Case Study : Darden Restaurants Inc.

Senior Management of PepsiCo is evaluating the potential acquisition of two companies – Carts of Colorado and California Pizza Kitchen – in order to expand the company’s restaurant business. If indeed PepsiCo decides to pursue the acquisition of one or both, they must decide how to align each of these business units in its historically decentralized management approach and how to forge relationships between the acquired business units and existing business units. In their evaluation, Senior Management is faced with the question of whether the necessary capital investment in order to purchase one or both of the businesses can be profitable for each of the acquired business units, but must

Olive Garden was founded in 1982 owned and operated by Darden Restaurants. Darden Restaurants is the nations largest most successful restaurant chain. Darden Restaurants also own and operates The Red Lobster chain. Olive garden offers a family home style dining with inspiring recipes from Tuscany, Italy. Their Culinary school was founded in 1999 in Tuscany, Italy. Where they train their chefs and create menus for the restaurant. With a remarkable wine selection and great home cook Italian meal and a affordable menu price I have always enjoyed my stay at the Olive Garden. Olive Garden has received many award throughout their history. Recent awards came from the Nation's Restaurant News which presented Olive Garden with the "Menu Masters" award

Darden Restaurants, Incorporated began with its founder William (Bill) Darden in 1938. At the age of nineteen, Bill opened his first restaurant, The Green Frog, in Georgia. Thirty years later, Bill opened another restaurant, Red Lobster. His focus for the restaurant was to provide quality seafood at affordable prices to landlocked cities. Located in the center of Florida, Lakeland was the perfect city to begin Bill’s restaurant legacy. Offering a prime location, the city sat in the center of the state, one of the furthest points from water in Florida.

In this paper I will compare my favorite restaurant, Olive Garden, to its most direct competition which in this case is Milestones Bar and Grill. These two restaurants are in competition because they target the same market and are located within one block of each other. Each restaurant is owned by one of top restaurant companies in North America. Olive Garden is owned by Darden Restaurants which also owns Red Lobster, Smokey Bones, Bahama Breeze, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Seasons 52. Cara Operations Ltd. is the owner of the Milestones chain as well as Montana's, Swiss Chalet, Coza, Kelsey's, and several others. Although there are several other restaurants within the same area as the two I have chosen, I

The restaurant industry has been booming since the 90’s to now. With over 600,000 restaurants in the United States alone, and about 14.4 million employees

Red Lobster is a casual dining seafood restaurant established in 1968 by Bill Darden and Charley Woodsby. The flagship restaurant opened in Lakeland, Florida and expanded in two years to four more locations in Florida. Darden’s goal was to supply customers without easy access to the coast with fresh seafood. In 1970, Darden sold Red Lobster to General Mills and continued as President until 1975. Red Lobster’s rapid expansion across the United States gave Red Lobster the notoriety as the first casual dining restaurant to reach a national market. The restaurant also became the first with national television advertisement. The popularity of a seafood restaurant in inland areas gave General Mills the

The Dariette is owned by Rich and Jolene Seltz of Fort Dodge. The bought the Dariette in the beginning of 2008 and have run the business for nine years.

Darden Restaurants owns a number of specialty brands that are located throughout the United States and Canada. These include: the Olive Garden, Red Lobster, LongHorn Steakhouse, the Capital Grille, Bahama Breeze, Seasons 52, Eddie V's Prime Seafood and Wildfish Seafood Grille. The company has 2 thousand locations and they employ 135 thousand people. Their primary markets are middle class to affluent families. ("Our Company," 2012)

Darden Restaurants, Inc. has been a public company since 1995. A company born of the chain Red Lobster, Darden is a recent spin-off as a result of mergers and acquisitions of various types. Publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, Darden (DRI) is the parent company of Red Lobster, The Olive Garden, the now-defunct China Coast concept, and a new “Floribbean” concept: Bahama Breezes.

Darden takes its suppliers very seriously, prior to doing business, the supplier must be qualified and a Total Quality Management Team assigned to that vendor. Product tracking occurs with inspection teams that identify the lot ID, atmospheric packaging, and the ability to track the order from origin to receipt of goods. For their many restaurants, Darden structures its supplies from 5 continents and thousands of suppliers, but insists on independent and accurate assessments in order to maintain relationships. Everything must be JIT inventory except smallware.

The Panera Bread Company began in 1981 as Au Bon Pain Co., Inc. Founded by Ron Shaich and Louis Kane, the company thrived along the east coast of the United States and internationally throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s and became the dominant operator within the bakery-café category. In the early 1990’s, Saint Louis Bread company, a chain of 20 bakery-cafes were acquired by the Au Bon Pain Co. Following this purchase, the company redesigned the newly acquired company and increased unit volumes by 75%. This new concept was named Panera Bread. Top management chose to sell their previous bakery-café known as Au Bon Pain Co. due to the financial and managerial needs of Panera. In order for Panera to become

As mention before, Restaurant Brands International is a merger company that contains Burger King, a coffee shop and a restaurant called Tim Hortons. Since it was a merger that occurred in 2014, there isn’t much info for the company; however, since Burger King has been almost as old as McDonalds so much of the info will come from Burger King. Burger King is practically the same as McDonalds created in 1950s yet a few years later after its competitor was born. The main difference of how it was created was that Burger King started off like a stove and that name of the stove was named Insta-Boiler.

Multi-unit Restaurant Business concepts are represented by units with independent operators. The concepts are categorized into three industry segments 1) specialty establishments, 2) quick service restaurants, and 3) casual dining. An excellent example of this concept business is The Darden family of restaurants, founded from Lakeland, FL, which features the following most successful and recognizable brands in full- service dining: Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Long Horn Steakhouse, Bahama Breeze, Seasons 52, The Capital Grille, Eddie V’s, and Yard House. According to their last SEC 10-k report filing, they own and operate worldwide more than 2,000 restaurants, employ 185,000 people, and serve more than 423 million meals a year. The

This report is a Tutor Marked Assignment (TMA01) in Fundamental of Senior Management, submitted as a part of the requirement for the Master of Business Administration (MBA) Degree program at the Arab Open University (Oman Branch).It’s dealing with a case study of one of the biggest quick casual restaurant in China Lvendary café “ that is managed by a new general manager call Louis Chen who worked hard to run Lvendary Chin. “Mia Foster who is recently appointed as chief executive “CEO” was surprised to find that the Chinese subsidiary submitted all management and financial reports to Denver in its own format instead of apply U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) Foster felt strongly that this would not be a sustainable practice as the China operations grew into a larger portion of total revenue. (Bartlett, 2011)

Answer to Question 1. MITRE is following the committed expert strategy. Its recruiting focus is targeted. MITRE does not resort to broad recruiting channels because it’s costly and doesn’t attract the right kind of candidates. MITRE mostly uses internal sources to hire new people. The company’s current employees do most of the recruitment and, in return, they get bonuses and opportunities to improve their team by suggesting candidates that they find suitable.