In-N-Out will be managing a largely West Coast brand from the Nashville suburbs.
Lynsi Snyder, president of the venerable burger chain and granddaughter of the company founders, provided more details of the company’s plans and thinking around its move to Franklin, Tennessee, on the Relatable podcast.
Specifically, she said, California has simply grown too unfriendly for her to stay there.
“There’s a lot of great things about California,” Snyder said. ‘But raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here.”
The Tennessee headquarters will open next year, Snyder said. The company will move its operations either to those headquarters or to the company’s offices in Baldwin Park, California. The company’s office in Irvine, California, which has grown over the years, will close by 2030.
Snyder suggested that her father’s long-term plan was to move the headquarters away from Irvine back to Baldwin Park. But then she said other issues influenced the company’s decision to move to Tennessee.
Some of that came during the pandemic, when In-N-Out found itself at odds with California rules requiring restaurants only serve vaccinated customers while employees wore masks.
“There were so many pressures and hoops we were having to jump through,” Snyder said. “You’ve got to do this. You have to have this plastic thing between us and our customers. It was really terrible, you know? And I look back I’m like, we should have pushed even harder on that stuff. We’re not policing our customers.”
Health officials in California twice closed In-N-Out restaurants for failing to enforce vaccination rules. Snyder doesn’t regret that at all.
“We were shut down for a brief moment, but it’s worth it,” she said. “A lot of people were charged by that move.”
Snyder herself will be moving to Franklin, Tennessee. She said the company is giving its employees a “longer runway” so they can make plans to move.
“We gave them a lot of notice, because we love them and want to make it as easy as possible,” Snyder said.
The challenge for In-N-Out is its geography. The fast-food chain operates 281 of its 418 locations in California, but Snyder and other top corporate officers will be about three-quarters of the country away, and further east than any of the chain’s locations.
Snyder, however, does not anticipate a major East Coast push.
“The bulk of our stores are still going to be in California,” she said.
In-N-Out will open locations in Tennessee and other states that can be reached from the company’s beef facility in Texas. That suggests expansion into Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. But not much further.
“Florida has begged us, and we’re still saying no,” Snyder said. “The East Coast states, we’re still saying no.
“We’re able to reach Tennessee from our Texas warehouse. We’ll have a warehouse, but not do our own meat there, so we’ll be able to deliver from Texas. So Texas can reach some other states.”
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