9 Cracker Barrel Store Finds Tennessee Shoppers Can’t Leave Without
Few Tennesseans leave Cracker Barrel with just a to-go box.
The store does its best to make sure that’s the case.
You wait for a table, wander the shelves, and a cast iron skillet or a bag of candy lands in your hands before the buzzer ever goes off.
These are the Cracker Barrel store finds many customers can’t leave without.
1. Rocking Chairs
The rocking chairs lined up on the Cracker Barrel porch aren’t just for waiting out your table, and you can buy the same rocker you’re sitting in.
You can buy Cracker Barrel’s rocking chairs as a kit with several pre-finished parts.
Some assembly is required, but it won’t take you long.
Rocking chairs are one of Cracker Barrel’s top-selling retail items, up there with candy and women’s apparel.
The store carries a bent-wood style and a child-size rocker too, so the whole family can line up on the porch.
People load them into their trunks off the I-40 exit and rock on their own porch by the weekend.
2. Old-Fashioned Candy Sticks
The candy shelves at Cracker Barrel are stacked with impulse buys, and old-fashioned candy sticks are what few people can walk past without grabbing at least one.
Cracker Barrel sells more than 13 million of them a year, which lands them among its best-selling retail items.
They cost pocket change, a fistful for about a dollar.
The flavors run from root beer to lemon to tutti-frutti to peppermint, and each stick looks like a candy cane that lost its crook.
Grab a handful for the drive back to Nashville, and you’ve bought your kids’ silence to the exit.
3. Lodge Cast Iron Skillets
Cracker Barrel stocks a whole wall of Lodge cast iron, and it’s about as Tennessee as the store gets.
Lodge pours its skillets in South Pittsburg, the small Tennessee town it’s called home for generations.
Cracker Barrel even carries an exclusive Lodge skillet with the Old Country Store name cast into the bottom, plus a guitar-shaped skillet built for a Music City kitchen.
The 12-inch skillet is the pick for holiday cornbread, since a good Lodge outlasts the stove it sits on.
Season it once, and it turns out skillet biscuits and bacon for the next 40 years.
4. Wooden Peg Game
That triangle peg game you play while your food cooks sits in the Cracker Barrel gift shop for a few dollars.
The store calls it Jump All But One, and the goal is to leave a single peg standing on the board.
It’s harder than it looks.
Most people finish with three or four pegs stranded and blame the wood.
It’s one of the cheapest souvenirs in the shop, and the kids love playing with it in the back seat.
5. Pancake Mix and Syrup
Cracker Barrel bottles its own breakfast, so you can skip the wait and make pancakes at home.
The Buttermilk Pancake Mix on the grocery shelf is the same recipe the kitchen pours on the griddle. You just add water.
Grab Cracker Barrel’s Pure Natural Syrup while you’re at it. It’s half maple and half cane sugar, exactly what the restaurant serves warm.
Grab this breakfast bundle, and you’ve dodged Cracker Barrel’s Sunday-morning line.
Psst! How much do you know about Cracker Barrel and its Tennessee roots? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Old Country Store IQ
Answer these on Cracker Barrel, its Tennessee roots, and old general-store history. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Cracker Barrel took its name from a fixture of old general stores. What was it?
6. Coca-Cola Neon Sign
The decor aisle at Cracker Barrel leans hard into Americana, and the licensed Coca-Cola neon signs are the showpiece.
A Coke bottle neon sign runs about $59.99.
It's pure diner glow.
The sign fits a garage workbench, a basement game room, or a screened back porch outside of Knoxville.
It's a statement piece that costs less than a family dinner out these days.
Cracker Barrel is one of the few chains that keeps licensed pieces like it a few feet from the syrup and the socks.
7. Summer Cottage Dresses
Women's apparel is one of Cracker Barrel's biggest sellers, and the Summer Cottage collection is a big reason why.
The flowy floral midi dresses and green toile sundresses run in the $45 to $60 range.
Just add sandals.
They read farmers-market casual, the kind of dress you reach for all season without thinking about it.
The florals move fast once the weather warms up, so the rack rarely looks the same from one visit to the next.
8. Cat Measuring Cups
The kitchen section at Cracker Barrel hides the funniest finds, like a nesting set of measuring cups shaped like smiling cats.
When they're in stock, the set rings up at $12.99.
A quarter cup of cat.
They stack into one another and make an easy gift for a baker or a kid who likes to help.
The kitchen shelves are full of these small novelties, from marshmallow-shaped salt shakers to whisks with a face.
This is register-line stuff, the kind of thing you add on and never regret.
9. Glass Cake Stand
Cracker Barrel's serveware shelf turns a quick store run into an entertaining haul, and the glass cake stands are the prize.
They're pretty when they're empty, too.
It lifts a birthday cake or a stack of buttermilk biscuits into a centerpiece worth a second look.
The glass catches the light on a kitchen island, cake or no cake, and at around $23, it costs about half what the fancy home-goods stores charge.
The stand travels fine too, boxed back up for the ride home over the mountains.
Set a pound cake on it, and people who've never been to Cracker Barrel will start asking where you found it.
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