Articles & Perspectives

How to Drive Transformation at a Legacy Brand, From a 40+ Year Foodservice Veteran

6 minute read

Legacy brands face a difficult challenge: evolving to meet new customer expectations while protecting what made them successful in the first place. Navigating that balance requires the right leadership, clear communication, and a true understanding of people and operations.

Jeff Carper has spent more than 40 years helping foodservice organizations do exactly that. Throughout his career, he’s led major operational initiatives, introduced new technologies, and guided teams through periods of meaningful change. His experience building strong cultures and aligning teams around a shared mission has helped brands adapt to shifting market demands without losing what makes them unique.

In this Q&A, Catena Senior Client Engagement Director Marisa Vrona sat down with Jeff to discuss lessons from across his career, including:

• Leading across corporate and franchisee structures
• Training, storytelling, and culture
• Evolving the brand without breaking it
• Knowing when customers are ready for change
• AI, technology, and the future of operations

Leading Across Corporate & Franchisee Structures

What’s been your experience delivering transformation in a corporate structure versus franchisees?

In my 40 years in the food service industry, about 30 on the corporate side and 10+ with franchisees, I’ve found both groups want the same thing, which is the brand to succeed. Franchisees have invested their livelihoods, and corporate teams are tied to compensation and company performance. The motivation may be different, but the destination is the same.

The real shift I’ve seen over the decades is that you simply cannot manage by saying ‘because I told you so.’ That approach may have worked in 1985, but not today. Even in a corporate structure, you must explain why, listen to your team, address their concerns honestly, and then lead them forward.

“You have to be able to explain why. Listen to team members, answer their questions truthfully, and then lead them forward.”

Training, Storytelling & Culture

What roles do training and storytelling play in helping teams embrace change?

Early in my career, a mentor told me the three most important things that determine success in a restaurant are ‘training, training, and training.’ That’s stuck with me ever since. I’ve also learned that at the heart of great training is storytelling.

Storytelling means sharing what you experienced—like how you overcame a challenge—and showing your team that they can do it too. It means speaking at their level and using language they understand, not executive-speak. In my experience, most people want to do the right thing, but they may need a leader to give them the reason why, paint the mission clearly, and show them where you’re all going together.

“People won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That’s why listening, talking, and understanding who they are comes first.”

How do you make sure training programs go beyond documentation and actually shape daily behavior?

You have to walk the talk. When you visit a restaurant, whether you’re a district supervisor, a regional director, or a COO, you need to ask certain questions, such as ‘Can you walk me through how you were trained on this new product?’ If you get a blank look, you know you have a problem. But if you’re afraid to ask, or afraid to hear the answer, the training will stay on paper and never become action.

The model I brought from one brand to another is what we called leader-led training: train the leaders first, and they train their leaders, who train their team members. Change cascades from the top, but only if the top is genuinely equipped to lead it.

Evolving the Brand Without Breaking It

How did you define the line between ‘evolving the brand’ and ‘breaking the brand’?

The first critical step is always the conversation with your main leader before you even start an initiative that could impact the brand. What do they expect? Do you have their support? What’s the real opportunity? When I started as COO at a foodservice brand that had been around 90+ years, the CEO was very clear with me that the culture didn’t need to be blown up. It wasn’t broken; it was just stagnant. My job was to inspire the team to go faster, work harder, and be happier.

That’s the nuance with established brands. It wasn’t about tearing down 90+ years of history, it was about bringing outside perspective. When your entire team has only ever worked at one brand, they only know what the generation before them taught them. Storytelling bridges that gap. You can say, ‘Here’s what I saw at my former company. Let me show you what’s possible.’

“When you’re not aligned with your supervisor, effective change won’t happen. That upfront conversation is the most critical first step.”

How do you protect culture while changing systems, tools, and workflows?

That’s the million-dollar question! Culture doesn’t survive change without a clear, shared mission that every single person—from the C-suite to the store level—can recite and believe in. I’ve walked into organizations where I asked a store manager ‘What’s your mission?’ and they had no idea. If front-line leaders don’t know the mission, your culture will have cracks, and customers will feel it.

My advice when promoting anyone into a new leadership role is to keep in mind what made you successful in your last role isn’t what will make you successful in a new one. A great multi-unit supervisor’s job is to develop 7-10 other great general managers, not to be a 7-10-unit general manager themselves.

Knowing When Customers Are Ready for Change

How do you know when customers are ready for change, even when they say they aren’t?

I grew up on two phrases: ‘the customer is always right’ and ‘yes is the answer, what’s the question?’ After 40 years, I’ll revise the first one: The customer may not always be right. They just may not know yet that they’re ready for a change you’re about to make.

The key is executing flawlessly on your current promise first. If you’re the friendliest operation out there, if your team understands the why, if your people can explain new changes to customers from a place of knowledge and pride rather than shrugging and saying, ‘I don’t know, corporate just does this stuff,’ then change becomes far less dramatic for the customer.

And you must be willing to accept some risk. You may lose a customer or two, but if the change is aligned to your mission, you should be gaining more than you lose, especially as you build toward future generations of customers.

AI, Technology & the Future of Operations

How did you decide where AI could enhance the customer experience rather than detract from it?

At one company, our mission was to create memorable moments every day. This made the question we asked about every technology investment simple: Does this help us create more memorable moments? What can we put inside the four walls that will free up our team members to give more attention to customers?

That led us aggressively toward AI-powered drive-thru ordering. In QSR, drive-thru can represent 60-80% of your business. If I can take the job of order-taking off a team member at the speaker, that team member can now focus entirely on the customer at the window—making drinks, checking orders, creating a real human connection. We pursued the same logic with a fryer robot. If that task can be automated, let’s move that team member to where they can make a bigger impact on the customer experience.

“The question we asked about every technology investment was simple: Does this help us create more memorable moments?”

How did you evaluate risk when introducing new technology or operating models?

We had resistance from both team members and customers. Some customers, especially older ones, don’t want to talk to a machine; they want a human. So, during early testing, we actually stationed people near the drive-thru speaker so we could respond to that feedback in real time, walk customers through the why, and have some fun with it.

My standard for AI wasn’t 100% accuracy because our human order-takers weren’t 100% accurate either. If I could get AI to perform at 80-90% accuracy, I’d freed up that team member 80-90% of the time to focus on higher-value work. You set the goal, you tell the story, you listen when a manager tells you three customers complained, but you also need ask, ‘What about the other 400?’ That can help people see the full picture.

At what point did AI shift from ‘interesting’ to ‘necessary’?

2020 pushed the entire QSR industry over the edge. We were already thinking about AI, but suddenly we had situations where dining rooms were closed, 90% of the business was going through drive-thru, and we simply didn’t have enough people to staff positions. When you can’t hire, you start asking, ‘What role can technology fill so that team members are doing the highest-impact customer-facing work?’

That was a pivotal moment for the industry. It shifted the conversation from ‘this is interesting to explore’ to ‘this is a necessity, and we have to figure it out and move fast.’

To learn more about how Catena Solutions drives transformation, view our solutions. You can also contact us here to see how Jeff can help your company with operations, automation, and change initiatives.