Behind the fall of Foxtrot (2024)

Abigail Stinson was called into an emergency meeting on the morning of Friday, April 19. The former manager of the Milwaukee and Damen location of the Chicago-based, high-end grocery/coffee shop hybrid Foxtrot Market logged onto the video call a few minutes late; she’d been tied up onboarding a new employee.

“There’s a cash flow issue. Should be temporary,” company leadership told managers calling in from two states and Washington, D.C., in what was meant to be a 20-minute announcement. The meeting ended up running nearly an hour as corporate reps fielded a torrent of questions from concerned staff. The mood was dire, but questions focused on the practical: inventory share was coordinated in real time, with a hastily made Excel spreadsheet to keep track of cups, milk, coffee, and everything necessary to get stores through the busy spring weekend.

Stinson herself asked leadership for reassurance, guidance—anything to calm her and the other rattled managers. Spencer Young, the company’s director of operations, was an eight-and-a-half-year company veteran with a knack for cooling nerves. “Hey, we’ve been through things like this in the past where we pull labor in really tight,” Stinson recalls him saying. “We really watch the numbers here very closely. Have some assurance. We’ve been here before.”

“Time to update the résumé,” wrote one person in an unofficial manager group chat, which had been bombarding Stinson’s phone throughout the call. Other supervisors, Stinson included, stayed positive. Ordering and budget freezes had happened in the past, and an occasional belt-tightening wasn’t uncommon for fast-growing brands like Foxtrot. It hadn’t even been six months since Foxtrot and Dom’s Kitchen and Market—an emerging high-end grocery start-up with two locations on the north side—merged under the new Outfox Hospitality banner. Dom’s had quickly become an established grocery favorite in the neighborhood, while Foxtrot had a respectable presence in Chicago, particularly along the north side, that kept even Starbucks and 7-Eleven on its toes. The merger was lauded with praise from leadership in both companies, with the standard-issue barrage of corporate buzzwords like “disruptor.”

For Helix Valentine, former assistant manager of Foxtrot’s Humboldt Park store, the company’s emphasis on community involvement made for an ideal inroad in a new city. “Every store caters toward the neighborhood a little bit. . . . We have all these local vendors, suppliers, and independent businesses. I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool for me to get my foot in the door somewhere in a city I don’t really know.’”

Outfox was also under new leadership in Rob Twyman, who replaced Liz Williams as CEO on March 11. Twyman previously served as executive vice president of global operations at Whole Foods and CEO of the Massachusetts nonprofit grocery chain Daily Table. Dom’s cofounder Jay Owen, Mariano’s owner Bob Mariano, and Foxtrot cofounder Mike LaVitola maintained a guiding hand through their continued board roles. “Liz came out, Rob stepped in. He was very nice. It felt like a great, positive step forward for the company,” Valentine says.The April 19 meeting felt out of place. Red flags for the company’s health were few and far between. “It was a strange meeting, that Friday one,” Valentine tells the Reader. “There were a lot of stores if something had to change. People were just kind of ready for something dramatic to happen.”

Stinson, now back in Wicker Park, relayed the news to her staff, prepping them for the tough weekend ahead. Her mind was on the basics: is there enough milk? Cups? To make things harder, she wasn’t expecting a restock to arrive until later in the week. “Maybe they were finalizing the last round of investors,” she remembers thinking in a bid to make sense of the news. “I [didn’t] have the full picture.”

On April 23, less than a week later, Outfox publicly announced the immediate closure of all Foxtrot and Dom’s locations. One thousand people were out of work with hours’ notice. Thirty-three Foxtrot stores, including three Foxtrot commissary food delivery facilities, two Dom’s grocers, and one Chicago office, became vacant. Shelves filled with food were left unaccounted for. Small, local businesses that had partnered with Foxtrot to supply their products and relied on the company for a large portion of sales were suddenly devastated. No more coffee and date smoothies.

Outfox did not respond to multiple requests for comment the Reader made to its PR representation or a lawyer’s office representing the company in bankruptcy proceedings.

Stephanie Damian, a former Foxtrot commissary driver, started getting questions from store managers on Saturday, April 20, wondering if they should expect any deliveries. The commissary, known colloquially as the company’s ‘ugly duckling,’ was the food preparation and delivery hub for Chicago-area stores. The Pilsen facility had a staff of around 50 people, most of whom were immigrants, that assembled and hand-packed Foxtrot’s sandwiches, wraps, and beloved gummy candy mixes daily. By March of 2024, Foxtrot had opened 33 locations across Chicago, Texas, and D.C., with a commissary in each location.

When the commissary team was hit with a supply freeze order the day prior, Damian and the other drivers feared a riot. “Things with us were always kind of different from other vendors because it was all within the same company,” Damian says. Foxtrot closed its Washington, D.C., commissary in March. It acquired the space in 2022 to support an expansion in the area that began in 2021 and saw nine new stores open in the district by 2024. Damian says, despite the closure and sales order freeze, everyone at the Chicago commissary expected nothing less than a full work week. That was confirmed on Monday when the company cleared Damian to return to her normal delivery route. She was a welcome sight to managers and store staff who, after the uncertainty of Friday’s meeting, saw each commissary delivery as a minor miracle.

Across town, that same Monday, Stinson had a meeting on her calendar scheduled for 5 PM. Management first pushed it back an hour . . . and then again to the following evening, then moved it up to the following morning, on Tuesday, April 23. Stinson already knew it wouldn’t be good news. “I had heard through the grapevine that the entire corporate office had been laid off on Monday and they were planning on closing all the stores.” At the moment, it was still hearsay. But, after Friday, it seemed like the next logical step.

Stinson’s phone ran wild with texts from other managers late into Monday night. Everyone seemed to have their own rumor or corporate insider. Maybe closures would be isolated to stores outside Chicago, or at least to those that were the least profitable? The sudden inventory freeze, plummeting company morale, and unclear stance from leadership about whether she’d still be employed by the end of the week weighed on Stinson. She remembers breaking into tears as she told her husband about the situation. He told her that, officially, her job was safe until her bosses said otherwise.

Whatever the announcement, Stinson and a handful of other Chicago store managers decided to face the meeting together at Foxtrot’s River North location on Hubbard and Wells. She brought her dog for a little extra support through what was likely to be a pretty abysmal watch party. Managers from the D.C., Dallas, and Austin stores were also on the video call, along with leadership from each market and the guest relations e-commerce operations teams. It was all unnecessary though, as word had spread amongst the managers that the rumors were true: all Foxtrot and Dom’s stores would be closed by the end of the day.

The meeting began with Twyman reading from a prepared statement. “He went on [a], to be frank, kind of a bullsh*t spiel of, ‘You know, we tried to make it work; it just financially didn’t make sense,’” Stinson recalls. She says Twyman instructed managers to “pull out the trash and pull out prepared food that would spoil.” Twyman then offered to take questions, but Stinson says he and company leadership signed off the call almost immediately afterward. “They just hung up,” says Valentine, who also noted that much of Twyman’s language was taken directly from Foxtrot’s public closure announcement. The same announcement was posted to its website, socials, and, within the hour, storefront doors.

After the call, Stinson said a final, emotional goodbye to her coworkers. The call ended around 10 AM, smack in the middle of the morning rush for many of the stores, and the River North store’s cafe was packed. As she left to tie up loose ends at her Wicker Park store, Stinson says the River North managers were beginning to usher confused customers outside.

Wicker Park team members on staff that morning were already fielding questions from patrons and members of the media when Stinson—still with dog—arrived. Social media was ablaze with photos from other locations that had already shuttered and angry testimonials from employees freshly out of a job. Stinson got straight to the point. Yes, Foxtrot was done, she confirmed to her staff. “They were shocked,” Stinson says. “They gave me a huge hug and said, ‘OK, what do we have to do?’”

Stinson asked them to inform customers that the store was closing and that they needed to leave. She had her husband pick up their dog from the store, and staff joked that it was the last time they had to kick out someone’s pet. The Milwaukee and Damen location’s final customer was a woman looking to buy roughly $200 worth of espresso martini bottles for her wedding. Stinson says she stepped in before her team could ring up the bottles and told the woman, “No, just take them.”

With customers cleared and the doors locked, Stinson spent the rest of the day calling workers one by one to let them know they were out of a job. If they were to be unexpectedly unemployed, she wanted them to hear it from her. “Funny enough, I received [the call from Stinson] while I was in therapy,” says Matt Grydzuk, a former part-timer. “Typically, if something were even medium wrong, she would have texted me about it.”

To Stinson, none of it added up. The night before, she spoke with a manager in training who’d just been assigned to lead the Gold Coast location. Two weeks prior, Chicago’s district manager told Stinson she needed to hire three more people for the summer. One of the new hires was moving to Chicago from the UK, and needed the job to help pay for grad school. Stinson lost access to her email before she had a chance to tell them the job no longer existed.

Miya Medina, a barista at Stinson’s store, says she woke up to news of her layoff in a text from a coworker. “I woke up in a panic. For the life of me I couldn’t find any formal communication from the company,” she recalls. An official communication from Outfox HR would come later that day, but Medina still couldn’t find the right person to contact about payments missing as a result of a faulty time-clock app. “I know that Abby lost access to fixing our punches,” says Medina. She and many other employees say they had constant issues with the UKG app that allowed them to clock in and out of their shifts. “I’m talking to coworkers on a daily basis being like, ‘Ugh, UKG won’t log in again.’” Medina says Foxtrot would tell employees to ask their managers to fix the discrepancy manually. “I wasn’t able to clock in at all on my final day, and I let Abby know that,” Medina says. “I don’t believe she was ever able to go back and fix it.” Medina says she spoke with other employees over Twitter who also had issues getting a response from HR over missing payments. As of press time, Medina has a final paycheck but still has not received any response about the two days’ pay she’s missing due to the malfunctioning UKG app.

Back at the Pilsen commissary, Damian and the rest of her staff were taking their lunch break. It was her favorite part of the shift, a time to talk with friends and coworkers. Damian, in particular, was in need of a break. She’d spent most of the morning training a new hire. Unfortunately, lunch began with a surprise announcement from the commissary’s manager. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” she remembers her manager saying. Of everyone in the company, Damian knew her boss was spread thin and juggling multiple roles to keep the commissary running smoothly, making the sudden closure all the more blindsiding. Damian says, when she left for the final time, the evening’s deliveries were already packed and ready to be driven to the stores. (It’s unclear how much surplus food, if any, is still at the commissary.)

Stinson ended each of her calls to employees with an invitation to come by the store for a final time to say goodbye and grab some free snacks. Just about everyone on her staff made it out, a fitting curtain call for a day filled with theatrical twists. Together they shared work stories and final bits of gossip over expensive Foxtrot-branded wine. “We took a last team picture in the space, which felt very full circle because I was the opening manager at [the Milwaukee and Damen] location.” At the behest of a regular customer, Stinson shared her staff’s Venmo links via Instagram under the handle @foxtrot_md_tips.

On Wednesday, April 24, dozens of former employees filed a class action lawsuit against Outfox, which Food & Wine reports could shake out to $11,000 per person if it’s successful. They claim they were illegally laid off in violation of the state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, which requires employers with at least 75 staff members to give employees and the state at least 60 days’ notice before large-scale layoffs. Though long-term justice may come eventually, former Outfox staff say the lasting scars come from the realization that the company they entrusted their livelihoods to—in all of its lofty ambition and venture capital funding—was a paper tiger.

Stinson says people participating in the lawsuit were asked to mark whether they were part-time, full-time, or part-time with full-time hours. “That was the case for a lot of employees, that they were working full-time hours or . . . close to 40 hours a week but still coded as part-time employees.” According to Stinson, the Outfox HR department instructed managers to default employees to part-time during the onboarding process but allowed employees to work more hours as needed. Managers were not informed by leadership of the potential legal issues regarding how employees were categorized.

“It’s crazy how many people they managed to escape from and wrong all in one go.”
–Miya Medina

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Outfox Hospitality did not file for bankruptcy until May 15. On May 10, Outfox held an online auction of its assets, raking in $2.2 million. In a strange twist, buyers on the call reportedly received no specific descriptions of what assets were being sold. Outfox’s assets were dissected over Microsoft Teams, an echo of how its leadership laid off employees during a remote meeting. “That’s crazy to me,” says Stinson, who was baffled by how long Outfox lingered after shuttering its brands.

Once the stores closed, Valentine says they felt like they were in a fog. “Public opinion and staff opinion was like, ‘Wow, we’re growing. It’s growing, everything’s growing.’ I think in the last year, five or six stores opened; mostly they were D.C. and Texas stores. There’s just been a lot of growth and a lot of opportunities. A lot of people were very eager to continue.” As reported by Modern Retail, Foxtrot missed its 2023 sales goal by more than $30 million, recontextualizing the much-lauded merger as more of a death rattle than a war cry.

Medina, who has a new job now, says existing store necessities sometimes took a back seat to opening new locations. “When I started working there, a lot of our supplies were old and needed work, and [corporate] kept denying us things like new cutting boards because they couldn’t afford it. But they could afford to open multiple new locations.”

Rumors have circulated that LaVitola, Foxtrot’s cofounder, may have plans to revive a select number of Chicago locations. If true, LaVitola faces a gauntlet of obstacles, including renegotiating leases and regaining public trust. Whether or not Foxtrot stays dead or drags itself out of the grave, former employees won’t forget the hellish week they were put through. “It’s crazy how many people they managed to escape from and wrong all in one go,” Medina said.