All General Mills restaurant holdings were spun off into a stand-alone company in , named Darden after Bill Darden, the founder of Red Lobster which was itself sold off in July Restaurants are modeled after a farmhouse in the town of Castellina in Chianti, Tuscany.
Check out more unusual Olive Garden facts. Instead, Olive Garden restaurants used to be owned by the company and no one but the company. However, the previous model became outdated when the people in charge of Olive Garden started contemplating a new wave of expansion, with the result that they decided that franchising would be the best way forward. The reveal that Olive Garden would be franchising came at around the same time as a reveal that it would be opening a lot of new locations as well as a reveal that it would be expanding into foreign markets.
As a result, it is possible that these choices were connected to one another, which would make sense because foreign markets are a natural choice for franchising. After all, while franchising provides plenty of benefits for the franchisees, it can provide benefits for franchisors as well, with an excellent example being the increased local know-how.
The people in charge of Olive Garden made the choice to pursue foreign expansion because the core market in North America was mature. In other words, the North America market already had most of the Olive Garden restaurants that it could support, meaning that adding new locations would have resulted in marginal gains. Meanwhile, foreign markets had not been saturated to the same extent, meaning that there were richer pickings in said locations provided that Olive Garden could make the adjustments needed to succeed in similar but not quite the same business environments.
In the past when Olive Garden and Red Lobster were still run by the same people, there were co-locations. The co-locations were meant to cater to smaller markets, which were big enough to be profitable but not big enough to support both a full-fledged Olive Garden and a full-fledged Red Lobster. However, the co-locations were still a relatively new concept by the time that the choice was made to sell Red Lobster. When that happened, two of the six locations were closed down, presumably because the local markets were deemed to be insufficiently large to support the option that happened to the other four locations, which was to convert them into Olive Garden restaurants.
Olive Garden has become well-established enough for it to be considered a relatively well-liked icon for a lot of people out there. Unfortunately, it has also become well-established enough for it to have suffered some of the issues of longevity in the business world, with an excellent example being the dilution of its brand.
In the not so distant past, there were people who criticized the restaurant for being so diluted that they could no longer figure out what it was supposed to be focused upon, which is a huge problem for businesses because a memorable presence makes it much easier for them to sell their products and services to interested individuals. The core market for Olive Garden is the United States. However, considering that Canada is so close, it should come as no surprise to learn that there are Canadian locations as well.
With that said, it is curious to note that Olive Garden has no presence in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. There used to be between 10 and 15 Olive Garden restaurants in the province of Ontario in the s, but all of them went down during the early s with no exceptions whatsoever.
However, there are some businesses that take this to an extreme. Speaking of which, Olive Garden has also engaged in experimenting with converting most of its workforce from full-time employees into part-time employees. Essentially, this is meant to let it stop paying for expensive healthcare benefits for its full-time employees, which is something that plenty of other businesses in a wide range of other sectors has engaged in as well.
Sometimes, Olive Garden has made claims about having a cooking institute in Tuscany. Instead, what happens is that Olive Garden sends some of its staff members to Tuscany on an annual basis, where they stay at a hotel but spend a few hours in a local restaurant.
At one point in time, Darden Restaurants got its entire Board of Directors replaced. In short, what happened was that an activist hedge fund called Starboard Value launched a blistering attack on various faults. The criticisms voiced by Starboard Value covered a wide range of topics. For example, there was mention of bad pasta-making as well as mention of nonsensical menu options such as vegetable lasagna topped with chicken.
By: Nancy Hayden. Pasta image by Yvonne Bogdanski from Fotolia. Related Articles Restaurants on the Courtney Campbell Famous Black Chefs of Louisiana. Different Kinds of Fast Foods. Mellow Mushroom Nutrition Guide. Dinner Cruises in Kemah, Texas.
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