In-N-Out heiress Lynsi Snyder reveals she’s moving family out of California as company expands east: ‘Not easy here’

Billionaire In-N-Out Burger heiress Lynsi Snyder revealed Friday that she is relocating her family from California to Tennessee, months after the popular burger chain broke ground in its eastern expansion.

“There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here,” Snyder shared on Allie Beth Stuckey’s “Relatable” podcast. “Doing business is not easy here.”

“We’re building an office in Franklin, so I’m actually moving out there,” Snyder added.

Snyder, who has served as the company’s president since 2010, confessed that “the bulk” of their stores will be in California, even though a new office will be in Franklin, Tenn., just south of Nashville.

“It will be wonderful having an office out there, growing out there and being able to have the family and other people’s families out there,” Snyder added.

Snyder, a mom of four, has been married to Sean Ellingson since 2014.

The company, founded by Snyder’s grandparents Harry and Esther Snyder in 1948, plans to close its Irvine, Calif. headquarters by 2030. and return to its office in Baldwin Park.

“My uncle opened the office in Irvine … in the ‘90s,” Snyder said. “When my dad came down to run the business, we had moved to northern California. It was family over fighting with his brother and running the company.

“So when he came down and saw Irvine and all of that, [he] was just like, ‘This is not us. This is not our roots, this is not my dad,’ and he wanted to move everyone back to Baldwin Park. So he kind of did a hybrid. He moved a lot of people back to Baldwin Park but Irvine continued on and continued to grow and my dad died a handful of years later.”

Snyder claimed that corporate workers will either be transferred to their Baldwin Park office, located just outside of Los Angeles, or to the new Tennessee headquarters.

The company that founded California’s first “drive-thru” hamburger stand broke ground on a new 100,000-square-foot office building in Franklin in September 2024, according to News 2.

The company plans to open its first Tennessee restaurants by 2026.

Snyder confessed that she’s rejected invitations to open In-N-Out locations in Florida and in various states on the East Coast, but she hinted that it could expand into other places.

“We’re able to reach Tennessee from our Texas warehouse,” Snyder said. “So we’re not putting our meat facility, where we do all of our beef and send it to our stores [to] make patties, we’re not going to have that there. We’ll have a warehouse, but not do our own meat there, so we’ll be able to deliver from Texas. So Texas can reach some other states.”

The burger leader didn’t elaborate on which states the company could enter next but she didn’t hold back the company’s struggles with the state of California.

Snyder shared grievances ranging from crime to the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s requirement to make restaurants check customers’ vaccine cards during the Coronavirus pandemic.

“There were so many pressures and just hoops we were having to jump through,” Snyder said.

“You’ve got to do this, you have to wear a mask, you gotta put this plastic thing up between us and our customers and it was really terrible you know. And I look back and I’m like, ‘Man, maybe we should have just pushed [back] even harder on some of that stuff and dealt with all of the legal backlash.'”

In-N-Out’s refusal to check vaccine cards shut down stores in San Francisco for a “brief moment, but it’s worth it,” Snyder added.

Snyder also closed a store in Oakland because it was in an “absolutely dangerous” area.

“There was actually — gunshots went through the store, there was a stabbing, there was a lot,” Snyder shared during an interview with PragerU.