Olive Garden: Unsalted Pasta Water, Lifetime Passes and a 294-Slide Revolt

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Olive Garden was created by General Mills, the cereal maker, which opened the first restaurant in Orlando, Florida on December 13, 1982, with co-founders including Blaine Sweatt. Following the Red Lobster playbook, it reached 145 locations by 1989, and in 1995 General Mills spun off its restaurants as Darden Restaurants, named for Red Lobster founder Bill Darden. In 1998 "The" was dropped from the name and the slogan became "When you're here, you're family." The chain's Culinary Institute of Tuscany, promoted in ads, amounted to managers staying at a rented hotel and visiting a local restaurant in the off season. In 2009 its average check was $15, against more than $90 at Darden's Capital Grille, and unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks cost the company very little.

The Never Ending Pasta Bowl sold more than 13 million bowls in 2013, a $99 seven-week Pasta Pass was limited to the first 1,000 buyers in 2014, and a $500 lifetime pass followed in 2019. After sales slipped from $3.3 billion in 2010, the activist hedge fund Starboard Value, led by Jeff Smith, released a 294-slide presentation in 2014 attacking the 96-item menu, custom-length straws and piles of stale breadsticks, and revealing that kitchens had stopped salting pasta water to extend cookware warranties. Darden conceded much of it, and a month later shareholders replaced its entire board.

• Darden's rebuttal defended unlimited breadsticks and corrected Starboard that its takeout containers were microwave safe, not dishwasher safe.
• A 2011 tip-out program let more server wages fall to the $2.13 federal tipped minimum, and in 2012 the chain tested shifting most staff to part-time.
• Darden pledged in 2016 to drop battery-caged eggs by 2018 and crated pork by 2025, and later widened the cage-free pledge to international locations by 2027.
• Olive Garden was the largest U.S. casual dining chain from 2018 until Texas Roadhouse passed it in 2025.
• In August 2019 Darden released a statement backed by financial records denying rumors it was funding Donald Trump's 2020 campaign.