Name: Red Lobster’s New CEO Damola Adamolekun on How He’ll Save the Restaurant
Uploaded: 2024-11-07T17:45:00Z
Duration: 7 min 8 s
Description: Red Lobster’s new CEO is just 35 years old—and he’s already saved one chain from the brink. He sat down with WSJ to share how he plans to bring America’s oldest seafood chain back to the top.

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Red Lobster’s new CEO is just 35 years old—and he’s already saved one chain from the brink. He sat down with WSJ to share how he plans to bring America’s oldest seafood chain back to the top. Photo Illustration: Alexandra Larkin

https://m.wsj.net/video/20241116/5dc6c3a2-a378-4daf-805e-52a9ad2579f0/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Red Lobster’s new CEO is just 35 years old—and he’s already saved one chain from the brink. He sat down with WSJ to share how he plans to bring America’s oldest seafood chain back to the top.

Red Lobster’s New CEO Damola Adamolekun on How He’ll Save the Restaurant

This can be the greatest comeback in the history of the restaurant industry.

Heather: This is Damola Adamolekun,

Let's do it.

Red Lobster's new CEO. After decades of declining sales and a promotion that was a little too popular,

Advertiser 1: Ultimate endless shrimp is here with a limited time.

Advertiser 2: Flavor drop.

Heather: the 35-year-old was hired by private equity firm, Fortress, to lead Red Lobster out of-

Bankruptcy.

More than a billion dollars in debt and a serious financial pinch.

And back to profitability. It's worked before. He revitalized PF Chang's during COVID. Fortress hopes he can do the same for America's oldest seafood chain. I spoke to the new CEO at a Red Lobster in Orlando to learn what it will take to save the chain from sinking. So, I actually had dinner here last night.

Oh, did you?

And I have to say, one of the things I first noticed was the banner outside basically like, we're open. America, we are open. Are you doing that throughout your fleet of restaurants basically to kind of get past the bankruptcy?

That was done before I took over. The signs are still there. You're correct. I think at some point, you want to address the elephant in the room, but you want to do it in a way that better reminds people of why they wanna come to you in the first place.

The elephant in the room is Red Lobster's bankruptcy. When Red Lobster filed, it was over $1 billion in debt and had to close over a hundred stores in 2024. Now, with $70 million from Fortress, Adamolekun has a lot to do. What's your to-do list look like?

Well, number one was to build the executive team. To run a great business, you need great leaders.

Heather: Over the past few years, Red Lobster has cycled through multiple CEOs. I asked an expert in casual dining why that's such a problem.

When your leadership consistently changes over and over again, it's very hard to get strategic direction. What ends up happening is that you get a sort of a confused message to the restaurant managers at the unit level.

Adamolekun hopes that he'll convey a clear message to restaurants with an important change, a new menu. Before diving into the nuts and bolts,

Sure.

tell me what is your favorite thing to order?

I would've said the Snow Crab, but I tried that Bairdi Crab recently,

Mm.

which is a variation on the Snow Crab, and that is my new favorite, I'll say.

Heather: He says that other favorites aren't prominently displayed on the menu and bestselling items like Create Your Own Ultimate Feasts are buried on page three.

Damola: If you were to say, where's the value in this menu, you have to hunt for it.

Heather: Mm-hmm.

So, there's things you can do both in terms of reducing the number of items, but also just the layout, the aesthetics, the photography.

Adamolekun says that for the new menu to work, it needs a new environment. Old Red Lobsters like this one feature dark interiors, aging decor, and separated bar areas. How ambitious do you think that brand refresh could be?

So, it's gonna come in stages. The first stage is things that should have been fixed a long time ago that weren't, whether it's roofing or tiling or HVAC units or kitchen equipment or furniture. As a next step, you'll think about how do you inject energy into the restaurant, but I wanna start with a very low cost way to do that. For example, it doesn't cost anything to change the music. Dimming lights has no cost to it. And then, the third stage would be a complete remodel. We remodel the entire fleet at PF Chang's.

Heather: The Red Lobster I visited in Orlando is one of the three updated restaurants, and it's going to act as a jumping off point for future designs.

I think it can be powerful, but I don't think it's enough. I think if you're just doing that, you're sort of putting lipstick on a pig in a way and you're not really addressing a lot of the core issues.

Any sense of how much that might cost?

Well, when I did a PF Chang's, it cost us about three, between 300 and 400,000 per restaurant. Now, it lifted sales between 5 and 10% in our restaurants that we did remodels in.

Wow. That's significant. But Red Lobster isn't just facing challenges inside its restaurants. Bankruptcies from Red Lobster and chains like TGI Fridays, Rubio's Coastal Grill, and Tijuana Flats mean that dining in 2024 is on track to have the highest level of bankruptcies in decades, besides 2020.

Coming out of the pandemic, casual dining exploded. It was doing really well and it's really come back to earth, and probably since about mid-2022, we've started to see traffic that has really declined on a year over year basis.

It's not an easy environment right now. You're coming in

No, it's not.

at a tough time.

It's a challenged industry. But I took over PF Chang's during COVID. I'm used to entering at a tough time.

Part of the reason these times are tough are because they're shrimp, the centerpiece of one of the restaurant's most popular specials.

Advertiser 3: Enjoy it all, because Red Lobster's one and only Endless Shrimp is now.

How much do you think commodity costs, kind of looking back again, could have played into some of Red Lobster's troubles, particularly when you're giving away all the shrimp?

When food costs are high, your cost of goods gets out of whack. And what that does to the rest of your restaurant margin, it really throws it off.

If a family of four comes in and they ordered lobster, which is a premium product, but that's what they come to us for, can you have affordable pastas and salads and bowls to round out the table?

Heather: Rising prices mean that workers' wages have to increase to keep pace with the cost of goods.

It's difficult because it's very localized. Even within the same city, you'll have different segments of the city where wages are totally different. So, you need to be watching it constantly.

Prior to the bankruptcy, some restaurants that didn't have a hostess or a bartender.

You guys can follow me on display.

What was the staffing situation when you got here?

Decisions were made that at certain volume levels there wouldn't be a dedicated host. So, as you come in as a guest, you come in and there's no host, that can be a very negative start to your dining experience.

Heather: He says he wants to change that, which experts say is not easy to do while keeping prices low.

The average restaurant worker wage is up 30% and that's driven those menu prices up, which is also just caused a lot of the other inflation that's been happening there. The wage situation, the benefits, all of those things that go into creating a satisfied worker are extremely important as part of the turnaround process.

With casual dining, are some of its challenges demographic?

I think part of the challenge that casual dining has today is that it needs to figure out ways to be more relevant to the millenial consumer, to the Gen Z consumer. The younger consumers are a lot more accustomed to a counter service, order first, fast casual style environment.

I think there's always going to be a place for the connection that you can get between a server and a guest.

Okay, I'll get that started for you all.

People want that personalized service. They wanna sit down, have a great meal in a great environment. This is a brand that's been around 56 years. 98% of Americans know Red Lobster. It's one of the strongest brands in the country.

Awareness is great, but if you are an aware non-user, you're still not going to the restaurant. And so, the challenge is twofold. It's creating more awareness, but then being effective enough in turning that awareness into a visit.

Heather: If you can turn awareness into more visits and draw in new, younger customers, Adamolekun may successfully turn the page for this 56-year-old chain.

That chapter, no pun intended, but that chapter is complete and we're entering a new chapter that's gonna be about investment and growth.

Red Lobster’s New CEO Breaks Down His $70 Million Comeback Plan

A global look at the economic and cultural forces shaping our world.

Red Lobster’s New CEO Breaks Down His $70 Million Comeback Plan

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