Olive Garden

History

The Olive Garden started as a unit of General Mills. The Olive Garden's first restaurant was opened on December 13, 1982, in Orlando, Florida, by co-founders Blaine Sweatt, Mark Given, Gino DeSantis and Dave Manuchia. By 1989, there were 145 The Olive Garden restaurants, making it the fastest-growing units in the General Mills restaurant division. The Olive Garden restaurants were uniformly popular, and the chain's per-store sales soon matched former sister company Red Lobster. The company eventually became the largest chain of Italian-themed full-service restaurants in the United States.

General Mills spun off its restaurant holdings as Darden Restaurants (named after Red Lobster founder Bill Darden), a stand-alone company, in 1995. Olive Garden removed "The" from its name in 1998 as part of a rebranding which introduced the slogan "When you're here, you're family". In 2009, Olive Garden was Darden's most inexpensive restaurant chain with an average check per person of $15.00 (USD) versus over $90 at its sibling Capital Grille.

Brad Blum, a former president of Olive Garden, said that sales in existing restaurants sharply decreased, with a 12% decline occurring at one point, even though the company was quickly establishing new restaurants. Sandra Pedicini of the Orlando Sentinel said that "Darden reinvented the Olive Garden in the 1990s, from a floundering chain into an industry star".

As part of a February 2011 Darden analyst conference, the parent group announced it intended to add more than 200 Olive Garden locations in the following few years. The announcement came after a previous announcement that the company would be expanding into potential new 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 would begin licensing franchising partnerships, a new direction for the chain and its parent, which had traditionally relied on expansion via company-owned locations exclusively.

In 2011, Darden announced that it was going to begin co-locating Olive Garden and sibling chain Red Lobster locations. The new restaurants were designed for smaller markets and had separate entrances and dining areas, but unified kitchen and support areas. Menus remained separate, with customers only able to order from the location they are seated in. In 2014, Darden Restaurants announced intentions to sell Red Lobster, to close two Olive Garden and Red Lobster co-locations in Georgia and South Carolina, and to convert the remaining four co-locations into standalone Olive Garden restaurants.