![]() The restaurant chain’s sales of $3.64 billion in fiscal year 2014 were 1.1 percent below those of fiscal year 2013. Olive Garden’s sales have begun to decline. Olive Garden is also Darden’s most value-oriented chain, with an average check of $16.75 per person (versus $72 per person at Capital Grille). Olive Garden is also Darden’s largest chain in terms of employees and locations: of the company’s 150,000 workers, 96,000 (64 percent) work at one of Olive Garden’s 831 locations in the United States. (In 2014, in response to a hedge-fund takeover effort, the company sold off Red Lobster.) Olive Garden accounts for $3.6 billion in annual sales and brings in approximately 58 percent of Darden Restaurants’ total revenue since the Red Lobster sale. The company originally consisted of Red Lobster, then Olive Garden, then later grew to include Capital Grill Steakhouse, LongHorn Steakhouse, and other popular American brands. Darden’s growth was based, at least in part, on “using assembly-line methods like those employed at the company’s fast-food counterpart, McDonald’s.”ĭarden Restaurants is today the largest full-service directly owned restaurant company in the world. In 1995 General Mills spun off its restaurant holdings into a separate corporation, Darden Restaurants. The company began in 1982 as a brand-expansion experiment by the food manufacturing and food-service conglomerate General Mills, Inc., and quickly grew into the largest chain of Italian-themed full-service restaurants in the United States. Unlike the other large chain restaurant corporations profiled in this book, there is no hometown origin story, no hometown founder who started poor and made it big, for Olive Garden. However, there is at least one way in which the Olive Garden and many chain Italian restaurants serving Italian food in America are antithetical to restaurant culture in Italy-through the practice of tipping. ![]() Beyond size, however, Olive Garden has made a name for itself by using the casual or family-style restaurant concept to bring Tuscan-style Italian cuisine to the mainstream. Olive Garden is the largest retail brand of Darden Restaurants, the world’s largest full-service restaurant conglomerate, and the world’s largest employer of tipped employees. With their claim, “When you’re here, you’re family,” Olive Garden has become synonymous with America’s proliferation of family-style restaurants. ![]() ![]() Reprinted from "FORKED: A New Standard for American Dining" ![]()
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