Part of Darden’s strategy is an updated version of the comment cards Bill Darden put on tables at the first Red Lobster. Over the past year, Darden’s 22-member customer-insight team invited 16 million customers across its six chains to answer guest-satisfaction questionnaires. The company won’t disclose results but claims the feedback predicts shifts in traffic at individual locations. “In restaurants, consumers are always shopping the competition, which reinforces the need to monitor how you’re doing,” says J.J. Buettgen, head of consumer insights. “We sample guests every day. We want to know how their last meal was.”
Given the competitive pressures, says Otis, it’s more important than ever for the company’s 180,000 employees to work collaboratively. Its three major brands should operate as test labs, sharing the best ideas and even personnel, while maintaining their distinctive identities.
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The Olive Garden brand is built around the notion that guests are treated like family, but Pickens knows that isn’t likely to happen unless employees feel like family too. Employees, he says, need to believe that serving meals and cleaning tables and cooking pasta in a hot kitchen is meaningful.
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Pickens starts every meeting with Olive Garden senior executives by reading letters from customers and employees — a woman’s description of her celebration at Olive Garden after having survived cancer; the reunion of an EMS worker, a 911 operator, and the boy they saved from drowning; the story of a young woman who dined every Tuesday at the table where her fiancé proposed before he was shipped off to Iraq. The managers share the letters with their staffs.
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Darden turned to research. “The key consumer insight was that people missed the emotional comfort and connectivity that comes with family,” says chief operating officer Drew Madsen, then the chain’s head of marketing. “People come to a restaurant for both physical and emotional nourishment. The physical is the food; and the emotional is how you feel when you leave.”
Olive Garden executives began tying everything to this mythical Italian family, adopting the tagline, “When you’re here, you’re family.” New locations were designed to suggest Italian farmhouses, with a large family-style table, modeled on one in a Florentine trattoria. Then executives formed a partnership with actual Italians: Olive Garden’s Culinary Institute of Tuscany (CIT). It was a “stroke of genius,” says Dennis Lombardi, a veteran food consultant. Eleven times a year, the company sends 14 top employees, many of whom have never set foot in Italy, to spend a week in an 11th-century village in Tuscany and learn from Sergio and Daniela Zingarelli, a husband and wife who operate a restaurant, winery, and inn. The couple and other local experts expose the Americans to everything from how olive oil gets pressed to how to layer flavors in a Bolognese sauce. The Olive Garden employees buy fresh vegetables at a market in Florence and prepare a multicourse Italian meal. “It’s like getting into Harvard,” says Pickens. “It’s not, of course, but you know what I mean.” Since 1999, some 850 employees have attended CIT; 80% of them are still with the company.
There are also what Caron calls “ideation trips” to CIT, during which chefs work in local Tuscan restaurants. They have come back with dozens of ideas that have served to expand and update Olive Garden’s menu. Gone are the days of puzzling hybrids like Italian nachos.
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Foodies may scoff, but standardizing the preparation of Chianti-braised short ribs and risotto at hundreds of restaurants by thousands of employees requires innovation and creativity. And the inventory can’t just sit around on the shelf. Leftover ingredients are refrigerated in day-stamped plastic bags, and anyone using an outdated item is fired on the spot.
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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.
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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.
but we do need a crib!! if its a nice enough crib we would be willing to trade the wii and rockband AND pay the difference if we LOVE it.
