Shareholder Calls Out Olive Garden For Being Lousy in a 300-Slide Presentation

So it has come to this. One of Olive Garden’s partners is sick of how awful Olive Garden really is, and at the forefront of these complaints is the notorious unlimited breadsticks practice.

Wallstreet Journal reports that Starboard Value LP, is more than just throwing out ideas, they want to see Olive Garden take real action in changing the “wasteful” nature of giving out unlimited breadsticks. We can take a deep breath for now as Starboard is not asking to do away with the breadstick program altogether, but they’d like the servers to ask if the table would like more breadsticks instead of automatically refilling them. This proposition was one of many in 300-pages worth of suggestions to try and make Olive Garden a not-so-shitty Italian restaurant.

Starboard believes that between their breadstick suggestion, improvements in food quality, and cutting down customer wait times, they could see a spike in shares between $67 and $86, up to 78% above the $48 they are currently hovering around.

Starboard insists that there are between $4 million and $5 million worth of wasted food per year and cutting down the breadstick distribution to one per customer, and only bringing out more upon request would fix that problem. Then Starboard just went bat-shit crazy and suggested that Olive Garden should focus on serving “authentic” Italian food.

“If you Google ‘How to cook pasta’, the first step of Pasta 101 is to salt the water,” Starboard said. “How does the largest Italian dining concept in the world not salt the water for pasta?” That pretty much sums up the clusterfuck that is Olive Garden.

Olive Garden said it has its ears open to new suggestions and value input from its shareholders.

Finally, someone put Olive Garden on blast. Ball’s in your court, OG.