Olive Garden to roll out delivery program after the holidays

Parent company Darden Restaurants shows same-store sales gains for most brands in Q2 Darden Restaurants Inc. plans to roll out individual-order delivery, coordinated with Uber Direct, to most of its Olive Garden restaurants after the holidays, company executives said Thursday. The Orlando, Fla.-based casual-dining company, which reported earnings for the second quarter ended Nov. 24, said it would potentially complete the rollout by the end of this quarter. Olive Garden launched its Uber Direct pilot in about 100 restaurants in September. “They are not promoting it yet in order to focus on the technology integration and operational execution,” Rick Cardenas, Darden CEO and president, said during Thursday’s analysts’ call. “The pilot has gone very well. … Olive Garden is on track to begin rolling it out to the rest of the system after the holidays, with potential completion by the end of the third quarter.” Cardenas said the delivery program has had little promotion. “In order to get the item or the delivery, you have to go to our website to try to take place that order,” he said. “And if the restaurant is in the pilot, it'll ask you if you want delivery or not. So that's the only way people know about it. You know, we're averaging somewhere about 1.5% of sales across the 100 restaurants on delivery.” The Uber partnership includes marketing funds as well, Cardenas said. “The Olive Garden marketing team is working on plans to deploy those dollars and some more with marketing this delivery,” he said, adding that the technology has “worked flawlessly.” “We had a few little tweaks here or there, but the IT [information technology] team and the Uber team did a great job integrating our proprietary point-of-sale into their systems,” he said. “Uber had to make some changes to their systems to work the way we wanted it to work.” Darden’s acquisition of the now-140-unit Chuy’s full-service chain was closed in October. “The leadership team, including Chuy's president, Steve Hislop, and their operations leader, John Corman, is in place,” Cardenas said. “The integration process has just begun and is being led by the same team that successfully directed the Ruth's Chris integration.” Darden acquired the Ruth’s Chris brand in 2023. “The timeline for this integration will likely be a little longer than the one for Ruth's Chris, because we are about to begin rolling out the next generation of our point-of-sale system,” Cardenas said. “This system currently supports nine different brands and is the nerve center for our competitive advantage of extensive data and insights. This is not an off-the-shelf product. Rather, it's a proprietary system that we first built more than 20 years ago and continued to maintain and enhance ourselves.” For the second quarter ended Nov. 24, Darden’s earnings were $215.1 million, or $1.82 a share, compared to $212.1 million, or $1.76 a share, in the same period a year ago. Sales were up to $2.890 billion, compared to $2.727 billion in the prior-year quarter. Same-restaurant sales systemwide were 2.4%, including increases of 2% at Olive Garden and 7.5% at LongHorn Steakhouse. Fine-dining restaurants declined 5.8%, and other restaurants went up by 0.7%. As of Nov. 24, Darden had 2,152 restaurants, including 925 Olive Garden units, 580 LongHorns, 181 Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchens and 104 Chuy’s. The company also had 88 Yard House units, 82 Ruth’s Chris Steak House locations, 70 Capital Grilles, 45 Seasons 52, 43 Bahama Breeze, 30 Eddie V’s, and four Capital Burger units. Contact Ron Ruggless at Ronald.Ruggless@Informa.com Follow him on X/Twitter: @RonRuggless