Olive Garden: Don’t count on home delivery anytime soon

Darden Restaurant leaders are giving the strongest sign yet that its flagship Olive Garden chain won’t be delivering a plate of fettuccine Alfredo to your doorstep.

Even though the Orlando-based restaurant chain has ventured into catering on orders of $100 or more, Darden CEO Gene Lee said last week during an earnings call with investors that the company doesn’t want to jump into the delivery business on small orders.

“Right now, we have no interest in delivering a $10 meal to an individual household,” Lee said. “That’s just not a business that we think we want to be involved in right now.”

The criticism of home delivery came as Darden reported increased sales and profits for the first quarter of its operating year last week. The number of customers is up, and the company’s simplification strategies are working.

Olive Garden and Darden are bullish on its growing catering business, saying about one-eighth of all restaurant sales are done that way. They expect it to grow to as much as 20 percent in coming years.

But so far Olive Garden has limited its out-of-restaurant services to takeout and catering on deliveries of more than $100 with big dishes of pasta and lasagna.

Restaurants have been ambitious about ramping up delivery services, sometimes on their own and sometimes with the help of third-party companies such as Uber Eats and Amazon Restaurants.

But those services take a big chunk of sales out of every order, usually 20 to 30 percent.

Darden has experimented on a limited basis with third-party companies but hasn’t rolled it out on a large scale.

“I don’t anticipate entering into a third party delivery agreement in a meaningful way,” Lee said. “There are things that I really don’t like about that business.”