Olive Garden is an American casual restaurant chain specializing in Italian-American cuisine. It is a subsidiary of Darden Restaurants, Inc., headquartered in Orange County, Florida. On May 28, 2018, Olive Garden operated 892 locations globally and contributed $ 3.8 billion of the $ 6.9 billion in income of Darden's parents.
Video Olive Garden
History
Olive Garden started as a General Mills Inc. unit. The first Olive Garden opened on 13 December 1982, in Orlando. In 1989, there were 145 Olive Garden restaurants, making it the fastest-growing unit in the General Mills restaurant division. The Olive Garden restaurant was very popular, and the store-by-store sales immediately matched former Red Lobster brothers. The company ended up becoming an Italian-themed full-service restaurant chain in the United States.
General Mills separated its restaurant ownership as Darden Restaurant (named after Red Lobster founder Bill Darden), a stand-alone company, in 1995. Olive Garden is the most Darden-oriented network with an average 2009 check per person of $ 15.00 (USD ) versus more than $ 90 (USD) in his brother Capital Grille.
Brad Blum, former president of Olive Garden, said that sales at existing restaurants declined sharply, with a 12% drop occurring at one point, even though the company quickly built new restaurants. Sandra Pedicini from Orlando Sentinel said that "Darden rediscovered Olive Garden in the 1990s, from a chain that floundered into an industry star."
As part of February 2011, the Darden analyst conference, the parent group announced that it intends to add more than 200 Olive Garden locations in the next few years. The announcement comes after the previous announcement that the company will expand into new potential international markets for the chain, including the Middle East and Asia, due to the maturity of the North American market. The company also announced it will begin licensing franchise partnerships, a new direction for chains and mains that traditionally rely on expansion through exclusively owned sites.
The parent company Darden also announced it would begin co-locating the location of Olive Garden and his brother in Red Lobster. The new format stores are designed for smaller market locations and will have separate entrances and dining areas but operate a single kitchen and support area. The new format feeding area will be half the standard area found in the more traditional Darden chain, but the actual building will be larger than the stand-alone chain operation. The menu will also remain separate, with customers only able to order from the location where they are sitting. In 2014, Darden Restaurants announced the intention to sell Red Lobsters, thereby closing two co-location locations of Olive Garden and Red Lobster in Georgia and South Carolina, and converting the other four co-locations into a stand-alone Olive Garden restaurant.
In 2010, Olive Garden made $ 3.3 billion in sales. Its closest competitor, Carrabba's Italian Grill, earned $ 650.5 million in sales during the same year. In 2012, sales declined in Olive Garden. In the last quarter of 2011, sales at the growing Olive Garden locations declined 2.5%. Chris Muller, dean of Boston University's hotel school and former professor of restaurants at the University of Florida, said, "Why Olive Garden stand now? I do not know what it stands for." President Darden and chief operating officer, said that Olive Garden at the time was "a loved brand, but somewhat expected." The company launched three dishes for a $ 12.95 offer in an attempt to try to stop the decline.
In 2011, Olive Garden implemented a compulsory tip-out program that allowed them to cut more hourly wages of employees to $ 2.13 per hour. In October 2012, Olive Garden became one of the first national restaurant chains to test turning most of its staff into part-time employees, aiming to limit the cost of paying health benefits to full-time employees.
On July 9, 2014, Olive Garden unveiled a new logo and restaurant design. This includes the addition of online reservations and smaller lunch portions.
Maps Olive Garden
Advertising and marketing
The original slogan of Olive Garden is "Good Times, Great Salad, Olive Garden". This is used when the main focus of their ads is unlimited salad. When unlimited soups and breadsticks are added to the menu, the slogan is changed to "When you are here, you are family". The new company slogan starting in early 2013 is "We're all family here".
In the fall of 2013, Olive Garden started promotions for "Never Ending Pasta Bowl", where customers can eat all the pasta they want from $ 9.99. During the event, the restaurant serves over 13 million pasta bowls. In 2014, the restaurant continues promotions but adds "Never Ending Pasta Pass", where customers can eat all the pasta they want for a period of seven weeks for $ 99. This promotion is limited to the first 1000 people who buy online pass. The Pasta Pass promotion is again offered in the fall of 2015, 2016, and 2017.
Location
On March 22, 2013, the company operates 891 restaurants globally. There are six locations in Canada, namely Winnipeg, Manitoba (two); Calgary, Alberta; Edmonton, Alberta (two); and Langley, British Columbia near Vancouver. In the 1990s, there were various times between 10 and 15 locations in Ontario, but everything closed in the early 2000s.
The new restaurants are laid out after a farmhouse in the town of Castellina in Chianti, Tuscany, on the Rocca delle Macie vineyard. The farmhouse is home to Riserva di Fizzano's restaurant adjacent to the company's Culinary Institute founded in 1999.
By the end of 2012, two restaurants opened in Mexico City: Interlomas and Reforma Ave. Currently, there are four restaurants in Mexico City, two in Monterrey, Nuevo LeÃÆ'³n, and one in LeÃÆ'³n, Guanajuato.
In 2013, Olive Garden opened in Kuwait. It is located on The Avenue. In 2014, Olive Garden is opened in Lima, Peru by the name of Olive Italian Restaurant but with the same menu as the original name restaurant, and is also located on the main street.
In 2014, Brazil received its first restaurant, which opened at the terminal 3 of Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo.
In May 2015, Olive Garden opened its first restaurant in Mid Valley Megamall in Malaysia.
In May 2016, an Olive Garden restaurant is being built in Ecuador's largest shopping center, El Dorado, located in Guayaquil.
In May 2018, Olive Garden opened two new restaurants in Gran Plaza, Guadalajara, Mexico and Cancun, Mexico.
Cuisine
Olive Garden serves several types of Italian-American cuisine including pasta, steak and salad dishes. The company advertises breadstick products and centers the lunch menu around it. In addition, the company advertises that its soups and sauces are made fresh at every location every day, rather than importing them from street vendors or from outside.
In June 2010, Olive Garden began importing parts of the menu format from its sister chain, Seasons 52; it started selling a smaller dessert section called "dolcini". These new products are modeled after the Season-52 "mini-indulgence" product line.
Criticism
Tuscan Institute
Although Olive Garden's advertising has a cooking agency in Tuscany, news outlets have reported that, in fact, there are no institutions or schools. Olive Garden sends a number of managers, coaches and cooks to Tuscany each year, but they live in a rented hotel and spend only a few hours at a local restaurant out of season.
Investor criticism investor
In September 2014, Starboard Value, a hedge fund activist who has acquired most of Darden's shares and challenged Darden's management, released a 294-slide presentation assembled by its founder, Jeff Smith, which focused on the way companies wasted money and failed. to satisfy customers. Chief among them is the lack of Olive Garden, which gets considerable media attention. Starboard claims they justify replacing the director of Darden in the upcoming election with a slate sponsored by hedge funds.
It mentions details like unlimited breadsticks offered by network visitors, which are too much discarded because they tend to be stale, claim Smith, and pay extra for custom-sized straws. The chain menu was too complicated, with some of the 96 items unreasonable, like a vegetable lasagna given a chicken topping ("if you want meat in your lasagna, you'll order lasagna meat" read the slide). The chain has also stopped the general practice of adding salt to the water where it cooks pasta to guarantee a longer guarantee on the pot, which makes Smith doubt it. "Pasta is a core dish of Olive Garden and should be cooked properly." He included photos of poorly executed dishes purchased at Olive Gardens compared to the photos on the chain's website, along with excerpts from online reviews posted by disappointed customers.
Darden's management responded with a much shorter presentation two days later. Without discussing specifically, he admits most of the Starboard criticisms are valid and that the company has already responded to the problem. He defended an unlimited breadsticks policy as "conveying Italian hospitality" and denied any other claims hedge funds had made: packing for take-home food that the hedge fund claimed was safe dishwasher and thus unnecessarily expensive in fact, only microwaves were safe. However, a month later shareholders chose to replace the entire board of directors of the company with Starboard slate, a result described as a "rare epic failure".
See also
- List of Italian restaurants
References
External links
- Official website
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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