The Staggering Number Of Breadsticks Olive Garden Serves Per Year
When it comes to chain restaurant eating, nothing can quite outdo Olive Garden's decades-long commitment to carb-loading thanks to their unlimited breadsticks. Sure, there's a huge menu of pasta dishes, and you can have as much grated cheese as you want in your salad, but it's the buttery, baked bread batons that win over even the pickiest eaters every time.
Post Malone famously told Jimmy Fallon that he eats his sticks with a sliver of butter in every bite, and The Weeknd impressed his date, Selena Gomez with a basket or two back in 2017. The chain has been serving unlimited bread baskets since it opened its first restaurant in Orlando, Florida, and despite some pressure from corporate in 2014 to cut down on the nonstop bread-fest, the company steadfastly continues to serve up millions of breadsticks to the masses every year.
Unlimited as they may claim to be, we actually know how many breadsticks the chain serves every year: A mind-boggling 529 million, according to Thrillist. That's almost two breadsticks for every person living in the United States.
Olive Garden by the numbers
It feels like Olive Garden has always been with us, but the mighty chain actually started out with its first location in 1982. These days there's at least one OG in all 50 U.S. states, and 106 of them are in Texas, which has the most. Back in 2010, almost 4 million Americans ate there each week, according to ABC News, netting the company around $3.3 billion in sales. Today, the chain sees $4.5 billion in annual sales. With those kinds of numbers, it starts to make sense how the pasta behemoth is able to sell hundreds of millions of breadsticks each year.
Servers are trained to only bring two breadsticks per person per table, plus one extra, when you're greeted. After that, you have to ask for more, and even then they'll only bring you one more per person for each request, which is a company policy designed to cut down on waste. That doesn't stop a lot of breadstick fanatics from getting their fix, however.
On Reddit, there's a thread asking Olive Garden employees what happens when a customer is cut off from unlimited breadsticks. "Kept bringing baskets of bread, had to be 7 or 8," replied one commenter. "At this point we're at about 30 breadsticks and the food hasn't even hit the table yet. I start watching and they are putting the bread in their purses. Just filling 'em up. Manager asked them politely to stop, that was that. They weren't thrilled."
Breadsticks for the people (even vegans)
The only way you can get unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden is by dining in, but if you're a die-hard fan you can of course order them to go, and even get them unbaked so that you can make them fresh at home, but you'll have to pay. Instead, you can hack the system and ask for more at the end of your meal like one ingenious Redditor who said, "Even if you have half a bite of food left, ask for a to-go box. Then fill it with breadsticks, head home. They reheat in the oven surprisingly well, I suggest a low temp and wrapped in aluminum foil."
There are also several dupe recipes for the iconic sticks on the internet, but the originals are pretty simple. They're just a simple bread recipe that's topped with a melted vegetable-based margarine spread instead of butter, then sprinkled with garlic powder. So if you're vegan you can safely dig into the breadstick basket with everyone else at the next family gathering. The only folks who can't take part in the breadstick ritual are people who suffer from Celiac, as the chain hasn't created a gluten-free breadstick yet. But if they ever do, that'll just be another million or so breadsticks sold each year at the Olive Garden.