A little over a year ago, CEO Jim Holthouser stepped onto stage in Las Vegas and told a company of 6,700-plus restaurants it was about to drop its name. “FOCUS Brands” had been an industry staple since 2004 when Roark Capital purchased Cinnabon and Seattle’s Best Coffee from then-AFC Enterprises for $21 million. The backer combined with Carvel (Roark acquired the ice cream chain three years prior) to form FOCUS’ early vision, which had roughly 1,200 stores. Schlotzsky’s arrived in 2006, Moe’s Southwest Grill a year later, Auntie Anne’s in 2010, McAlister’s in 2013, and Jamba in 2018.
Holthouser spent a year combing through and testing 200 potential names. The agency noticed a string of feedback around the idea of “brand loyalty.” They’d see notes like, “Moe’s is my go-to burrito joint,” or “Auntie Anne’s is my go-to place for Monday night football,” or “Cinnabon is my go-to place for an indulgence,” and so on. Holthouser, a former Hilton senior executive responsible for a $36 billion portfolio of 15 hotel brands, liked the idea of rooting his company in how customers thought about it. And so, “GoTo Foods” entered the restaurant lexicon.
But the visual change merely glanced at the work being done. In the four-and-half years or so leading up to the reveal, GoTo Foods had restructured operations with a goal to become more connected. FOCUS had a history in regional success, but there was a bridge missing with how to harness collective scale and leverage and develop a platform that could charge individual growth through shared resources. It’s not all that unlike how hotel companies expand out from a center of gravity where differentiated concepts pull from a center of power. Also, not too removed from Roark’s other Atlanta-based giant in Inspire Brands, which was ideated off this notion of curating systems capable of powering a portfolio. While a customer might not consider the benefits Buffalo Wild Wings gains from being owned by the same parent company as Jimmy John’s, franchisees can, and so can the teams operating the restaurants.
MORE: Behind GoTo Foods’ Strategic Shift Toward Synergy and Scale
Holthouser calls this “power of a portfolio,” the ideal of “one plus one equals four.” That was what GoTo Foods began to shift toward as it plotted a name change.
Since, the company evolved toward creating enterprise engines through scale that provide demand-generating advantages and operating strength for its brands.
And now, a shade over a year later, Holthouser says GoTo Foods’ efforts to get to this inflection, which as mentioned, took multiple years, helped it not only insulate during “a tale of two cities” 2024, but angle toward expansion during a time when many companies are retracting.
This past calendar didn’t lack for headwinds. There was oversupply, a skittish consumer based on inflation, interest rates, and a host of other setbacks. Hurricanes. Winter storms. “Everything that could be thrown at us last year, was,” Holthouser says.
Still, GoTo Foods ended up growing earnings double-digits for the fourth consecutive year.
How it did so returns to the elements of shared scale. One of the key things GoTo Foods needed to do, to get anywhere within the orbit of this vision, was to bring digital platforms into a unified structure. That would allow for updates to be applied simultaneously across brands, saving time and money. Also, it opened the coffers of its own data, marketing resources, and systems for franchisees to access. Ad fund efficiency had grown significantly since streamlining and centralizing operations.
The company says 70 percent of each dollar now benefits the consumer, compared to 30 percent four years ago. That paired with better analysis, loyalty programs, and pricing tools, revamped experience across both sides of the aisle.
Jamba and Moe’s have new websites, apps, and the company is already sitting at a 2 percentage-point improvement in conversion, as well as a 10–11 percent increase in check with the apps and websites because of suggestive sell technology.
In February 2020—when Holthouser arrived—there were about five million loyalty members across seven brands. This year, he says, they’ll end up closer to 30 million.
“And that’s important,” Holthouser explains, “because the more we can grow that base, the more customers you can engage. We can build relationships with more of them. We can track their stays. And when they lapse, we can put in the right incentives to get them back in the stores.”
Expect GoTo Foods to keep building that digital and loyalty infrastructure. In some ways, it’s the clearest manifestation of the platform being built.
The other part, while perhaps less visible to the general observer, is no less critical. Also this past February, GoTo Foods tapped Qu as its single point-of-sale platform. This aligned with the broader target—create a unified enterprise platform capable of lifting experience across all channels. So it combined native solutions that integrate with delivery and catering providers, online ordering, digital menuboards, and multiple loyalty and back-of-house tech providers, all from a single menu database and management portal.
“You think, well, OK, so what’s the big deal about that?” Holthouser says. “Well, it’s a big deal because No.1, we can put economies of scale to work, which is one of the big things you do with the platform and lower that cost at a unit level. No. 2, we can solve problems much more quickly when we do have technical issues because you’re not trying to master three or four POS systems.”
“But the real thing,” he continues, “is you start setting the stage to be able to serve customers in a way we’ve never been able to do and, quite frankly, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen in this industry.”
Holthouser offers an example. When Qu is installed and customers come in and identify themselves as loyalty members, GoTo Foods knows they showed up, say, two weeks ago. It understands they ordered the classic and a brownie and now, the respective brand can begin tailoring communications based on what they order and their preferences. Then, the suggestive sell tool GoTo Foods has seen success with on websites and apps? It can import that same tech into the restaurant.
As a customer stands at the cash register ordering, the algorithm is looking at their behavior and reacting. “We’ve got one shot to sell them this one thing.” OK, let’s offer chips. “The guest generally gets a dessert but didn’t today?” Let’s present that. “There’s a lot of ability to personalize the experience and recognize customers in ways that we’ve not been able to do before,” Holthouser says.
More broadly, another upswing is when GoTo Foods does innovate, unlike in the past, it’s a one-stop process. Previously, it had to build everything seven times. Some brands had white-label sites. Others had internally developed tech. Now, though, everything is unified and GoTo Foods has the capability to innovate and bring on new functionality with one switch.
Starting in March, GoTo Foods will turn on group ordering. There’s one, maybe two brands with that capability currently. Now, all seven will have it.
McAlister’s touts one of the industry’s more prominent subscription services in its “Tea Pass” program. So, given the tech exists there, any GoTo Foods brand, from Moe’s to Jamba, can turn it on, if it chooses. “This is starting to allow us to innovate and bring new functionality, new ways of serving customers, to market very quickly, very efficiently,” Holthouser says. “It continues to get stronger with each passing week.”
The larger picture, and the internal one
Holthouser feels the larger industry is headed toward a model of unified structure. Given rising costs, through pretty much every tick of operations, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compete without scale. It’s why consolidation has become such a core tenet of M&A in recent months, and why there’s been a proliferation of platform companies, from holding groups like WOWorks to BRIX to Edible Brands acquiring a Mediterranean chain.
This is a conversation Holthouser understands well from his hotel days. The restaurant industry, especially quick service, is massively fragmented in comparison. It’s a $600-billlion plus field with 20 or so players at national scale. In hotels, there’s less than 10 with real global footprints. Here, too, fellow-Roark-backed entity Inspire has lived this reality. And, not surprisingly, the company, in Paul Brown and Christan Charnaux, has two former Hilton leaders at the top (Holthouser once worked with Brown and his team).
Whether it’s handling digitization or dealing with third-party bookings (think 3PD in restaurants), hotels navigated this disruption a good 10, 15 years before restaurants did. And multi-brand scale was one of the answers.
Holthouser thinks the restaurant industry is headed there simply because of how challenging it’s become to compete without it. Outside of the national point, you have hundreds of small, subscale regional players. Investing in 21st century marketing tools, loyalty programs, digital platforms, apps, websites, etc., requires a lot of capital. If you break apart GoTo Foods, it’s unlikely any of its brands are sizable enough to afford the company’s resources on its own.
“There’s not enough money in these ad funds and this and that to be able to pay for these things,” he says. “But when you built it once and then leverage that scale for all seven brands honestly, the advantages are huge.”
Just look at what Yum! Brands recently did by creating a state-of-the-art tech suite, Byte by Yum!, to control its own innovation destiny and provide franchisees “the best technology in the world.” It was a multi-year jigsaw of acquisitions and in-house development.
“There’s no such thing as too many resources you can put behind brands,” Holthouser says. “But this really does help us use our dollars so much more efficiently, and make those dollars stretch.”
Four years ago, FOCUS had no revenue management function. GoTo Foods built it (only had to do it once) and it now serves seven brands. Theoretically, tomorrow, it could feed nine, 10, or 12. That’s true of the digital platform and POS.
Back then, the company didn’t have robust information about customers. Today, there’s little it doesn’t know.
“We’ve done a lot,” Holthouser says. “There’s still a lot more for us to build and do here. But the overall framework is in place and people bought into it. I think the franchisees are comfortable with it, and off we go.”
On the labor front, and the makeup of evolution
Holthouser says, many years ago, you’d see hotel businesses run by operators. He remembers getting the question a lot, “why do you have a master’s degree? Why would anybody waste their time getting one?” By the time he left, there weren’t many leaders without deep education and experience resumes that helped morph a gut-run industry into something with intricate webs.
The level of sophistication brought into hotels elevated and unlocked a bevy of growth, from operations to technology.
Holthouser says you’re watching a similar shift in restaurants. “You’re seeing different kinds of managers with a more sophisticated technology bend,” he says. “And understanding things like what we’re building here, platform companies, I think that’s becoming more and more common. And I think it’s good for the QSR industry. It’s going to make things more profitable. Customers are going to be happier. Franchisees are going to make more money.”
Essentially, there’s a labor dichotomy starting to fuse together. Holthouser says franchisees at GoTo Foods know what it takes to run a restaurant. They can “split a penny 16 different ways and they know exactly where it’s all going.” Yet operators can’t be experts everywhere. The industry has become far more nuanced and complex. You need to manage third-party deals, figure out how to deploy and crack apart buckets of data. It’s not about one being less or more vital than the other, he says; it’s simply the value of understanding how broad a skillset is needed to be successful.
“That’s just part of an industry and company and brand growing up,” Holthouser says.
Versus hotels, though, the quick-service space tends to be oversupplied considering the low barrier to entry. If somebody wants to build a hotel, they’re probably looking at a $15 million investment, no matter how economy. For $400,000, you can have an Auntie Anne’s up and running in the mall.
So traffic is always going to be an uphill war in this business.
Holthouser says he knows he can’t change supply and demand. But what he can do is learn to work around its constraints. If you look at what GoTo Foods is doing from a marketing standpoint, it’s finding more avenues to bring customers in, whether it takes those from a competitor or not. Once there, it’s investing in the ability to drive frequency and loyalty. That’s why it’s making all those investments on how it talks to guests.
Having great food, Holthouser adds, has become table stakes. “You’ve got to have ways of managing millions of customer relationships and getting them to come back,” he says.
Something else Holthouser learned since 2020 is a blueprint can be just a piece of paper. It’s academic if the company can’t develop into an organization that attracts and elevates talent.
There’s been a sizable restructuring going on at GoTo Foods since September, with most changes owing to promotions: Shelley Harris; EVP & chief operating officer; Bobby Morena; chief development officer; Mike Freeman; President, Brands; Urvi Patel; SVP, brands & chief brand officer, Cinnabon; Danielle Parra, chief brand officer, McAlister’s Deli.
“When you look at the reason people leave companies and this is true of ours, too, when we study our exit data, it’s not that they don’t like the culture, it’s not that they don’t like the industry,” Holthouser says. “They don’t see a path toward growth, personal and professional growth. You run the risk of losing them. So I thought that was a really good proof point that we we’re promoting so many people from within.”
GoTo Foods has tapped a hotel playbook here as well. When he began in 2020, Holthouser says his ideas raised eyebrows. He wanted to recruit from outside the industry. Holthouser’s view was, if he could find people with multi-brand experience in franchising, he could target areas of excellence, like digital and loyalty and revenue management, and have their skills lift the tide. Patel spent 10 years at IHG before joining GoTo Foods in 2019 as VP of Insights, Analytics, and Revenue Management. Prior to Cinnabon, she spearheaded a Voice of the Customer program that provided multi-dimensional insights for GoTo Foods’ seven brands.
“Where you get the magic is when you take the people who come from outside, with fresh ideas, they’ve seen different things, and you marry that up with the expertise of a QSR company,” Holthouser says.
GoTo Foods has hired gift card experts, data scientists, engineers who write code for websites and apps.
“I can promise you we would not be building what we’re building and getting the results if it weren’t for us having the right people in this place. It just could never happen,” Holthouser says.
The international promise
As has been evident to start the year, 2025 promises to be another tumultuous run. Tariffs and interest rates and political upheaval threw more uncertainty into the fold—not that restaurants aren’t used to waking up and grabbing the fire extinguisher. Holthouser feels optimistic, however.
GoTo Foods today, he says, has the ability to generate and manage demand better than ever. Its revenue streams are diversified relative to most, perhaps as much as any. The company has its core, seven-brand business domestically and a fast-growing international arm. A third of its stores are outside the U.S and two-thirds of its pipeline. “And it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down,” Holthouser says.
With international, GoTo Foods progressed a lot in this corner as well, and it owes to data. Namely, Holthouser realized the company can’t “lift and shift” concepts from one country to another. Localization is critical. One recent point, pulled from feedback, was “Southwest” as a food term meant little to international customers. In fact, the response generally was, “Southwest of what?”
So GoTo Foods rebranded Moe’s as “Moe’s Casa Mexicano” outside the U.S. It boasts a lively color palette with an emphasis on traditional Mexican dishes, like tres leches cake.
Research on the growing popularity of Mexican cuisine inspired some other pivots. For instance, guests in the international Moe’s order in a fast-casual setting, but dishes are prepared behind an enclosed glass wall rather than in front of them assembly line style. The food prep remains transparent, Holthouser says, yet Moe’s considered the cultural aversions of cafeteria-style service approaches. There’s also less American pop culture in international designs (more on the Mexican angle).
Additionally, GoTo Foods found less desire for the type of personalization you see in the U.S. Customers are more concerned with picking proteins and spice levels instead of every ingredient. Moe’s tailored heat levels and flavor profiles to regional markets and developed four unique footprints for international franchisees to support a wide range of spaces—a standalone unit, food court, mall kiosk, and others that dial in on takeout and delivery.
The road ahead
Holthouser also feels upbeat about 2025 because of GoTo Foods’ licensing business, which grew 25 percent last year. The company recently ranked as the second-largest food licensor in the world, trailing only Hershey. It struck partnerships with Wendy’s and Subway.
A study revealed GoTo Foods’ products generate about 65 billion consumer impressions annually.
The company reports more than $1.5 billion in product sales annually through grocery and retail partnerships. Seventy-five percent of all ice cream cakes sold in the U.S. are Carvel. Cinnabon sells more frozen products in Walmart than Sara Lee.
But again, before GoTo Foods’ recent changes, the seven brands, international, and licensing, each operated independently.
“What it allows you to do,” Holthouser says of the streams, “is when this industry goes through these frequent periods of softness, we’ve got ways to offset them a little bit.”
The same is true of agility. The data flow and oversight enabled GoTo Foods to respond early in 2025 to weather and other issues on the security front to “make sure that every dime that we’re spending was getting the maximum coverage and benefit,” Holthouser says. “I’m not sure we were that sophisticated four or five years ago.”
“So I think we’re showing great nimbleness and agility,” he adds. “Coupled with the new demand generating and management capabilities we have coupled with the diversified revenue streams—that’s basically the story of GoTo Foods right now.”
