The Journal. - The MAHA Shake-Up at Steak ‘n Shake

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Patriot Shakes. Huge American flags. Beef Tallow. Steak ‘n Shake, the classic fast food chain, is in the middle of an audacious turnaround strategy: a full embrace of the Make America Healthy Again movement. WSJ’s Heather Haddon spoke with the chain’s new “chief MAHA officer” and explains what’s behind the rebrand. Ryan Knutson hosts. Further Listening: - Breakfast Battle: The Cereal Industry vs MAHA - The Corporate Grudge Fueling Cracker Barrel’s Logo Fiasco Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In many ways, steak and shake is like any other burger chain. There's fries, milkshakes, obviously burgers. Our colleague Heather Haddon went to visit one in Indiana a few months ago. It's on a strip of lots of other restaurant chains. You just drive along. It's chain after chain after chain. And inside. People grilling, people frying, flipping burgers, attending to the drive-thru. But in a lot of other ways,

steak and shake is different. There's lots of branding within the restaurant that says, you know, 100% grassbed beef, 100% beef tallow. There's the bottles of Coca-Cola that have sugar cane instead of high-froctose corn syrup. So there's definitely a lot of branding there that shows that this is a different kind of restaurant. Giant American flags wave out front. There are Patriot shakes on the menu. fries are served in gold cups. What did it smell like?

It smelled beefy. These changes are all aimed at capturing a new customer base. People who support the Maha movement make America healthy again. Yeah, I think all these changes from the, yeah, the beef towel of the grassbed beef is really about leaning heavily into this Maha universe. and the consumers who are motivated to go out to eat based on it. So it is explicit in their branding, in their marketing, and some of this MAGA coding is their new target market. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Ryan Kudsen. It's Friday, September 11th. Coming up on the show, The Maha Shake Up at Steak and Shake. This episode is brought to you by IG Private Wealth. When your financial life gets more complex, having a clear plan matters. IG advisors build personalized, integrated financial plans that connect your investments, tax strategies, retirement income, and estate planning into one coordinated plan. They will help you make confident decisions about your wealth and your future. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Visit IGPrivatewealth.com to find an advisor near you.

Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit Scotia Bank.com slash h-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. Stake and Shake has been around since the 1930s.

Its first location opened up in the town of Normal, Illinois. It was founded by an enterprise in-competition. couple named Gus and Edith Belt. Him and his wife purchased some fuel stations, and one of them had a restaurant, which, you know, back in the day was serving chicken, beer, that kind of food. And then Normal made a push to go dry at this time. And Gus Belt, who seemed like he was a smart entrepreneur, said, I need a new concept. That new concept was, of course, burgers and milkshakes.

Almost everywhere you go these days, you'll find a steak and shake. Proof of the pudding of how popular steak and shake has become. Even from those early days, in some ways he had kind of a maha bent because he would grind the beef at times right in front of people to show how fresh it was, that this was not just a normal burger. This was like fresh steak between buns for your family. In sight, it must be right. Steak and shake.

Over the decades, Steak and Shake expanded across the Midwest with several hundred restaurants. The chain cycled through a string of owners. Then, in 2007, a new owner stepped in. His name was Sardar Biglari. So let's introduce our listeners to Sardar Baglari. He is a real character. He lives in Texas in San Antonio. And from a very young age, he's been interested in investing.

He is a real kind of American success story of self-made guy who was interested in investing in a diverse set of options. So he's been interested in restaurants, he's been interested in oil and gas and an insurance. So Stake-N-Shake was actually one of his first big investments. Things didn't work out as well as he had hoped, though. Between 2018 and 2024, Stake-N-Shake closed around 200,

restaurants, and its sales plummeted by about a third. Big Lari needed a new strategy. How did he come up with this idea to lean into politics, and Maha specifically? He saw RFK come to the position he's in as leading HHS. The Department of Health and Human Services. Yes. Something is poisoning the American people, and we know that the primary culprits are our changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical intensive processed foods. And he saw an opportunity, and he went full into, let's look at bringing Maha-friendly

products to this restaurant chain. Starting in early 2025, Steak and Sheik began cooking its French fries and beef tallow, which has rendered fat from cows. This year, the company rolled out grass-fed beef at all. of its restaurants. He also started bringing in, you know, some of this kind of more maga-coded elements like the big flags and the Patriot Shakes. Also, Stake and Shake Now accepts Bitcoin.

He also struck up a little ex-relationship with Elon Musk and started offing some of these deals for Tesla drivers, giving them out like supersized fries on Tuesdays during certain periods in the afternoon. Big Lari almost never does interviews and did not respond to our requests for comment. About a month after the company announced its new direction, RFK Jr. appeared at a steak and shake in Florida for an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox.

The two of them sat at a table eating fries and burgers. And steak and shake just switched out and people are raving about these french fries. You taste them. I'm amazing. They really are. Big Lurie also started getting into online political spats, while using the Steak and Shake brand. Like when Cracker Barrel changed its logo last year.

Cracker Barrel's new logo and $700 million brand overhaul sparking some backlash from customers and critics who say the company is abandoning its country roots. Biglari is also an investor in Cracker Barrel. And last year, he used his platform to blast the rebrand. Stake and Shake taunted Cracker Barrel on X, saying the company had essentially become a lot of, I'm too woke.

The burger chain even started selling red MAGA-style hats that say things like Fire Cracker Barrel CEO, and Big Lari was right about Cracker Barrel. You know, in some ways, Sardarabaglari and these others won because they did change the logo and they're branding back to kind of what it was. Is Big Lari a pretty political guy? Sardar Bagelari has been what appears to be a Trump fan for a while. He's also the owner of Maxim Magazine, a men's magazine, that endorsed Donald Trump in 2024, and has been, you know, generally sympathetic.

It seems to Republican causes, not a huge donor, but donating to Trump and related Trump, you know, Republican causes. Biglari even hired a former Trump administration's senior advisor to lead Stake and Shakes overhaul. Someone the company calls its chief Maha officer. Why this Maha overhaul might be harder than it sounds? That's next. Sardar Biglariamed his future chief Maha officer at a wedding in Florida. The ceremony was over, and people were grabbing late-night food.

There was a steak-and-shake food truck there, and they strike up a conversation, and lo and behold, Michael Bose leaves HHS where he had been, and he starts working for steak and shake. Michael Bose. At the time he was working at the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Bose helped revise the food pyramid. Michael Bose is a very tall Texan and very thin, who says most of his diet is made out of meat,

which is sort of interesting in itself. But anyway, he had a background in private equity. He worked for various private health care companies. And he ended up working for HHS under... RFK, where one of his tasks was to try to make Maha real in big fast food companies. So trying to convince big fast food companies like McDonald's, etc., to improve their ingredients, to make it more friendly for these kind of ideals they were interested in. And he found that very hard work.

He told Heather about his frustration over the phone. If it was additives within the frying oil, whatever. it may be, and again, we just kept getting the run around. And it was always like, oh, let me check with my team on that. And my argument to a lot of these other organizations was like, look, I truly believe that there's an economic value to make this change. Clearly people want this, this political movement didn't come out of nowhere. Right.

Meanwhile, Bose noticed that Stake was making all these changes on its own. All the while, we're not talking to Stake and Shake at all. and they're just rolling out these announcements over and over again. And his title is really Chief Maha Officer? His title really is Chief Maha Officer, which if you think about is incredible branding. I mean, it just makes it so explicit what his work is. And I think, you know, when he was hired earlier this year, it was an incredible marketing moment for Stake and Shake because suddenly he was on Fox News.

Tell us what a Chief Maha officer actually does. We are bringing fast food to what it was years ago, what my parents grew up with, when my grandparents grew up with, and what I grew up with for a short period of time. Real ingredients, real food that everyone can trust and pronounce. Bose did a segment for Fox at a steak and shake with Laura Trump, where she cooked fries and worked the drive-thru window. Here you go. Thanks so much.

Have a great day. This is Maha steak and shake now. You know that, right? He is very well-spoken. He's very charismatic. He's very good at talking about why they're doing this work and the importance of this work and that they believe in it. We want to get back to what humans have been eating for centuries,

what tallow, meat, cheese, and bread, and no other added chemicals associated. While things like beef tallow and cane sugar are less processed, and many would say taste better, many dietitians say those foods aren't necessarily healthier. Big restaurant chains, including McDonald's, used to fry their food in beef tallow, but eventually they moved away from beef tallow,

in part out of concerns of heart health. So a lot of dietitians say that these kind of animal fats just aren't as good for you, relatively speaking, as vegetable oil. I think what dietitians would like to see in fast food is more apple slices and more whole foods, not just switching what you're frying, your french fries in. So I think they would like people to consume fewer fried foods and not necessarily drink different types of soda, but drink less soda. What is the supply chain like for this stuff? Because restaurants have been using vegetable oils for so long, so those supply chains are well developed.

But I imagine that's not really the case for something like beef tallow. The challenge is to do this kind of work and change your supply chain so radically is that it's really expensive to do. So we're going from really mass market food distributors that, you know, food suppliers that can provide, you know, big gallons of vegetable oil to smaller producers that can provide beef tallow. Having sugar cane, coke, and bottles is just not as economic to offer for a franchisee as putting regular Coke through your soda fountain. It's just more expensive to provide these products. Coke made with cane sugar

is typically only sold in bottles rather than as found syrup. Some of steak and shake suppliers haven't achieved economies of scale yet. Boz's quest for buns made without using seed oil is a good example. Only now have they announced

that these buns will actually be coming later this year in October. So this is months and months of work to try to overhaul one element of the product. And Michael Bowes, has his sights on everything, you know, all the condiments, all the, you know, every ingredient he's looking at. And, you know, for each one, you got to make sure that people care. Like, do they really care about seed-free oil buns? We're going to have to see if that's a big motivator or not.

How is this all working out for steak and shake financially? I think for steak and shake, it is improving sales, but it's also increasing costs. So in terms of profitability, it is better than where it was, say, two years ago, but it is not on fire, I would say. It is not shaking the whole fast food landscape with what they've done. And steak and shake is a franchise business like a lot of other fast food chains. So how do the franchise owners feel about these changes? So when I was in Indiana, I talked to the owner, Keith Mitchell, about these changes. First of all, he had not really heard of Maha before all this work.

started happening. But, you know, he's excited to just see that the chain is really taking a strategy and running with it and marketing it. And he sees his sales going up. And so he likes that. What if these franchise owners are not on board with MAGA or the MAHA movement, though? I mean, these are, in many ways, controversial, highly political things. Well, then they'll probably need to find a new restaurant tone because, you know, these, at least the products are part of the franchise agreement. So they need to offer them as part of the menu. Stick and Shake's political overhaul shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the company just this week endorsed a congressional candidate because of his support

for the Maha movement. What would this mean for Big Lari if this doesn't work out? This brand is important to his overall holdings. He has taken out alone based on... steak and shake's performance. So if this didn't work out, it would be really bad for his overall company. So he's placed a big bet

on personally that his steak and shake moves are going to work. The real risk is that there'll be enough people coming to stake and shake to make these moves make economic sense

and you know, that they won't have to raise prices a lot. You know, everything in food right now is getting more expensive. I mean, all fast food chains are struggling to keep their prices and price increases moderate. And when you're adding this whole new element to it, it makes it even more challenging. That's all for today. Friday, September 11th. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show's made by Catherine Brewer, Evelyn Fahardo Alvarez, Pia Gedkarie, Max Green, Sophie Codner,

Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Jessica Mendoza, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinoosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Shingi, Jivica Verma, Catherine Waylon, Tatiana Zamiz, and me, Ryan Knutson. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Catherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapok, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Nicole. Cole Posulka. Remember, we have another episode of our new special series, My Monday Morning, coming on Sunday morning. We'll see you then.