March 27, 2024 | The Assembly
Biscuitville’s new hash brown casserole was too good. Soon after its chain-wide rollout, it had to be pulled from the menu.
The casserole, which debuted in October 2023, had been created by a member of the company’s culinary operations team, perfected by store leaders, and blessed by president and CEO Kathie Niven. Its preparation was foolproof, its taste was delicious, and its ingredients were already in the standard Biscuitville pantry.
Trouble was, the item created to keep potatoes, spices, and cheese from going to waste was so popular that locations depleted their surpluses before they could satisfy the hungry public’s demand.
“You think you’ve thought of everything, and then something as taken-for-granted as inventory is just one of a thousand things that can go wrong,” Niven said. “It’s amazing it doesn’t happen more often.”
With 80 stores in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia now on the Biscuitville map and plans to add another five locations by the end of 2024, Niven spends plenty of time thinking about inventory and systems.
Maurice Jennings wasn’t thinking about potato inventory for dozens of kitchens when he opened the Burlington restaurant that would spawn Biscuitville. The Pizzaville restaurant he opened in 1967 offered scratch-made biscuits in the mornings, which turned out to be a big hit. Jennings, who died in 2019, opened the first Biscuitville in Danville, Virginia, in 1975.
When his son Maurice Jr., who goes by Burney, took over as president and CEO in 1996, the company had 42 restaurants and employed more than 750 people.
Burney Jennings hired Niven as chief brand officer in 2011. In its fifth decade of business, Biscuitville’s image had gone a bit stale. “There had not been a whole lot of innovation and progression,” said Kristie Mitchell, Biscuitville’s current chief marketing officer. “It was still a very manual process of how we did things.”
Niven, now 56, led the company’s rechristening as “Biscuitville Fresh Southern,” highlighting its longtime commitment to sourcing local ingredients and skipping kitchen shortcuts. She also oversaw the introduction of new menu items, including a spicy chicken and honey biscuit, and created the company’s first real estate selection process.
In 2018, Niven was made president, and three years later, CEO. Burney Jennings remains executive chair, and his son, Blake Jennings, is the company’s chief development officer.
“We’re 100 percent family owned. There’s a tremendous amount of pride and protection in that,” Mitchell said. “But they knew Kathie [would] handle [the job] as if her last name was Jennings. And she’s done that.”
Even as a high school senior, Niven showed talent for changing trajectories, starting with her own. She was a senior at Cummings High School in Burlington and set to study art at East Carolina University when she gave a speech advocating for a tax increase to raise education funding. “My sister and I learn very differently,” she said. “And I felt like we needed the funding in Alamance County to create programs to allow people to learn differently.”
Among those who heard her talk was J. Earl Danieley, president of Elon University (which at the time was still Elon College). That night, he called Niven and offered her a full scholarship.
After graduating from Elon in 1989, she joined a small management team at an Arby’s in Graham. Her official title there was director of operations, but Niven describes the job differently.
“I was a jack-of-all-trades,” she said. “I managed marketing, communications, local promotions, and holiday events. I was the voice for most of their radio commercials.” She also helped build an inventory management system for the store.
From there, Niven moved on to executive roles at Krispy Kreme, Arby’s corporate offices, Burger King, and Quiznos.
One month after the hash brown casserole debut, the company’s Instagram account touted it as a threat to mashed potatoes. “Move over, Thanksgiving side,” the post crowed. “Our scratch made Hashbrown Casserole is here to steal the spotlight.”
By mid-January, the casserole was a goner. The inventory process “is very technical,” Niven said. “And we just weren’t quite ready to work with something with so many individual ingredients with different types of counts.”
Still, these are fun challenges for Niven, a bespectacled, friendly ball of energy. She loves processes, and proudly showed off a color-coded, six-month plan for her leadership team’s priorities.
“I’m a process junkie,” she said. “Everything should have a process. There should be one right way. And then everything else should be autonomous.”
This goes for her Greensboro home, too, where Niven and her husband, Drew Niven, an Elon classmate, for years dedicated Sunday nights to aligning the calendars of a busy four-member household. Their son is now a junior at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and their daughter is a high school senior and competitive equestrian.
Niven does the Wordle every day. She can’t get enough of true crime programming; it is an escape that appeals to her strong respect for justice and love of problem-solving, she said. The next problem she’s hoping to solve is email, which is too unruly for her taste.
Process is one of Niven’s “sacred” priorities, Mitchell said. “When processes are skipped, voices are missed,” Mitchell said, adding that Niven strives to find out “what the direction should really be versus the direction she feels it should be.”
Niven said “the most fun I ever have” at work is meeting with a committee made of eight store managers who get together quarterly for frank conversations about compensation, profit sharing, and the service that they receive from the corporate office. Niven said she values their insight and perspective. “We throw out all the big, hot, meaty topics—including the ones that they really are passionately not happy with,” she said. “And we wrestle it to the ground.”
She solicits feedback from cooks, cashiers, and assistant managers, because any one of them could come up with an idea that reduces email. Even now, Niven said, there are minds at Biscuitville adjusting processes so they can bring back the hash brown casserole.
