The logo has an old, southern white man, which some would call a "cracker" as a sort of white slur. That term originally comes from someone being a "whip-cracker." I'll let you fill in the blanks.

Insofar as I’m aware the Cracker term does indeed involve whips, but rather than whipping slaves, it was Florida Crackers driving cattle.

However, as relates to the business, I believe it’s meant to invoke a literal barrel of crackers an old timey good Ol’ fashioned country store?

Cracker Barrel is a nostalgic homage to the old country store, which often featured a barrel of crackers as in actual crackers and sometimes a block of cheese. You could cut a piece of cheese and put it on a cracker. Cue “people don’t know this but you can just take the crackers! I have one thousand crackers!” meme.

This was also a feature in some bars in the Midwest and South. I doubt the idea of a communal cheese block has survived into modern times, certainly not post pandemic, but I remember stopping into a pub as a kid in Ohio and seeing one and yes I did help myself and am still alive. That block of cheese had to have been one foot by one foot at least.

But they kept the word "Cracker" in the logo! That's why it was so confusing. Was the outrage about them keeping the word? But then they changed the logo back to its original that also had the word? It just makes zero sense. That's why it seems plausible that it might have been inauthentic, even right-wing people are still capable of basic logical reasoning.

Perhaps it was literally the result of an algorithm, pattern matching the word "cracker"? Like there was a idiotic controversy of Hasan saying the word awhile back, so the algorithms may have learned that. Perhaps a bunch of right-wing people all of a sudden got the name change announcement recommended in their feeds because of the keyword and it just spread from there. I think that is the most likely actually.