What Olive Garden Does With Uneaten Food Every Day

It's without question that Olive Garden is a household name. The chain restaurant is known for its endless menu items such as its recurring, inflation-free never-ending pasta, as well as soup, salad and breadsticks. (Admittedly, Olive Garden may eventually limit those breadsticks.) The high volume of food on offer raises the question of what happens to the unconsumed portions. Cooked food that wasn't served to customers gets donated as part of Olive Garden and Darden Restaurant's Harvest program and partnership with Feeding America.

It wasn't too long ago that restaurants, including Olive Garden, would simply toss out not only partially consumed meals, but also any surplus food that was cooked. However, since 2003, the chain's parent company, Darden Restaurants, has implemented its Harvest program. Instead of wasting perfectly fine food, Darden donates it weekly to food banks and other charitable groups. This is done in tandem with Food Donation Connection, which helps organize the process. To date, those efforts equate to over 49 million pounds of food being provided to hungry families.

Donating food is already commendable enough, but as a member of the Darden Restaurant family, Olive Garden has worked with Feeding America since 2018. Over that time, the Darden Foundation has given over $20 million to the non-profit group's food banks. This includes a 2021 partnership with Penske Truck Leasing and Lineage Logistics, which supplied Feeding America food banks in five states with a 26-foot refrigerated box truck to help transport up to 12,000 pounds of food to needy families.

The efforts didn't stop there. Darden also donated an additional $2 million to increase Feeding America's fleet by 10 more trucks per bank in 2024, and again in 2025 to add nine more trucks per bank. Over four years, this brought the total to an impressive 54 food banks served across 23 states.

For perspective, the USDA reported that 47.9 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2024. Additionally, a survey conducted by Hunger Free America found that 46% of employed adults and 58% of those unemployed ate less food because they didn't have enough money. Certainly, these numbers speak to America's current hunger woes, but Olive Garden and the Darden brands have striven to make an impact, placing them among the most charitable chain restaurants in America.