Business
Column: It wasn't just the endless shrimp — Red Lobster's corporate owners drove it into bankruptcy
On the surface, the story of Red Lobster’s bankruptcy is about one of the seven deadly sins: gluttony.
The most eye-catching manifestation of that sin, as my colleague Marisa Gerber reported, was the chain’s experience with its $20 all-you-can eat shrimp promotion, which attracted families that parked themselves in the restaurants for hours at a time, consuming mass quantities.
But that doesn’t account for the gluttony of Red Lobster’s former private equity owners, San Francisco-based Golden Gate Capital, or its subsequent corporate owners, the huge Bangkok-based seafood conglomerate Thai Union.
Red Lobster’s real estate sale gives its new owners little room for error.
— Restaurant analyst Jonathan Maze (2014)
According to Sunday’s bankruptcy filing by the chain’s new management, the chain was saddled with suffocating leases at “above-market” rents; these were the product of a financing deal entered into by Golden Gate. Thai Union, the filing insinuates, pressured the company into “burdensome supply obligations” that had little to do with the restaurants’ actual needs.
Golden Gate declined to comment. A Thai Union spokesman told me via email that the accusations in the filing are “meritless” and that it intends to continue its 30-year relationship with Red Lobster as a supplier.
That suggests that Thai Union sees more profit from selling shrimp to the chain than it did as a shareholder.
Put all this together, and it becomes clear that a major cause of Red Lobster’s financial collapse was the machinations of its owners.
Indeed, the chain got flipped several times among owners looking for a big payoff; when their expectations were disappointed, they sold it off.
As the bankruptcy filing put it, the chain “has gone from a privately-owned enterprise, to part of a publicly-traded organization, and then back to private again.”
It was founded as a single Orlando restaurant in 1968 by Bill Darden, then acquired by General Mills, which then spun off Red Lobster along with its Olive Garden chain as Darden Restaurants. Darden sold Red Lobster in 2014 to Golden Gate, which sold it in stages to Thai Union and exited ownership entirely in August 2020.
At the end of last year, Thai Union, which had bought a minority stake in the chain for $575 million in 2016 and purchased the rest for an undisclosed sum as a member of an investment consortium in 2020, wrote down its stake in Red Lobster to zero, taking a $527-million charge.
Throughout that period, Red Lobster faced a raft of challenges. Having made its nationwide mark in the 1980s and 1990s as America’s first “casual dining” chain—a step up from fast food but short of premium-priced sit-down fare—it now has about 550 company-owned locations in the U.S.
(The bankruptcy filing says Red Lobster’s “rich history … spans seven decades,” but its arithmetic is off: It’s only been in existence for 56 years.)
As time went on, Americans’ tastes changed and seafood-only restaurants fell out of favor. Then came the pandemic. According to the bankruptcy filing, the restaurants’ guest count is still about 30% below its pre-pandemic level. Over the last year, its operating earnings have fallen by 60%. The chain lost $76 million in fiscal 2023.
As the headwinds gathered, Red Lobster’s management changes were as dizzying as its ownership changes. From 2021 to now, the company had four CEOs, including one who lasted eight months in 2021-22.
After that the company went without a CEO for 17 months; the new incumbent assumed office in last September and was succeeded in March by Jonathan Tibus, a turnaround specialist who is now in charge. Each new CEO arrived with new strategic ideas before giving way to a successor who tried to undo the previous strategy and impose a new one.
If one is looking for the original sin in Red Lobster’s decline, however, a good candidate would be the deal that brought it under Golden Gate Capital’s ownership. The private equity firm bought the chain from Darden for $2.1 billion, financing the sale in part by selling the real estate underlying 500 restaurants to the real estate firm American Realty Capital for $1.5 billion.
This was a sale-leaseback transaction, in which Red Lobster was instantly converted from the owner of its property to a tenant on the same property. The leases were typically long-term — as long as 25 years — with annual rent increases of 2% baked in. They were also triple-net leases, meaning that the restaurants were responsible for paying operating costs, property taxes and insurance.
Red Lobster thus lost a great deal of flexibility for closing underperforming restaurants and cutting costs. The bankruptcy filing says that a material portion of the leases charge above-market rates. Of the company’s lease obligations of $190.5 million last year, more than $64 million was for “underperforming stores.”
This exacerbated the company’s financial problems. “Given the Company’s operational headwinds and financial position,” the filing says, “payment of lease obligations associated with non-performing leases has cause significant strains on the Company’s liquidity.” In other words, the sale-leaseback arrangement was draining the company of cash.
The sale-leaseback deal raised eyebrows among restaurant analysts at the time. “Let’s get this straight,” wrote Jonathan Maze of Restaurant Finance Monitor: “We’re taking a brand with badly falling sales and earnings, and will then load it up with rent costs?”
At the outset, Red Lobster would be paying $118.5 million in cash rent, about half the chain’s annual operating earnings, he wrote. “Red Lobster’s real estate sale gives its new owners little room for error,” he added presciently. Golden Gate declined to comment.
It’s proper to note that this sort of transaction resembles private equity deals that have been blamed for the deterioration of consumer businesses in other industries. Private equity takeovers often result in large-scale worker layoffs and the imposition of heavy debt on companies that can hasten their decline, as well as bringing higher costs to consumers.
The pattern was for private equity funds to “purchase controlling interests in companies for a short time, then load them up with debt, strip them of their asset, extract exorbitant fees, and sell them at a profit — implementing drastic cost-cutting measures at the expense of workers, consumers, communities, and taxpayers,” Democratic lawmakers wrote in 2019.
Buyouts of private for-profit colleges, for example, resulted in jacked-up tuition charges and higher student loan balances among students, according to a 2019 study of several such deals; these were accompanied by “sharp declines in student graduation rates, loan repayment rates, and labor market earnings.”
And local newsrooms across the country have been gutted by the private equity firm Alden Global Capital, which has become famous for aggressive cost-cutting and uninterest in the quality of the resulting products; by early this decade Alden was the owner of some 200 newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and San Diego Union-Tribune.
When Golden Gate sold off its stake in the chain, the restaurants were carrying a heavy debt load; some $375 million in debt was added to the chain’s balance sheet in May 2014 to help fund Golden Gate’s acquisition, Moody’s reported. The debt came due in 2021.
That brings us to Thai Union. One of the world’s largest seafood companies, Thai Union owns Chicken of the Sea tuna, among other holdings. Its involvement in the canned-tuna business brought it grief in 2018, when the federal government alleged a price-fixing conspiracy involving Chicken of the Sea, Bumble Bee and StarKist.
The government discovered the deal when it subjected a proposed merger between Chicken of the Sea and Bumble Bee to antitrust scrutiny. As I wrote at the time, Thai Union “promptly bailed out of the merger and fessed up to the Justice Department in return for amnesty from prosecution.”
Thai Union originally bought into Red Lobster as a strategic foray into retail dining. According to the bankruptcy filing, Thai Union eventually pressured the restaurant chain to increase its demand for shrimp, a Thai Union product.
One result was the conversion of the chain’s “Ultimate Endless Shrimp” offer, which had been an occasional limited-time promotion, into a permanent menu item. The filing says that was done, despite “significant pushback” from members of the management team, at the behest of Paul Kenny, who had been named acting interim CEO in April 2022 “at the direction of Thai Union.”
The current management says that Thai Union “exercised an outsized influence on the Company’s shrimp purchasing,” circumventing the chain’s “traditional supply process” and ignoring its demand projections. It says that Kenny took steps to eliminate two suppliers of breaded shrimp, giving Thai Union “an exclusive deal that led to higher costs to Red Lobster.”
The current management says it’s “investigating the circumstances around these decisions.”
The bottom line is that it’s not unreasonable to blame some of Red Lobster’s problems on its endless shrimp promotion, but that it’s more important to examine how that promotion came about in the first place.
The answer, according to the management team tasked with extricating the company from its financial mire, is that it was forced on the company by self-interested owners.
One had no experience running a restaurant chain, didn’t notice the signs that it was heading toward a fiasco and may not have cared as long as it could keep pumping shrimp into the chain’s pipeline. The other collected a healthy subsidy for its multibillion-dollar acquisition, and perhaps didn’t notice or care that it was tying one hand behind the back of the chain’s management as it faced a sea change in consumer habits.
Red Lobster became a plaything for financial engineers, a condition that almost never — if ever — leads to an improved consumer experience and greater profits in the long term. It’s one thing to blame Red Lobster’s problems on consumers pigging out on shrimp, but who were the real pigs in this saga?
An aging downtown office complex will be converted into apartments as part of an ambitious plan by local real estate companies to create 4,000 affordable housing units in Los Angeles.
The first project will be a $200-million makeover of the L.A. World Trade Center, a sprawling white elephant of an office complex on Figueroa Street built in the 1970s that will be turned into 512 apartments in one of the largest affordable housing conversions to date downtown.
Future projects being planned in the central city for delivery over the next five years will include other office-to-apartment conversions and new housing built from the ground up.
The 10-story World Trade Center, right, at Figueroa and Fourth streets in downtown Los Angeles, was built in the mid-1970s.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Behind the building campaign unveiled Monday are two of the region’s largest real estate companies, Jamison and Kennedy Wilson. Jamison is the city’s most prolific converter of offices to market-rate apartments and currently has a major makeover of a downtown office skyscraper underway for tenants who can pay top rents.
Kennedy Wilson, a real estate investment company based in Beverly Hills, owns Vintage Housing, which builds and operates affordable housing using tax credits and other state and federal financing to help fund it.
Vintage Housing and Jamison’s new affordable housing division, Arden Residential, will take on the campaign to build the housing where qualified tenants will pay rents below market rates.
Rents in the World Trade Center — which will be renamed Sky Castle when it opens in early 2028 — are expected to start at $937 for a one-bedroom unit. Some two- and three-bedroom units would rent for $1,100 and $1,300 per month, respectively, developers said.
Sky Castle will have shared amenities found in more expensive modern apartments, the developers said, such as a fitness center, resident lounge and co-working space. It already has six tennis courts on the roof, which may be converted to pickleball courts, Jamison Chief Executive Garrett Lee said.
The goal is to build higher quality affordable housing by using efficient construction methods Jamison has learned through building more than 8,000 market-rate apartments in the past, Lee said. The makeover of the World Trade Center will mark Jamison’s 15th conversion of an office building to housing.
The plan to redevelop the L.A. World Trade Center, bottom left, is one of the largest affordable housing conversions to date downtown.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The 10-story World Trade Center was built in the mid-1970s to fanfare saying it would be home to international companies. In 1976, The Times described the center as a place to prepare for an overseas trip where visitors could get passports and visas, as well as exchange dollars for francs, marks, rubles and other currency. There was a language school and branches of U.S., Swiss and Japanese banks.
By the mid-1980s, the 400,000-square-foot office complex covering a city block at Figueroa and Fourth streets had lost its international flavor and was falling out of favor with corporate tenants who were moving into glossy new skyscrapers on Bunker Hill and in other locations.
The building has been cleared of remaining office tenants to allow work to begin in August, Lee said.
Kennedy Wilson is a nationwide operator of market-rate apartments that has also moved into building affordable housing in the last decade, said Nicholas Bridges, global head of capital markets at the company.
Building affordable, workforce housing “in almost all cases requires public subsidies,” Bridges said, and Kennedy Wilson has developed expertise in assembling “a cocktail of public financing sources” that includes low-income housing tax credits and tax-exempt bonds.
In the past, many housing developers have shied away from building affordable housing because assembling the subsidies needed to make construction profitable is challenging.
An artist’s rendering shows what the L.A. World Trade Center could look like after being redeveloped into affordable housing. The new complex is to be called Sky Castle.
(Ian Camarillo)
“It’s complicated,” Bridges said, “and not for the faint of heart.”
Eligible tenants must earn between 30% and 80% of the median income in the area where the housing is built.
Jamison and Kennedy Wilson will develop about 15 affordable housing projects between downtown and the 405 Freeway, Bridges said, many of them in aging office buildings such as the World Trade Center that are already owned by Jamison and are close to public transit.
Substantial potential for affordable housing lies in L.A.’s underused office buildings, he said.
“In this post-COVID world, the way people are utilizing office buildings, particularly older office buildings, has just fundamentally changed,” he said.
It makes sense for developers of conventional multifamily housing to move to building affordable housing, Lee said, because the government supports it through subsidies, zoning reform and the fast-tracking of construction permits. The city of Los Angeles also recently streamlined its adaptive reuse rules to make it easier to convert office buildings to housing.
“There are a lot of incentives pushing us in this direction,” Lee said.
Comcast is spinning off its NBCUniversal entertainment and news media businesses into a separate publicly traded company, a move that would unwind an audacious play the cable giant made for the storied Hollywood assets 15 years ago.
The plan would put broadcast networks NBC and Telemundo, NBC News, cable network Bravo, streaming service Peacock, the Los Angeles-based Universal film and television studios, Universal theme parks and British TV service Sky in a new stand-alone company.
Philadelphia-based Comcast would remain in its core business of distributing pay-TV channels, broadband internet and wireless services.
The spinoff would be the second such move by Comcast in two years. Late last year, the Brian L. Roberts-controlled company cast off most of its cable portfolio, including CNBC, USA Network, MS NOW and Golf Channel to form a new entity called Versant.
But the maneuver failed to budge Comcast’s listless stock, which has languished for years as its primary business lost thousands of broadband customers.
Comcast executives needed to make a bolder move to mollify frustrated investors.
Comcast stock peaked at nearly $26 per share Monday before closing at $24.22, up roughly 4.5% from Friday. Still, the stock remains below its 52-week high of $34.34.
The plan announced Monday would unravel Comcast’s bold decision to acquire NBCUniversal from General Electric Co. in 2011. At the time, Comcast saw tremendous value in marrying NBC’s entertainment operations, including its then-lucrative cable channels, with its cable TV distribution service that Roberts’ late father, Ralph, launched in Tupelo, Miss., in 1963.
“They were two distinct businesses,” longtime cable analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a Monday note to investors. “Having them under the same roof didn’t make either better.”
Consumers shifted to streaming, and Comcast’s attempt to build a top-tier digital service, Peacock, has fallen well short of its goal. Peacock lags behind rivals despite billions of dollars in investment from Comcast.
The concept of unwinding its NBCUniversal operation began in earnest in the fall, when Comcast joined the bidding for Warner Bros. Discovery. Comcast executives knew they could ill afford to spend billions to buy a rival; Wall Street would have pummeled the company.
So Comcast offered to spin off NBCUniversal and pair it with Warner Bros., turning two original Hollywood studios into a new media colossus.
But 43-year-old billionaire David Ellison prevailed in the bidding, agreeing to pay $111 billion to capture Warner Bros. Discovery. Losing the auction forced Comcast to find a different path forward.
On a call with investors, Roberts said the separation would bolster the two firms as they navigate increasing competitive challenges while technology companies continue to transform entertainment.
“We asked ourselves three basic questions,” Roberts said. “One, can these businesses stand alone and have the heft to stand alone in separate companies? Two, do they have a clear, viable capital allocation path to invest? And three, is now the right time? And the answer we came back with was yes to all counts.”
A free-standing NBCUniversal, home of the “Minions” and “Jurassic Park” franchises, probably would be an acquisition target, as media companies have been consolidating in an effort to get more content and mass distribution for their streaming services. Ellison’s Paramount is on track to close its Warner Bros. purchase, which would combine such media assets as HBO Max, CBS, CNN, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. studios.
With its Sky business, NBCUniversal has a toehold in Britain and Europe at a time when Amazon and Netflix are flexing their global distribution muscles.
Comcast would be positioned to combine with another cable and internet provider, such as Connecticut-based Charter, which owns the Spectrum television service. Charter is in the process of buying the smaller Cox cable service, which also has operations in Southern California.
Comcast is expected to complete the spinoff next year and will retain an 19% stake in the new entity.
The timetable could put NBCUniversal up for grabs by 2028 — when the company is set to broadcast the Summer Olympics, which will be held in Los Angeles.
Comcast acquired NBCUniversal in 2011. The industry-reshaping deal combined the largest distributor of TV channels with a provider of top-rated TV channels and a movie studio. But the streaming revolution has decimated the cable television business. Traditional TV viewing has been in a steady decline over the last decade. NBC has relied heavily on NFL broadcasts, and more recently, NBA and Major League Baseball games to remain relevant.
NBCUniversal has invested heavily in its streaming service, Peacock, but has been unable to reach the scale necessary for profitability. Comcast‘s stock price has struggled as a result.
Roberts, chairman and chief executive of Comcast, will continue to be involved in the leadership of Comcast and NBCUniversal, working in partnership with the CEOs of both companies.
Mike Cavanagh will remain as CEO of NBCUniversal, and Comcast’s former chief financial officer, Michael Angelakis, will return to run Comcast after the spinoff.
“Perhaps the best part of today’s welcome announcement … is that Mike Angelakis is coming back,” Moffett, the analyst, wrote. “He will now helm the cable business, [which] is unequivocally good news. With Mike Angelakis’s return, Comcast has come full circle.”
Moffett added that, despite Monday’s announcement, the 2011 combination was not a complete bust.
“The deal to acquire NBCU from GE was financially brilliant,” he said. “It was structured so that Comcast paid for just half of the acquisition and then let NBCU’s own cash flow pay for the rest.”
Over the years, Comcast has raked in billions in profit from its media holdings.
Comcast executives on the analyst call played down the notion that the two companies were being positioned for another deal.
“Absolutely not,” Roberts said. “This is the right move to put each company in the strongest position to create value, fully monetize its assets and aggressively pursue its own organic growth strategies.”
Cavanaugh, who has been running the combined company for three years, sounded more like a buyer than a seller.
“Our plan for NBCUniversal and Sky is to build and invest for growth,” he said. “We have the freedom now to explore adjacent businesses where we have the right to play, and that’s thanks to the stability of our company and management team.”
The spinoff announcement comes a week after Fox Corp. announced its deal to purchase the streaming platform Roku for $22 billion. The deal is aimed at ensuring that Fox has a means to get its portfolio of sports, news and entertainment channels into viewers’ homes as the traditional pay-TV business continues to erode.
Rocket Lab took a big step Monday to better compete with rivals SpaceX and Amazon, announcing an $8-billion acquisition of satellite communications company Iridium.
The Long Beach rocket-and-satellite maker is buying a company that provides critical communications services to pilots, mariners and others, while giving Rocket Lab a foothold in the emerging satellite-based mobile phone market.
“We are going to absorb it, optimize it and scale it into something that is really truly fantastic,” said Rocket Lab Chief Executive Peter Beck in a YouTube presentation of the deal.
Rocket Lab is paying $54 a share for McLean, Va.-based Iridium — $27 in cash and the rest in shares. Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo are providing $3.6 billion in financing in the deal, which is expected to close next year.
Iridium’s 66 low-Earth-orbit satellites provide voice, data, navigation and other services to remote regions and across the globe to 2.55 million government, defense, aviation, maritime and commercial subscribers.
Iridium reported net income of $114 million in 2025, up 2% from the previous year. Revenue climbed 5% to $872 million.
The market for mobile cellular and other satellite-based communications is growing rapidly.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX spent $17 billion last year to acquire spectrum from EchoStar and then followed it up with a $2.6-billion purchase. The spectrum will allow its Starlink broadband satellite network to provide mobile phone service worldwide.
In April, Amazon agreed to acquire satellite operator Globalstar in a roughly $11.6-billion deal that would expand the services of its satellite system and the so-called direct-to-device smartphone market.
The competition has raised concerns about Iridium’s ability to compete.
SpaceX went public this month in the largest initial public offering ever, raising $86 billion, with the company now valued at more than $2 trillion.
In February, Iridium Chief Executive Matthew Desch said the company has shown it’s not “in decline,” dismissing concerns that it couldn’t compete with Starlink, according to Morningstar.
Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, Rocket Lab moved to the U.S. a decade ago and opened its Long Beach headquarters in 2020. It has manufacturing and mission operations in Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, Maryland, Toronto and New Zealand.
The company manufactures a small rocket called Electron that has launched 262 satellites into space, making it the second-busiest U.S. launch provider behind SpaceX. Rocket Lab is developing a larger rocket called Neutron, and it also makes satellites, subsystems and space components.
Beck said the acquisition of Iridium will propel Rocket Lab into the satellite communications business. That would otherwise be a slow process, requiring the acquisition of spectrum, satellite development and establishment of a customer base.
“We think we’ve found a little bit of a shortcut here,” Beck said, noting the combined company will be vertically integrated, able to design, build, launch and operate its own satellites.
The deal is “very strategic” for Rocket Lab, William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma said in a note to clients, according to Morningstar.
Rocket Lab has announced multiple contracts this year.
Last week, the company said it would launch Electron rockets for three NASA missions from its New Zealand site.
In May, Rocket Lab announced a $30-million contract with Costa Mesa defense contractor Anduril for multiple hypersonic test flights in Virginia using Rocket Lab’s HASTE launch vehicle.
The company is among scores of businesses that have revitalized Southern California’s aerospace and defense industries since SpaceX was founded in 2002. SpaceX, now headquartered in Texas maintains operations in Hawthorne.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited Rocket Lab’s headquarters in January during a stop on his tour of defense contractors in Southern California and across the country.
“This company, you right here, are front and center, as part of ensuring that we build an arsenal of freedom that America needs,” Hegseth told several hundred cheering workers. “The future of the battlefield starts right here with dominance of space.”
Iridium investors cheered the news. Its shares gained 25% to close Monday at $54.59. Rocket Lab shares jumped 16% to close at $97.95.
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