One member of Cracker Barrel’s board of directors is catching heat over his DEI-heavy background following negative reaction to the company’s new logo and redesigned interior and revelations about its embrace of far-Left values.
Gilbert Davila, 61, joined the restaurant chain’s board in July 2020 and is also among its top individual shareholders. Conservative activist Robby Starbuck called out Davila in a video criticizing the company’s leadership, calling the recent changes the culmination of a years-long campaign to cater to the far Left and abandon the values of its middle-America customer base.
“What qualified him for this board seat?” Starbuck asks in the video. “Well, you see, he’s owned a DEI consulting and strategy firm for 15 years that focuses on pushing DEI and DEI advertising.”
Starbuck was referring to DMI Consulting, a firm where Davila has served as president and CEO since 2010. Davila’s biography page on Cracker Barrel’s website describes the firm as “a leading multicultural marketing, diversity & inclusion and strategy firm in the United States.”
FOX Business reached out to Cracker Barrel and Davila’s company for comment but did not hear back at the time of publication.
Consumers have criticized Cracker Barrel after it unveiled a new logo that replaced the image of a man leaning on a barrel with just the restaurant’s name in black text over a yellow barrel-shaped backdrop. The chain also redesigned the interior of its restaurants, ditching the kitschy American aesthetic and replacing it with a slick modernist motif.
But Starbuck said those cosmetic changes are just part of a lurch away from American values. In his 15-minute video, he notes the company has been active in LGBTQ pride events, and aggressively employed diversity, equity and inclusion policies in hiring.
Davila’s LinkedIn page states that he “is widely recognized… for his multicultural market knowledge and his proven track record on how to best embed a multicultural perspective into a corporation’s entire operation.”
“People like him are behind the woke advertising push that we’ve seen in recent years,” Starbuck said of Davila in the video. “And he was also one of the people responsible for DEI at Disney.”
Prior to his work at DMI, Davila worked at The Walt Disney Company, where he served as the vice president of global diversity and multicultural market development from 2003 to 2010.
Davila earlier held the role of vice president of multicultural management for Sears & Roebuck Company and was a marketing director for Coca-Cola USA.
Davila’s biography page also notes that he is a member of the Association of National Advertisers, co-founding and serving as a director of the group’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing.
Starbuck said he believes the controversy around Cracker Barrel’s logo change is about more than the removal of a man in his chair leaning on a barrel.
“The American people are sick of having our culture and heritage stripped from us,” Starbuck told Fox News Digital last week.
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