They were at a point where they had honestly gotten quite good at it and then they decided to put an inexperienced finance bro in charge of pretty much everything (I think he was promoted 4 times in 6 months for no objectively demonstrable reason) and gave the La Boulange guy a blank check to go do whatever the hell he wanted (and what he wanted was to siphon as much money as he could to all his buddies' companies). At that point the quality tanked, retention evaporated and the waste went through the roof because the chefs no longer had any real voice in anything. There was nothing a good marketing executive could possibly do to pull out of that tailspin and they had never gotten anywhere near a good marketing executive at any point, so the investors installed a new CEO who installed a bunch more recently unemployed Yahoo cronies who demanded around $300K/head
to sit around writing reports no one ever read or did anything with and it's mostly been shocking that they survived beyond that point.