Here's What Olive Garden Does With Leftover Food

Olive Garden is a dinner staple in the United States. Undoubtedly, Americans love Italian food — but perhaps even more than that, they love abundance. This might explain Olive Garden's success. The restaurant is best known for its unlimited breadsticks, salad, and soup. It also offers not one but two pasta passes: the Lifetime Pasta Pass and the Never-Ending Pasta Pass. But with nearly 40% of the U.S. food supply going to waste, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), what happens to all the food that isn't eaten at restaurants where volume is a selling point?

Luckily for the bottomless breadstick brigade, Olive Garden is part of the solution, not the problem. The chain is owned by Darden, a restaurant group committed to combating waste, which has created the Darden Harvest program to allow U.S. branches of the Italian-inspired eatery to give leftover food to local charities and food kitchens. Darden also works in partnership with the Feeding America program to further these efforts.

We've written about how many restaurant chains Darden owns in the past. Other brands in its portfolio include LongHorn Steakhouse, Yard House, Ruth's Chris Steak House, and The Capital Grille. All of them donate their leftover food, so you can enjoy your dinner without feeling guilty about waste (as long as you take your own leftovers home for later, of course).

Olive Garden, as well as other Darden restaurants, donate uneaten food using roughly the same process through the Darden Harvest program (though the beneficiaries of the program vary from location to location). The restaurants never donate food that has been ordered and sent back or partially eaten. Rather, surplus food that hasn't been ordered but needs to be used is prepared by the kitchen and then frozen. The freshly frozen food is then picked up weekly by food banks and non-profit distribution partners, before being given to people who need it in the local community. In total, Darden-owned restaurants have donated over 146 million pounds of food to people in need. That's a lot of breadsticks, salad, and pasta.

On top of giving away leftover food that would otherwise end up in a landfill, Darden donates around $2 million to Feeding America every year. In addition, Darden has also partnered with Penske Truck Leasing to provide more than 50 refrigerated trucks to Feeding America food banks. As the largest charity working to end hunger in the U.S., Feeding America works with over 200 food banks and more than 60,000 meal programs regularly. It also provides disaster relief across the country whenever and wherever it's needed. While there are plenty of interesting facts about Olive Garden, its parent company's generosity has to be the best one!