The Hire
GoTo Foods, the Atlanta-based franchisor operating more than 7,500 restaurants and retail locations across 72 countries, has appointed Lucy Brady as President of Jamba, effective September 8. Brady arrives from Conagra Brands, where she most recently served as President of Grocery & Snacks, overseeing a $5.0 billion portfolio of more than 60 consumer brands. Before Conagra, she held senior roles at McDonald's spanning strategy, innovation and digital customer experience, where she helped develop the MyMcDonald's Rewards loyalty platform and the McDelivery and digital-ordering infrastructure.
The Jamba appointment is the most prominent of four leadership moves disclosed by GoTo Foods — formerly Focus Brands — on September 14. The restructuring consolidates brand and functional accountability at a moment when the multi-brand franchising sector is under pressure to improve franchisee unit economics and demonstrate guest-traffic momentum across legacy mall-dependent concepts.
Portfolio Restructuring
Nathan Baldwin, who has led Auntie Anne's since joining GoTo Foods in 2025, takes the newly created title of President of Specialty Brands, adding Cinnabon, Carvel and the company's Co-Brands strategy to his existing remit. The move groups three concepts with overlapping non-traditional footprints — airports, malls and travel venues — under a single operator with more than 25 years of restaurant-industry experience, a structure GoTo Foods said is designed to surface co-development and co-location efficiencies.
Francisco Bram, who continues as Chief Growth Officer, adds the presidency of Moe's Southwest Grill to his portfolio. His enterprise mandate — loyalty, marketing, consumer research, analytics, public relations and social media — will now run in parallel with brand-level P&L accountability at Moe's, a fast-casual Mexican concept the company has described as undergoing a strategic repositioning. Bram brings prior leadership experience at Chewy, Albertsons Companies and Uber. Separately, Biplav Misra formalises an interim arrangement by assuming the title of Chief Digital & Technology Officer, consolidating Digital, Technology and Off-Premise under one reporting line after more than 20 years scaling digital and e-commerce platforms at Albertsons Companies and Amazon.
What It Means for Franchisees
The structural logic of the reorganisation is franchisee-facing. Omer Gajial, Chief Executive Officer of GoTo Foods, framed the changes as an effort to build "organisational agility" and sustain focus on "franchisee success" across the portfolio. With more than 7,500 units as of June 28, 2026, GoTo Foods ranks among the largest franchise platform operators in North America, and the performance of individual brands directly determines royalty income and development pipeline health.
For Jamba specifically, Brady's hiring signals a strategic push to extend the smoothie-and-juice brand beyond its traditional West Coast consumer base and expand the dayparts it captures. "I am excited to work alongside our brand, franchisee and restaurant teams to make Jamba even more relevant to today's guests, expand the occasions we serve and deliver an exceptional experience every time," Brady said. The brand competes in a better-for-you beverage-and-snack segment where traffic trends have been mixed, making consumer relevance — and loyalty programme execution — central to the growth case.
The moves follow broader franchise-sector trends covered in F&B Industry News's franchise coverage and echo similar portfolio-management strategies analysed in our leadership and M&A tracker. As GoTo Foods refines brand positioning ahead of what Gajial described as a critical period, investors and franchisees will be watching whether the new leadership structure translates to measurable improvements in same-store sales and unit openings.
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.
