Why America Is Addicted to Olive Garden

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CEO Clarence Otis is bringing Darden's brands together in a single building for the first time | Photograph by John Loomis

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Kitchen Monitors run Meal Pacing software created by Patti Reilly White and her IT group

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The Darden Menu

Patti Reilly White, 53, chief information officer, leads the 170-person team at Darden that introduces order and predictability to this volatile business. She's another Darden veteran (18 years and counting), a former government consultant who liked that the company preferred to develop its own software. In the 1970s, Darden had worked with Burger King to build the first restaurant point-of-sale system; it tracked sales in real time, eliminating the need for managers to call in the previous day's results. These days, managers rely on Guest Forecasting, another software program developed internally.

"In every area where technology can be applied, Darden has a considerable lead on other businesses," says Muller, who has followed the industry for 20 years. Darden was computerizing its guest surveys in the 1990s, he says, when other restaurants were relying on comment boxes.

On a Thursday night in April, Erin Harvell, the culinary manager at the Olive Garden in Wayne, New Jersey, reviews the week's forecasts in a tiny office off the kitchen. They're within 1% to 4% of the actual turnout. The biggest gap -- 630 guests instead of 660 -- was on a rainy night. Guest Forecasting spells out the appropriate staffing and food preparation -- how many fettuccine Alfredo orders to expect, how much sauce to make in the morning. Over the past two years, Darden has reduced unplanned hours by more than 40% and trimmed excess food costs by 10%. "We don't want zero waste," says White, "because we don't want to run out of anything on the menu." The goal is no more than 9% waste, and the system tells each restaurant how it's doing.

In the kitchen, cooks are hustling, directed by a program called Meal Pacing that White's team introduced across the company two years ago. Traditionally, an expediter would try to ensure that meals for a given table were ready at the same time so the shrimp entrée didn't sit at the window getting cold while the 14-ounce steak was still on the grill. Meal Pacing displays the optimal work flow for each party on eight screens in the kitchen and monitors each station's progress, with color-coded warnings when one falls behind. The screens also show if the staff is meeting Darden's one-minute rule: Food should arrive at the table within one minute of being ready.

Meal Pacing, says White, is the ideal restaurant support tool in that it benefits employees as well as guests by taking much of the guesswork out of juggling scores of simultaneous orders. The restaurants can turn tables faster in peak times, which increases revenue. And guest-satisfaction scores are up.

Now White's group is addressing wait times. Other than Capital Grille and Seasons 52, Darden restaurants don't accept reservations, and the crowds can get ridiculously big. Some guests are willing to wait an hour or more, but Darden knows it's losing business when they do. White is running one pilot program with handheld devices to speed things up; waiters submit orders and payments at the table, eliminating lag time. This summer, she's launching another project to share wait times across restaurants so that a hostess can steer customers to nearby Darden establishments that aren't as busy. The next logical step, White says, would be to give customers online access to that information.

After all, as Bill Darden used to say, "not everybody's a gourmet, but everybody can tell time."

The next place where Darden's drive to collaborate across restaurants could really pay off is LongHorn. Steak is the second-biggest sector in casual dining, and LongHorn gives Darden a ready-made challenger to No. 1 Outback Steakhouse. LongHorn generated $900 million in revenue over the past 12 months with fewer than 330 restaurants -- and only one west of Oklahoma. The challenge is differentiating the chain in a homogeneous category, which is where president Dave George is hoping Darden's brand expertise will help.

George, 53, is barrel-chested and gregarious, the kind of guy you want manning the backyard grill. (The appetizer of crispy shrimp with peppers and garlic butter was his idea.) Before the acquisition, he marveled at Olive Garden's 14-year streak of quarterly same-store sales growth. "Every year, even in down times," he says. "Man, that's impressive. It's [Babe] Ruthian." Now he's privy to its secrets, and he's eating them up. "I call it the consumer-insight gold mine. We had insights at Rare, but quite frankly, I think Darden knew more about Rare's customers. Nobody looks at the customer more."