Influx

There’s a good article in Fast Company about restaurant powerhouse Darden. The story talks about how the company is trying hard to re-tool its business to be relevant to a changing American food landscape.

Of particular interest is the section on The Olive Garden where the insight about emotional togetherness helped the brand deliver a benefit above and beyond the food and how the company strives to bring more Italian authenticity to the chain with the establishment of a cooking school in Tuscany and field trips.

“Olive Garden promises “an idealized Italian family meal, whether you’re
Italian or not,” says Pickens. When General Mills launched the chain in
1982, it was an affordable Italian restaurant — a safe choice, nothing
surprising. By the 1990s, it had hundreds of locations, but the menu
had grown stale and sales were in decline. “It lost its culinary and
cultural soul,” says John Caron, Olive Garden’s head of marketing.

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. Today,
many items on the dinner menu carry a CIT logo, designating that they
were inspired by a staffer’s experience in Italy.

These experiences — and menu items — provide an authenticity
that’s rare for a chain. Take risotto, an Italian staple that made its
way into Olive Garden only two years ago. In a pilot program at a small
number of restaurants, diners were initially tepid. As attitudes
changed, the test kitchens took on the preparation challenge; risotto
requires 20 minutes to cook, longer than customers are willing to wait.
Chefs eventually found a more expensive variety of rice that could be
cooked most of the way through in advance, finished off just before
serving, and still retain the desired taste and texture. Risotto is now
part of a CIT-inspired entree designed to entice more adventurous
diners who might not have considered Olive Garden

While The Olive Garden might be the furthest from many people’s perception of an authentic Italian experience, it’s clear that the brand has to compete on a mass scale, by finding an emotional connection and pushing its employees to be educated, gives it a better chance of success than its major competitors.

Posted by Ed Cotton