in annual savings. The bacon previously was thin and cooked in a microwave. Strips are now thicker to preserve flavor. It took Sullivan a bit to put his finger on what was off, but the mayonnaise (a base for so many Red Robin sauces) needed to be replaced with a higher-quality offering. That change can’t be understated, he says. Pineapples were coming out of a can. Tomatoes. Pickles. Ketchup. Mustard. Sullivan says it was both overwhelming and alluring how much of the playbook was in tatters.
Red Robin brought in fresh, hand-prepped ingredients like smashed avocado seasoned with chili flakes and a squeeze of fresh lime on a new Smashed Avocado N’ Bacon Burger, fresh grilled pineapple on its Banzai, vine-ripened tomatoes, and a new brioche bun.
In plain terms, Red Robin’s burger chefs got back to “real cooking.” The chain also moved away from wrapping burgers in wax paper and started to place them in a basket to highlight new plateware.
In-store preparation anchored down, too, as Red Robin vacated virtual brands in early 2023 and abandoned deep-discounting marketing.
The big reveal came in October with a new lineup of 20-plus improved burgers. Also, the burger relaunch ran alongside Red Robin’s introduction of updated entrees (like Whiskey River BBQ Ribs), appetizers, beverages, and seasonal additions Hart says provided optionality within menu categories capable of driving check.
Overall, Red Robin enhanced about 85 percent of its menu. The bar was upgraded, too, layering in higher-quality, recognizable brands while also improving margarita mix with fresh lime juice and agave.
Hart shares the brand surveyed loyalty users afterward and 52 percent indicated burgers were better. Fifty-four percent agreed food quality had improved, up from 46 percent, quarter-over-quarter, and nearly 60 percent felt service and hospitality were better—a noticeable climb from 48 percent. And Wilson adds there had been a substantial jump in the number of new guests coming to Red Robin’s website. A reflection of fresh customers, and perhaps lapsed ones, were returning to see what’s changed.
The Breadth of Evolution
When Hart joined the board at Red Robin, he says the menu was “humongous.” It then shrank through COVID, as was the case for most chains. But there were three levels of burgers defined by quality. “Finest” was the premium tier. Hart says guests didn’t quite understand the difference. As things recalibrated and Sullivan fine-tuned the revamp, it was more about totality and creating a lineup that promoted quality throughout.
Hart was a big proponent of implementing a stronger barbell menu approach at Red Robin that would serve as a value entry point for some, yet also showcase options to encourage exploration.
“A big component is about going back to how do we differentiate within casual dining and that space that I talked about that I admired,” he says, “where Red Robin knew exactly who they were—family friendly, a lot of fun, great hospitality, great food, reasonable price. No one’s really filled that gap in casual dining, if you think about it. They really haven’t. So why not go back and try to do that, but do it relevant for today? That is where we’ve been headed—to provide an experience that is differentiated.”
The heyday of Red Robin was, naturally, burger centric. Yet it was also about extending a “total barbell” strategy that encompasses other categories (“Tavern” is the value side for the brand). Hart noticed every appetizer on the menu was fried. Part of October’s effort included options like Crispy Parmesan Brussels Sprouts and Panko-breaded Tsunami Shrimp (tossed in a sweet and spicy sauce). Red Robin worked on salads as well. “I think [the barbell] has really helped us in today’s world of choice,” Hart says. “That’s one thing. But the other is just from a value perception perspective. Menu engineering is important. And if you just lead with your chin, burgers are what you do and that’s all that’s on your menu, it’s a little bit harder to disguise what’s going on with menu pricing. So we’ve done all that. We’re still trying to figure out what’s the optimum approach, but we’ve made great progress.”
An example, going back to the decision to slice discounting, is there was a 2022 second-half combo meal deal that hit national media with a burger, bottomless side, and non-alcoholic beverage for $10—a 30-40 percent discount to retail prices. That spiked traffic and sales but created economics that were “quite penalizing,” to profitability. Red Robin’s present approach courts more sustainable and healthier gains through targeted offers and a barbell that inspires trial and then offers a chance to ladder up or return for more.
Interestingly, however, on this journey, something Hart came to understand was customers didn’t necessarily know Red Robin for burgers. Or at the least, it’s not always the first thing they say.
What surfaces is fun, family, and, importantly, “bottomless.”
Hart says research revealed serious runway with the latter. Customers generally associated Red Robin’s never-ending platform with fries, and fries alone. At this point, though, there are 30 items on the menu a guest can order over and over, if they wanted to. If you went around and asked people if they realized that, Hart says, you’d likely get a few blank stares. “In the sea of what’s going on today, that’s the huge value proposition that we never really have done a great job with explaining it to the consumer,” Hart says.
Erasing the veto vote is crucial to Red Robin’s soul as a brand. Hart says it got lost a bit on its way to trying to become a “polished casual” concept—campaigns around date night, and things of that ilk. That brand transformation just wasn’t who Red Robin needed to be. “The family component is very important to us,” Hart says.
The remaining three portions of the North Start plan aim for eliminating costs and complexity (optimizing supply chain and evaluating vendors); improving customer engagement (engage with communities, enhance off-premises, and build rewards program); and fueling revenue and profitability. It’s a multi-year lens that’s still early innings, all things considered.
One thing is about to change, however: “Now, we have to scream from a mountaintop,” Hart says.
A Bottomless Well of Opportunity
CMO Kevin Mayer has a unique calling card at Red Robin: He’s one of the few new executive hires who didn’t work with Hart at a prior shop.
Mayer, the former marketing chief at BJ’s Restaurants, who previously spent his career mostly on the automotive side (he ran Subaru advertising at one point), came across the opportunity through a recruiter and met with Hart. Within 15 minutes, he says, they decided to get together in Vegas, where Hart was traveling. Mayer flew out and they connected on the future.
Hart was looking for a business-minded marketer who was numbers oriented, but with a brand and transformation background. Mayer was on the ground level of BJ’s evolution from a regional category player to a nationally recognized one, efforts that included one of the best retention programs in the industry and record levels of familiarity and brand love that contributed to nine straight quarters of same-store traffic growth over the category.
When Mayer got to Red Robin last May, the brand was well into its ingredient transformation. He says it was probably a nine-month-or-so process trying to understand where the opportunity was, and then working to accelerate and take the lid off. That’s where Red Robin is today.
“We went into a thing I call, ‘Brand Essence,’” Mayer says. “Me as a marketer, I really need to understand what is the magic sauce a brand has? Even a brand like Red Robin that maybe lost its way for a number of years, there are still people who go to Red Robin today 90 times a year. So who are they? Why do they love this brand so much and what do they have in common?”
Mayer calls these commonalities “the chromosome.” What it paints is a consumer profile that spans the demographic map. They may not even know about Red Robin or have considered trying the restaurant. Mayer identified this core target as the “spirited individualist.” They’re somebody involved in the community, with friends, who eat out often for occasions, and are into the idea of living life in a fun way. Restaurants can play a vital part.
“The indulgent side of our restaurants is something they really love,” he says.
And so going back to Hart’s point around bottomless, Mayer wanted to do something he didn’t think many, if any, casual brands were attempting in today’s landscape—to connect with people on human terms.
“What we found is there were people looking for more fun in the experience,” he says. “So as you think about Red Robin over the decades and the fun and the decorations on the walls, the brand position, it was a position that hadn’t really been filled when we walked away from it a decade ago. So it’s just crystalizing it now.”
This is going to unfold in stages, but the tagline will, as Hart says, be shouted through a megaphone: “Leave Room for Fun.” The campaign includes videos, digital and social assets, and a fresh design system. A recent spot, “Red Robin Fun Guy” features an adult hanging out with a child-like version of himself—at the park, basketball court, karate, riding a shopping cart—until they’re eventually dining together at Red Robin and tossing food across the table. The restaurant itself doesn’t show up until the 23rd second of a 30-second spot.
It’s a lesson, Mayer says, brought over from the car world where you “have to connect first in somebody’s heart.”
“You have to give them a reason to believe, and then give them a reason to visit,” he says. “I firmly believe that people don’t go buy brands on discount they don’t like.”
Just look at Subaru in 2008. It became less of a car company and more of a storyteller (dog commercials). That connection translated to loyalty.
But before this really ignited for Red Robin, the chain focused particular attention to paid media and guest targeting. The company turned toward category-specific search strategies to capture the attention of diners seeking an experience like Red Robin. AKA, the “spirited individualist.”
Investments in earned media and targeted initiatives also positioned the chain in new consumer touchpoints, “fostering engagements with guests eager to see Red Robin’s resurgence and explore our latest menu offerings,” Hart says.
One illustration was linking with “Vanderpump Rules” star and bartender-by-trade Ariana Madix in October where she created a “Burgertini” cocktail with Red Robin’s new premium ingredients. She stirred up the drink on TikTok and Instagram for a two-minute spot.
The collab generated more than 500,000 views in a “few days.” Then, Red Robin struck a partnership with Juicy Couture on a track suit that quickly counted 800,000 social impressions.
The larger angle is Red Robin wants to show up everywhere it can, with a voice and positioning relevant to where it’s meeting guests. But that will all play out against the observation the “spirited individualist” can be 24, 34, 54, and so on. “The way we look at it is, you have to take those reasons to believe with the emotional connection of the playful spirit, the ‘Leave Room for Fun,’ idea and you need to make it authentic by those generations,” Mayer says.
It started with better burgers and ingredients. And then, it moved to bottomless. Red Robin hosted a campaign at the beginning of the year called “Bottomlessly Yours” that was a love letter of sorts for guests.
“Bottomlessly Yours is the idea that everything we do is for the enjoyment of our guests,” Mayer says. “The satisfaction of our guests where they can have as much as they want.”
And now, “Leave Room for Fun” will take it a step further and be all encompassing. Bottomless, better ingredients, Mayer says, all fit into this message, which he believes will direct the company for years to come.
It will be supported as well by a refaced loyalty program that arrived in May. Based on an internal survey conducted in 2023, the company says, more than half of respondents indicated they were looking to earn more rewards faster. So Red Robin replaced its previous structure, which rewarded guests with a free entree for every nine entrees purchased. Now, Royalty members earn a point for every dollar spent on qualifying purchases, not just entrees. For every 100 points, they get a $10 reward to use on their Red Robin favorites.
Mayer says Red Robin also wanted to stress a VIP-like experience with sneak peeks and early access to new menu items, exclusive offers, free birthday burgers, and a free app for sign-up.
The 13-million-member program is one of the industry’s oldest, having arrived in 2008.
“We’re very optimistic with how this is going to happen for our guests,” he says.
