TAMPA, FL – After leaving Delta Air Lines, where he served as its chief operating officer, Michael L. Spanos has been named CEO of Bloomin’ Brands Inc., parent to Outback Steakhouse and other brands. His appointment is effective Sept. 3, succeeding David Deno, the company said Monday.

According to Nation’s Restaurant News, “the Tampa, FL-based Bloomin’ said Spanos will join the company from Delta Airlines, where he served as executive vice president and chief operating officer. Deno announced his impending retirement in May and will serve in a transitional role until Dec. 31, the company said.”

“We have found an ideal strategist, operations, and cultural leader in Mike,” Michael Mohan, Bloomin’ board chair, said in a statement. “Our board believes that his experience operating complex, multi-unit businesses will benefit our iconic, founder-inspired brands. He has a customer-first mindset for leading established organizations through challenging environments.”

Spanos noted of his new company that, “we have such a classic set of heritage brands that my family and I have enjoyed over many years.”

Spanos has also led Six Flags Entertainment as CEO and president, and spent more than 25 years at PepsiCo and the Pepsi Bottling Group in various positions. Nation’s Restaurant News noted that “Bloomin’ Brands has four brands, including Outback, Carrabba’s Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill, and Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. The company owns and operates more than 1,450 restaurants in 46 states, Guam and 13 countries, some of which are franchised.”

Delta C.E. Praised Spanos in Memo

Delta Air Lines Chief Executive Ed Bastian told employees about Spanos’ departure in a memo on August 23. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Bastian said that Mike Spanos, who has been COO for just over a year, had approached him earlier this summer and said he was considering other opportunities. The company said in a securities filing Friday that Spanos’s departure will be effective Aug. 31 and that he will receive severance benefits, including 18 months of his base salary.”

The article noted that “Spanos’s departure also comes about a month after a botched CrowdStrike software update on July 19 sparked an operational meltdown for Delta, leading it to cancel 7,000 flights over five days and disrupting travel for more than a million passengers across the country. Delta executives have estimated the episode cost the company about $500 million…”

The article emphasized that, “Bastian has said Spanos wasn’t the one spearheading critical decisions as Delta tried to figure out how to respond to the outage. ‘He wasn’t the person that we were relying on to make the decisions,’ Bastian said in an interview earlier this month, citing Spanos’s ‘newness to the industry.’”

In fact, Spanos had no aviation experience. “When hired, Bastian said that Spanos would align Delta’s operations, customer experience and technology teams to ‘deliver an unsurpassed product and service’ for customers and employees,” the Journal wrote, the article adding that in his memo: “Bastian praised Spanos for helping to maintain the airline’s leading position and said the carrier had seen ‘significant reductions in injuries’ among workers in the first half of this year compared with last year.”

(Material from The Wall Street Journal and Nation’s Restaurant News was used in this report)