Olive Garden Is Expanding Home Delivery After the Holidays

Olive Garden is expanding a delivery program after the holidays, helping customers get meals quicker.

Nation’s Restaurant News reported that Darden Restaurants Inc., which owns Olive Garden and plans to roll out individual-order delivery, coordinated with Uber Direct, to most of its Olive Garden restaurants after the holidays. Darden hopes this will drive speedier orders, reduce training time, and strengthen its data and insight capabilities at nine brands, executives said on a Q2 2025 earnings call last Thursday.

To shed more light on the initiative, Darden CEO and President Rick Cardenas shared insights during the call, highlighting the program’s progress and noting the lack of advertising so far.

“They are not promoting it yet in order to focus on the technology integration and operational execution,” said Cardenas. “The pilot has gone 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.”

He added, “In order to get the item or the delivery, you have to go to our website to try to take place that order. 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.”

“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,” Cardenas stated during the call. “Uber had to make some changes to their systems to work the way we wanted it to work.”

Olive Garden Began Testing the Waters of This Rollout in Late 2024

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Olive Garden (@olivegarden)

Darden Restaurants Inc. began a pilot program for Olive Garden delivery in late 2024 after striking a deal with Uber in September. As the year ends, the Uber Direct handoff is only in 100 restaurants so far.

Darden expects that the delivery program will be implemented nationwide by May 2025, according to The Takeout. The deliveries will be facilitated by Uber Direct, which means customers can order directly from the restaurant rather than through Uber Eats.

Most importantly, Olive Garden wants its new takeout program to do little to disrupt the dining experience of its in-house customers. Darden said it was essential that customers do not see delivery drivers entering and leaving the restaurant regularly to pick up orders. Therefore, Olive Garden implemented a process different from other delivery services. The company has designated pickup areas where employees bring delivery orders to waiting drivers.

“It was important for us to find a way to address this guest needs state without disrupting the team member or guest experience,” Cardenas said during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call.