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?
Erewhon opened its newest location in Glendale on Wednesday, marking the luxury grocer’s 14th store in Southern California with more set to open soon.
The new store, located at 520 N. Glendale Ave., includes the chain’s signature cafe and tonic bar as well as an indoor-outdoor patio space.
Known for its upscale, trendy products and high prices, Erewhon has grown into a tourist destination in Los Angeles and a hot spot for celebrities and influencers.
The Glendale location will bring Erewhon staples to trendy consumers in the area, including the beloved Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie, which until last year was named after the model Hailey Bieber.
Employees at the store handed out complimentary gift bags and fresh flowers during the grand opening Wednesday morning.
“This location was designed to reflect the spirit of the neighborhood while creating a welcoming space to gather, centered around wellness, connection, and a commitment to the quality standards that define Erewhon,” Erewhon President Josephine Antoci said in a statement.
The company purchased the space, which was formerly a hardware store, in 2024.
Erewhon has locations in several of Southern California’s wealthiest areas, including Calabasas and Beverly Hills. It also has stores in Venice, Manhattan Beach and at the Grove.
“Erewhon’s decision to invest in Glendale reflects confidence in our city’s economic future,” Glendale Mayor Ardashes Kassakhian said in a news release.
The grocer was founded in 1966 by Japanese immigrants Michio and Aveline Kushi — pioneers of the natural-foods macrobiotic movement — who began selling imported organic goods out of their Boston home. In 1969, the company opened its first Los Angeles location on Beverly Boulevard.
Josephine and Tony Antoci bought the company in 2011 and helped launch it to its luxury status with a cult-like following. Tony serves as chief executive while Josephine handpicks much of the store’s merchandise.
By the mid-2010s, Erewhon had become a watering hole for celebrities such as the Kardashians and the Beckhams.
The company has its eye on further expansion. A Thousand Oaks location is slated to open this August and stores in Costa Mesa and downtown Los Angeles are planned for 2027. An Erewhon cafe opened in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries earlier this month.
The Pacific Palisades location, which shut down after the wildfires last year, is set to reopen in January.
The Glendale Erewhon takes the place of Virgil’s Hardware Home Center, which opened in 1932 and closed in 2019.
Volvo Group North America has agreed to pay nearly $197 million to resolve allegations from California regulators that company’s heavy-duty truck engines violated California emissions standards and certification requirements.
About 10,000 diesel truck engines manufactured by Volvo were equipped with an undisclosed device, causing them to release excessive levels of smog-forming pollution across California, according to the California Air Resources Board, the state agency that regulates air pollution and greenhouse gases.
Volvo is developing a software fix to repair many of these vehicles and extend their warranties at no cost to the owners. Eligible truck owners are expected to be notified of a non-mandatory recall on these trucks next year.
CARB found inconsistencies in the Swedish automaker’s data while testing trucks with Volvo engines from model year 2010 to 2016, which resulted in the investigation and ensuing settlement.
“This case underscores why CARB’s compliance testing and strong enforcement are essential to protecting the state’s air quality and public health,” said Lauren Sanchez, chair of the state Air Resources Board. “Our responsibility goes beyond adopting regulations — we are committed to upholding them by identifying violations and holding companies accountable for meeting emissions standards.”
Under the settlement, Volvo will pay $17.5 million in civil penalties to reimburse the state for the cost of the investigation and support its vehicle-testing operations. Another $179 million will go toward investing in clean-air initiatives, such as electric vehicle incentive programs, to offset air pollution that resulted from the alleged violations.
Business
Commentary: A surge in Nevada data center construction threatens the electricity supply for 49,000 Californians
Local opposition has blocked or delayed more than a dozen huge data center projects around the country. But these Californians don’t get a vote on Nevada projects that could affect their electricity supply.
Those big data centers being built for artificial intelligence firms are in bad odor nationwide.
Seven in 10 Americans oppose projects in their local communities, according to a recent Gallup poll. More than a dozen, valued at some $64 billion, have been blocked or delayed by local opposition in recent years.
But what happens when the people directly affected by these project plans don’t get a vote?
Data centers did not influence this decision.
— NV Energy, explaining its move to end service to 49,000 California customers. But is it telling the truth?
That’s the quandary faced by 49,000 residents living on the California side of Lake Tahoe, mostly in the city of South Lake Tahoe. The surge in construction of data centers in Nevada is prompting the Nevada utility that supplies 75% of the Californians’ electricity to cut them off next year.
The California-regulated utility that carries the electricity over the state line to their homes and businesses has assured them that it will find alternative sources to protect them from losing service — but hasn’t promised that their rates won’t increase because of the transition.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes, the head of a local energy nonprofit and an advocate for the customers, told me. The crisis facing those residents is just the latest in a long line of indignities they have suffered thanks to several unique characteristics of their energy market, Hughes says.
For one thing, they are permanent residents of the community — teachers, firefighters, police, and service workers at the hotels, restaurants and resorts that bring in a tidal wave of visitors every winter. The latter, as well as vacation-home owners and renters, generate seasonal electricity demands that drive up power costs year-round.
That means that the permanent residents are in effect subsizing the visitors, even though they’re lower-income ratepayers than the generally well-heeled vacationers.
Before delving deeper into the issues for the permanent residents, let’s examine the effect of the large-scale data centers being built and proposed in Nevada, and more generally coast to coast.
Nevada has emerged as a prime location for data centers, in part due to the wide open, undeveloped acreage available for construction. More than 60 data centers have sprung up around Reno and Las Vegas, with many more slated to rise in the northern part of the state, according to a survey by the Desert Research Institute, a Nevada nonprofit.
“We’re right at the epicenter for global expansion” of data centers, observed Sean McKenna, a co-author of the report.
The existing data centers consumed 22% of Nevada’s electric generating capacity in 2024, DRI calculated. If all those under construction and on the drawing board are completed, that figure would rise to 35% by 2030. NV Energy, the Nevada utility that provides the electricity for the California side of Lake Tahoe, estimates that the electricity demand for just the 12 projects being planned would come to 5,900 megawatts — nearly three times the generating capacity of Hoover Dam.
That construction frenzy is likely to bring some of the same drawbacks that have provoked local communities to militate against data centers — not only pressure on existing electricity capacity, but also a voracious appetite for water due to the cooling needs of the computerized equipment managing the data for AI applications. Residents in the neighborhoods of data centers have also complained of incessant noise coming from their 24/7 operations.
With global warming driving up temperatures in Nevada’s semiarid and desert zones, they add, residents will find themselves in a contest with data center owners for an already inadequate supply of power in the state. DRI warns: “Local utilities and ratepayers in data center cluster regions like Northern Nevada also risk bearing the costs of subsidizing AI and computing services as power grids expand their infrastructure.”
In many communities, the result has been a vigorous and vocal backlash, including in California. They’ve packed town halls, prompted state and local political leaders to legislate limits on their growth or even to ban them.
That brings us back to the situation around Lake Tahoe.
In terms of its electric utility service, the region has long been an outlier. About 25% of its power comes from two solar farms operated by Liberty Utilities, but the rest comes from NV Energy; the reason is that it’s unconnected with the California transmission grid but accessible via a line from Nevada.
As a result, it falls into the cracks among energy regulators. Because it’s not part of the California grid, the California Public Utilities Commission has only limited jurisdiction over its service, although it has the authority to approve its electricity rates. The Nevada Public Utilities Commission doesn’t oversee the customers’ service at all, because they’re not Nevada residents.
The region is also unusual because its peak energy demand comes in the winter; most of the rest of California peaks in the summer, when air conditioners are on full blast.
Hughes and other residents have maintained that because the CPUC hasn’t modeled electricity demand for their small region, they have been paying for infrastructure that doesn’t serve them.
“We’ve been paying for assets in Nevada,” Hughes says, “without it being tracked by the state of California.”
Liberty does charge permanent residents in the Tahoe area about 2% less than the rate for part-time residents, but the discount should be much larger, Hughes says. Liberty didn’t respond to my request for comment.
Earlier this year, NV Energy informed Liberty that it would no longer serve as its wholesale energy provider after mid-May next year, and urged Liberty to make haste to secure an alternate supplier.
Liberty promised its customers in a recent statement that they “will not be left without service” as a result of the change. “This does not mean the power is shutting off,” Eric Schwarzrock, president of Liberty Utilities, said at a South Lake Tahoe City Council meeting last month, according to the news site SFGate. “Energy companies, utilities, large customers change energy supply frequently.”
Liberty and NV Energy both attributed the change to a preexisting agreement that anticipated that NV Energy would eventually cease providing power to Liberty’s customers, although their interpretations of the deal and the impetus for the change appear to be at odds.
The “long-standing agreements and planning assumptions … date back more than a decade,” NV Energy said in a May 14 statement. That was “well before data center growth became a factor,” the utility said. “Data centers did not influence this decision.”
That is, to be charitable, dubious. How do we know? Liberty said so in a March 6 letter to the California Public Utilities Commission, requesting permission to take “immediate action” to find alternative providers.
The letter stated that Liberty had expected its arrangement with NV Energy to “continue indefinitely.” During their last negotiations for an extension of the deal, however, NV Energy informed Liberty that it would cease serving Liberty on May 31, 2027, with a possible extension to Dec. 31.
“This change of stance by NV Energy was a surprise to Liberty,” the letter said. Liberty ascribed NV Energy’s decision to new “market circumstances” in the latter’s home service region. Among them: “A number of entities are seeking to add large loads such as data centers into the area.”
NV Energy says it will continue serving Liberty’s customers until Liberty secures a new supplier, even if it misses the May 2027 deadline; the ultimate deadline is Dec. 31, 2027, when NV Energy expects to complete its 350-mile Greenlink West transmission line between Las Vegas and the Reno area, part of a $4.2-billion infrastructure upgrade.
Yet that still leaves an open question that should make those customers nervous: How much will they be paying for power?
In its recent statement to customers, Liberty made only the vaguest of promises. “While no utiulity can predict the exact future cost of energy,” it said, “affordability is a primary goal” in its search for new suppliers. “With a competitive bidding process, we aim to find a cost-effective solution for your monthly bill.”
But any new supplier would have to come from outside California, because of the region’s lack of any connection with the state’s grid. And generators in nearby states face their own rising demands from data centers, drought and global warming.
The drawbacks of these massive industrial installations are beginning to be felt by their neighbors, including higher electricity prices and dwindling water supplies. They’re only going to get worse.
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