Outsourcing Offshore at Darden

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Case Study: Outsourcing Offshore at Darden William A. Lewis MBA 630-D3A3 Operations Management March 3, 2013 Intro Darden Restaurants is the owner of many popular restaurant chains such as The Olive Garden and Red Lobster. These, along with their other restaurants, serve over 300 million meals a year in over 1,700 locations in US and Canada. In order to provide the best quality foods for the restaurants, Darden's employs purchasing agents which scour the globe in search of the biggest competitive advantage in the supply chain. Darden also uses outsourcing to keep costs down and to more efficiently prepare the food for its restaurants. Outsourcing Even though restaurants are a straight to user enterprise, there are still many ways to utilize outsourcing to keep costs down. One opportunity for outsourcing would be marketing. By outsourcing the marketing, it allows the restaurant to focus on its core competency: cooking. It also eliminates the financial costs for keeping employees around to analyze the market and develop strategies. Outsourcing this responsibility means that you only have to pay for the service when it is needed. Also, preliminary preparation of the food could be outsourced as well. For example Darden outsources the peeling of its shrimp, and the preparation of its meats to other companies where they can do it more effectively than their individual restaurants. Research and development is another area where restaurants could benefit from outsourcing. An R&D firm would be able to focus efforts on developing new dishes for the restaurant and also conducting the market analysis and taste testing to help insure its success. This would be beneficial to a large restaurant chain because they would not have to dedicate resources to this effort, only pay a fee for services. In general outsourcing non-core competencies is more

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