GoTo Foods is trying to turn mall brands into destination restaurants

• The decline of shopping malls has had an outsize impact on food court restaurants and snack brands.
• Now, GoTo Foods' new CEO, Omer Gajial, wants to make Jamba and Cinnabon destination spots.
• Gajial told Business Insider that his strategy leverages location, customer experience, and new tech.

The last time you visited a Cinnabon or Auntie Anne's, did you seek it out — or come across it and visit on a whim?

That question, GoTo Foods' new CEO, Omer Gajial, told Business Insider in an exclusive interview, is a through-line for the company's next act: take the parts of its portfolio long associated with mall and airport grab-and-go moments and make those brands places people choose to visit on purpose.

Gajial framed the strategy simply: GoTo's "restaurant brands," like Moe's Southwestern Grill and McAlister's Deli, already have the bones of destination businesses — stand-alone locations, deep local ties, and sizable catering operations. Those businesses, he argued, are less dependent on transit foot traffic and more able to build intentional visits.

The rest of the portfolio lives in a different reality. For decades, brands like Jamba, Cinnabon, and Auntie Anne's thrived on the built-in foot traffic of American malls — temples of teenage loitering and weekend errand runs that reliably delivered customers without much need for marketing muscle.

But that ecosystem has been shrinking for years.

Department store anchors have shuttered, mall vacancies have climbed, and consumer traffic has steadily migrated online or to open-air lifestyle centers and stand-alone drive-thru concepts. The pandemic accelerated the shift, hollowing out already struggling properties and reinforcing new habits around convenience and digital ordering.

For chains that once depended on being the sweet smell wafting through a food court, fewer malls — and fewer shoppers lingering inside them — means fewer automatic occasions. That reality makes reinvention less optional and more existential: if the mall is no longer the destination, the brand itself has to be.

"At times, intentionality can be created. At times, it is purely where the location is," Gajial, who joined GoTo Foods in December after nearly four years as Chief Digital Officer of Albertsons, said. "We want to create the right combination for Auntie Anne's and Cinnabon, for example, where we can confidently offer more intentionality and give customers access that they previously would only find if they're at an airport or a mall."

For GoTo Foods' specialty brands, that means intentionality often has to be reimagined with better offers, a sharper location strategy, and an experience that rises above a quick impulse buy. To do it, Gajial is doubling down on three levers: location, customer experience, and tech.

A hangout spot for a new era

Location remains the anchor: airports, transit hubs, and college campuses still deliver discovery moments where a visible product can spark desire. Gajial wants to turn those moments into repeat visits.

He aims to do so by creating places worth lingering in — think refreshed seating areas and revamped signage — leaning into loyalty programs and personalized limited-time offers, and offering "bite-sized" menu innovations, specifically expanding snack options, that address new occasions without losing a brand's essence.

Technology is the connective tissue. GoTo Foods has been consolidating systems to streamline operations and reward repeat behavior. Gajial is explicit about pacing new tech rollouts: the company will test new agent-driven or AI tools carefully, running controlled experiments rather than firing gimmicks at millions of customers overnight.

Industry thinkers say that execution will make or break the gamble.

Mike Perry, founder of creative shop Tavern, told Business Insider that the route to destination status is less about app tricks and more about space and atmosphere: "Old school Starbucks — you know, 1.0 Starbucks, maybe 2.0 where it was a little more commercial in the-mid 2000s — that's the model," he suggested, urging GoTo Foods to focus its redesign effort on lingering.

"Make it a place to hang out; most restaurants are not made that way anymore, fast food is definitely not made that way," Perry said. "Food courts and malls in the 80s and 90s were literally a loitering place. So, if they can encourage loitering in a brand-led way, that's how I think they'll win."

Perry was skeptical of reactive health pivots — a hypothetical fiber-focused Cinnabon roll, for instance — arguing that such moves could risk muddying what customers actually seek: a place to have a "full-blown experience" that they can share with friends.

"If you're trying to get it to be a destination, the destination needs to be a hangout spot," Perry said.

Gajial's plans to replicate localized franchise experiments — an in-store SMS campaign here, a university partnership there — at scale and paired with tangible in-store upgrades that invite customers to stay.

If it's successful, the company could reshape expectations for brands historically tethered to mall corridors. If not, the portfolio risks becoming an uneasy hybrid: neither the quick indulgence customers remember nor a reason to detour.

Either way, the question Gajial keeps returning to — can intentionality be created? — will be the true test of whether mall-era snack counters can become tomorrow's neighborhood destinations.