GoTo Foods has appointed Lucy Brady as President of Jamba, effective September 8, bringing a CPG heavyweight to a smoothie-and-juice brand that competes across both foodservice and grocery retail channels. Brady's hire signals that Atlanta-based GoTo Foods—franchisor of more than 7,500 restaurants, cafes, and bakeries across all 50 states and 72 countries—is leaning on consumer packaged goods discipline to sharpen Jamba's brand relevance and guest frequency.
The Brady Hire
Brady arrives from Conagra Brands, where she served as President of Grocery & Snacks and managed a $5 billion portfolio spanning more than 60 national brands. Her earlier tenure at McDonald's included senior roles in strategy, innovation, and digital customer experience, where she helped build scaled growth platforms including MyMcDonald's Rewards, McDelivery, and digital ordering. That combination of CPG category management fluency and quick-service digital experience is a notably different profile from a typical franchise-brand appointment—and a deliberate signal for a brand like Jamba, which competes for stomach share against both retail refrigerated beverages and specialty coffee chains.
"Jamba is one of those rare brands that is instantly recognizable," said Brady. "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."
For grocery and CPG operators tracking the snacks and beverages segment, Brady's appointment underscores how porous the line between retail and foodservice has become. Smoothie and functional beverage velocity is under pressure from private label and national brands in the refrigerated aisle, making occasion expansion and loyalty-driven traffic critical levers for branded chains like Jamba.
Portfolio-Wide Moves
The Brady hire is one of four leadership changes GoTo Foods announced simultaneously. Nathan Baldwin, who has led Auntie Anne's since joining in 2025, expands to President of Specialty Brands, absorbing oversight of Cinnabon, Carvel, and the company's co-brands strategy. The consolidation bundles brands with complementary physical footprints—mall kiosks, travel hubs, grocery store-within-store formats—under a single leader, a structure that could streamline co-location and multi-brand licensing deals across retail and non-traditional channels.
Francisco Bram, GoTo Foods' Chief Growth Officer, adds the President of Moe's Southwest Grill title to his enterprise portfolio. Bram, whose background spans Chewy, Albertsons Companies, and Uber, will focus on repositioning Moe's menu and restaurant experience while driving the brand's franchisee growth strategy. His Albertsons experience is particularly relevant given Moe's potential to expand grocery-adjacent or non-traditional footprints.
Biplav Misra formally becomes Chief Digital & Technology Officer, consolidating Digital, Technology, and Off-Premise functions under one executive. His prior roles at Albertsons Companies and Amazon bring supply-chain-adjacent digital capability to a platform that must serve franchisees across seven distinct brands. CEO Omer Gajial framed the moves as building "organizational agility" to support franchisee profitability and category leadership.
What It Means for Retail
For retail and foodservice operators tracking multi-unit franchise brands as competitive benchmarks or licensing partners, the GoTo Foods restructuring reflects a broader industry pattern: franchise platforms are importing CPG and e-commerce talent to close the gap on guest data, loyalty economics, and channel diversification. Jamba in particular has meaningful crossover relevance for grocery buyers in the refrigerated juice and functional beverage segments, where branded foodservice chains increasingly compete for the same consumption occasion as shelf-stable and cold-chain SKUs.
With over 7,500 total units and brands spanning impulse snack formats (Auntie Anne's, Cinnabon), frozen dessert (Carvel), fast casual (Moe's, McAlister's Deli, Schlotzsky's), and health-oriented beverages (Jamba), GoTo Foods operates one of the broadest multi-brand franchise portfolios in North America. How Brady translates CPG category-management thinking into Jamba's franchisee economics and guest acquisition will be a closely watched proof of concept for the sector.
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.
