The Leadership Moves
GoTo Foods — the Atlanta-based franchise platform behind Auntie Anne's, Carvel, Cinnabon, Jamba, McAlister's Deli, Moe's Southwest Grill, and Schlotzsky's — announced four simultaneous leadership appointments on September 14, restructuring the executive layer responsible for brand strategy, digital growth, and franchise development across a system that spans all 50 states and 72 countries.
The headline appointment is Lucy Brady as President of Jamba, effective September 8. Brady spent her most recent tenure as President of Grocery & Snacks at Conagra Brands, where she oversaw a $5.0 billion portfolio of more than 60 consumer brands. Before that, she held senior roles at McDonald's across strategy, innovation, and digital customer experience — including formative work on MyMcDonald's Rewards, McDelivery, and digital ordering infrastructure. Bringing that combination of CPG scale and QSR digital fluency into Jamba signals that GoTo Foods sees the smoothie-and-juice brand as a growth vehicle, not a maintenance play.
Brand Consolidation and Digital Convergence
The other three appointments reinforce a clear organizational logic: fewer leaders with broader remits, and tighter integration between brand, technology, and off-premise channels.
Nathan Baldwin, who joined GoTo Foods in 2025 to lead Auntie Anne's, has been elevated to President of Specialty Brands — now responsible for Cinnabon, Carvel, and the company's co-branding strategy as well. The move groups brands with overlapping real estate footprints (mall corridors, airports, travel plazas) and complementary daypart appeal under a single operator, which typically accelerates co-location deal-making and reduces duplicated franchise support overhead.
Francisco Bram, the company's Chief Growth Officer, adds the presidency of Moe's Southwest Grill to his portfolio. Bram oversees loyalty, marketing, consumer research, analytics, PR, and social media at the enterprise level, and his dual mandate suggests GoTo Foods wants brand repositioning at Moe's driven from inside the growth engine rather than managed as a separate brand-leadership function. With previous stops at Chewy, Albertsons Companies, and Uber, Bram brings a data-and-retention orientation to a fast-casual Mexican brand that has been undergoing a broader reimagination.
Biplav Misra, who had been overseeing Digital and Off-Premise, formally adds Technology to his title as Chief Digital & Technology Officer. Misra's background spans Albertsons Companies and Amazon. Consolidating digital, tech, and off-premise under one leader is a structural bet that faster deployment of guest-facing and franchisee-facing tools — ordering, loyalty integrations, delivery channel management — requires a single accountable owner rather than a handoff model between departments.
What Operators and Vendors Should Watch
For franchise operators and the vendors that serve multi-unit systems, this restructuring carries practical implications. When a platform company of GoTo Foods' scale consolidates technology and digital under one executive with an Amazon and grocery-tech pedigree, procurement conversations around POS, loyalty platforms, AI-driven personalization, and off-premise integrations tend to accelerate. Vendors pitching into any of the seven brands should expect a more unified technology evaluation process.
The Brady hire at Jamba is equally worth tracking from a brand-launch and growth-marketing standpoint. CPG executives who move into foodservice typically bring sophisticated media-mix thinking — category management, consumer segmentation, occasion-based targeting — that can shift how a restaurant brand allocates marketing spend across digital, programmatic, and in-store channels. Operators in the juice, smoothie, and better-for-you beverage segment should watch Jamba's campaign activity over the next two quarters as a read on where the brand is investing.
For franchisees across the GoTo Foods system, the Baldwin consolidation of Specialty Brands is the most immediate structural change. Co-brand development — pairing Cinnabon with Carvel or Auntie Anne's, for example — is one of the higher-return real estate plays in franchise development, and a single president with authority across all three removes an approval-chain barrier that can slow those conversations. Operators evaluating new locations or co-brand opportunities should re-engage with franchise development contacts now that the leadership structure is clarified.
For a broader read on how multi-unit franchise groups are deploying AI and digital tools across their portfolios, the Misra appointment fits a pattern visible across the full-service and fast-casual segments: the CTO and CDO functions are merging, not coexisting.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
