Christine Barone was made for this moment

Christine Barone at the Dutch Bros headquarters in Tempe, Arizona. | Photo by Jon Mouer.

Dutch Bros employees don’t walk into the beverage chain’s corporate offices in Tempe, Arizona, just across the freeway from the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, so much as they are transported.

The employee entrance is a long, wide hallway, painted mostly deep blue and lit with a large “DUTCH BROS” light, as well as the brand’s blue, red and yellow rainbow, which runs along the hallway on the walls, ceiling and the floor in neon and paint. The walls are pockmarked by the company’s windmill logo and images akin to the chain’s stickers, like “peace of mind” and “killer coffee.” 

There’s a big QR code for workers who need tech help and plenty of motivational quotes. “Make every day count” is in large letters on the right, and a neon sign with “luv and happiness” below a hand holding up two fingers is on the far wall. More motivation is on the left. “Get up early, stay up late,” and “We leave every person and community better than we found it.” 

If that’s not enough, inside the corporate offices you’ll find a glass room with video games from 1992 like “Street Fighter 2” and “NBA Jam,” a pickleball court in the cafeteria, pool and ping pong tables, electric bikes for rent, brightly colored murals and more beverage stations than you can count. If you’re not caffeinated here, you’re not trying.

Not even the urinals are safe. Atop each is a Dutch creed, urging users “to look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.”

Overkill? Not for Dutch Bros, which has made company culture a crucial part of its business model since Travis and Dane Boersma opened a coffee cart in little Grants Pass, Oregon, in 1992. The company is intent on keeping that culture the same, whether the location is in Portland or at a strip mall outlot in Florida. 

And it’s a culture that could well have gone off the rails when this headquarters was opened. The brand had been stumbling coming out of its 2021 IPO. It changed management and opened this facility 1,000 miles away from the brand’s previous corporate offices. Any of those moves could have dampened the brand’s Dutch Love.

This is where Christine Barone comes in. Barone came to Dutch Bros in 2023 and was elevated to CEO in 2024 and brought with her a steady hand, helping the company navigate challenges that undo many growth chains. In the process, Dutch Bros reestablished its presence at the top of the list of chains that are redefining the beverage business. 

Dutch Bros has proven that a drive-thru can be a culture carrier and one that could generate sales all day, not just in the mornings. It established the energy drink, long the purview of the c-store sector, as a viable business for restaurant chains. And it has put larger rivals Starbucks and Dunkin’ on notice.

Don’t just take our word for it, either: Just look at the blocks-long lines a new Dutch Bros generates every time it opens. Or maybe ask the executives at McDonald’s, Taco Bell and others that are rethinking their beverage offerings to grab a piece of this market. 

Yet it’s also a business, and a market, that is made for someone like Christine Barone, who has spent her life maneuvering through tough challenges while navigating big personalities. 

“It’s probably the most competitive space you can compete in,” said Joth Ricci, the former Dutch Bros CEO who helped recruit Barone to the company. “It isn’t just the coffee shop next door. The competition is the c-store market. The competition is the truck stop. The challenge of the category gives Christine an advantage, because she understands complexity and problem solving as well or better than anyone I’ve ever been around.” 

All of this has been more than enough to earn Barone the title of 2026 Restaurant Business Restaurant Leader of the Year, an award that will be presented at the Restaurant Leadership Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, April 19-22.

The Dutch Bros employee entrance. | Photo by Jonathan Maze.

Barone has a disarmingly pleasant, steady demeanor and a desire to please. “She really wants to make sure that she brings a smile to people’s face,” her husband, Luca Barone said. 

Ricci thought that it was going to be a challenge when Barone was introduced to the corporate staff of Dutch Bros in Grants Pass in 2023. Instead, “within a couple of weeks, she had the place wrapped around her finger,” he said.

“She’s like a mama bear, only with less of the bear, and more of the mama,” Travis Boersma said. 

That demeanor comes with a deep intelligence and a mind for strategy. Lauren Bailey, the cofounder and CEO of Upward Projects Restaurant Group in Phoenix, Bailey will sometimes call Barone for advice while working through difficult challenges. “I think she has the most incredible brain,” Bailey said. “The way she sees business, how she takes really huge challenges and turns them into opportunities. 

“Yeah, she’s perfect.”

Barone grew up in Maryland. Her father worked with IBM. Her mother owned a school and a daycare. When she was 14 the family moved to Florida, where Barone threw herself into academics.

She discovered she was good at math. She joined the math team, and for a time wanted to work at a particle accelerator. She and her father would have conversations about the origins of the universe. 

“I’ve always had a curiosity for finding things that aren’t figured out,” she said. “A lot of experimentation that goes into figuring out how the universe evolved is done in particle accelerators. So I had this fascination with figuring out unsolved things.”

Barone is also a natural leader. She was not just the oldest of three children. She was often the oldest of a dozen, as the home was typically full of children thanks to her mother’s daycare. 

Barone organized activities, figured out lunch and helped mom with the general bedlam that comes along with a child-loaded home. “There was always some level of chaos that I had to rein in,” Barone said.

That leadership translated to school, where she would ultimately become the captain of the math team. She also joined the swim team. A straight-A student, she went to Harvard as a math major, where she joined the water polo team and became its co-captain. 

Barone took a job out of college as a senior analyst at Raymond James in Tampa to be closer to her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer at the time. Having decided on a business career she went back to Harvard Business School for her MBA.

That is where she met Luca Barone, who had grown up in Italy and hadn’t been in the U.S. for long. They met at a party that Luca had thrown for a classmate at his house. Christine showed up with a friend. “She showed with that beautiful smile and those bright eyes and it was love at first sight,” he said.

Much of Christine Barone’s career has been spent around big personalities. She’d spent more than a decade with Bain & Company before going onto a series of restaurant chain positions that would see her work alongside Howard Schultz, Sam Fox and Oprah Winfrey. 

Barone’s first introduction to the restaurant industry came with Starbucks, working in strategy and helping with a corporate transformation. She was quickly shifted to marketing where she was tasked with helping the company figure out food.

That was not easy. Starbucks viewed food as a way to build more beverage occasions and generate additional sales. It had long been a major corporate initiative, one that prompted the company to make a number of acquisitions, notably of La Boulange Bakery in 2012. 

Barone worked with La Boulange founder Pascal Rigo. “A wonderful gentleman,” she said. “I got to learn. It was pretty neat, because I was both part of a large company and with the acquisition, part of a smaller company, trying to integrate the two together and really think through how we could redesign the food platform.” 

It was also a big learning period. She learned how to scale a new product offering without cutting quality, including how to produce the items and set pricing that fit customer expectations and develop a supply chain. 

It ultimately worked. Food is now a $6 billion business at Starbucks. “We learned how to make a really great croissant,” Barone said. 

She also gained experience working with a big personality. The food program was a big deal and thus the effort was under a microscope. Which meant that Howard Schultz was asking about it all the time. 

Barone would get more such experience at her next stop, at True Food Kitchen, the health-focused casual-dining chain where she became CEO in 2016. The concept was owned by Fox Restaurant Concepts, owned by renowned restaurateur Sam Fox, based on the anti-inflammatory diet principles of Dr. Andrew Weil. Oprah would invest in the brand two years later. 

Dealing with founders like that is “not easy,” Bailey said. But Barone has a unique ability to bridge between a founder and their vision. “She just leans in every time,” Bailey said. 

And it would set her up for a stop leading one of the industry’s hottest growth chains. 

“There was just this aura about her. It was almost like she was cool, calm, collected, seasoned, had been through a number of different things, COVID, to say the least. And she had demonstrated and been pretty extraordinary with True Food Kitchen in that space.” -Dutch Bros cofounder Travis Boersma.

The Boersma brothers, who grew up on a dairy farm in Oregon, founded Dutch Bros as a pushcart in 1992 to serve espresso while they listened to music. They expanded first with more carts, then with drive-thru locations. They started franchising in 2000 and grew throughout the Pacific Northwest. 

The brand is one of the more unusual in the industry. It doesn’t sell drip coffee, and most of the beverages it sells are cold. It started its own line of energy drinks in 2012 called Blue Rebel that has driven sales in the afternoons. Its biggest opportunity to generate more sales, in fact, is in the morning.

The brand grew steadily but modestly in the following years until 2018, when it received a cash infusion from the private-equity firm TSG Consumer Partners. In 2021, the chain went public. And suddenly this regional drive-thru brand was introduced to a nationwide public.

That IPO would be successful, but by 2022 the company started looking for an executive to come in and lead its operations and potentially take over as CEO. The company believed that it needed someone seasoned to take the company to the next level.

Brian Maxwell, Dutch Bros’ vice chairman, knew Barone through a mutual friend and organized a dinner with himself and Boersma. 

As it happens, Barone knew Ricci because they both had served on a board together. And she knew Charles Jemley, Dutch Bros CFO, who had worked with Starbucks at the same time she did. 

“There was just this aura about her,” Boersma said. “It was almost like she was cool, calm, collected, seasoned, had been through a number of different things, COVID, to say the least. And she had demonstrated and been pretty extraordinary with True Food Kitchen in that space.”

These types of moves can be hazardous for a restaurant company. Dutch Bros had undergone a number of changes over that period. There was the private-equity presence, the IPO. Now the company was about to bring in somebody who would become CEO, which along with it would be followed by a consolidated corporate headquarters that brought people into the office. Some corporate employees left, not wanting to relocate to Phoenix.

Any of that could interrupt the company’s culture, which had been built carefully over three decades. 

Dutch Bros ultimately scrapped franchising to run company stores and promote operators from within. Those operators bring the culture from one store to the next. And that helps the brand ensure that everybody is treated the same from one place to another. 

That culture can be seen throughout the organization, in the stickers that its loyal customers collect, in the variety of energy drinks they order and in the service provided through the drive-thru. 

“We’re just this organization of good people wanting to do good things and then developing standards around that point us in the right direction,” Maxwell said. 

The Dutch Bros “walk-thru” location in Los Angeles. | Photo by Jonathan Maze.

Barone was built for this, however. She has the financial acumen as a math major who went to work in the financial sector before joining restaurants. She understands the beverage business and its complexities, thanks to Starbucks. She understands leadership—hey, you try helping all 12 kids in a house get their lunches—and she can translate a founder’s vision into practice.

Yet she had to convince her family that this was the right thing to do. At first, the job would take her to Oregon from the family’s Arizona home during weekdays. Her youngest daughter, Valentina, did not want her to take the job. Until, that is, she found out what the restaurant chain was. 

“I knew my mom was cool,” Valentina said. “I didn’t know that she was like, that cool to work at Dutch Bros.” Younger consumers, who line up for the chain’s stickers and its energy drinks and mostly cold, espresso-based beverages, have been crucial to the brand’s success. 

Barone took over as Dutch Bros CEO in 2024. The brand has more than doubled in size since then. It weathered the opening of the new headquarters the next year. The company’s stock price has gone up 71% since then. 

The company crafted a new strategy for opening in new markets, which has helped those locations thrive and generate the long lines. Dutch Bros implemented mobile order and pay, which has driven sales further. 

The company is now adding an expanded food menu to lure more customers during those crucial morning hours. It is also experimenting with a walk-up unit in Los Angeles that could open more growth down the line in places where drive-thrus don’t work. And it just created a line of items to be sold at retail, which is designed to improve the company’s name recognition.

Same-store sales, which stumbled in late 2022 and early 2023, have picked up and grown every quarter since she took over. The chain has grown to more than 1,100 locations and has plans to double that number, to 2,029 locations, by 2029. It is thriving in Texas, just opened in Florida, and is generating long lines in Illinois. 

“She’s been so instrumental in taking us to a whole new level, with not only the financial part of the business, but the cultural part of the business that’s so important, and how we perform operationally,” Boersma said. “She has built a world-class team and I couldn’t be more proud to have her steer the ship.”

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Restaurant Business Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Maze is a longtime industry journalist who writes about restaurant finance, mergers and acquisitions and the economy, with a particular focus on quick-service restaurants.

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