company – Smoking-Jackets

Neverending success? Olive Garden sales boom

Darden Restaurants announced late Monday that it was buying Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, a casual dining chain with 165 restaurants in 28 states, for $780 million cash. The company also announced earnings and sales that topped forecasts.

Shares of Darden (DRI) rose 7% in early trading on the news and hit an all-time high.

The Cheddar’s deal gives Darden another brand that is regionally popular but does not have a national footprint. Most Cheddar’s locations are in Texas and the Southeast.

Cheddar’s focuses on American comfort food classics like chicken-fried steak, ribs, and macaroni and cheese. This is the first acquisition for Darden since it bought the Yard House chain in 2012. Darden sold Red Lobster to private equity firms in 2014.

In addition to Olive Garden and Yard House, Darden owns the LongHorn Steakhouse, The Capital Grille, Seasons 52, Bahama Breeze and Eddie V’s chains.

The good news for Darden is the latest in a stunning turnaround since the company was essentially taken over by the activist investor group Starboard in 2014.

Starboard successfully led a shareholder revolt that caused then-CEO Clarence Otis to step down and the company’s COO at the time, Gene Lee, to replace him — with Starboard’s blessing.

Starboard attacked Darden in a scathing slide presentation that detailed all the culinary sins that the investment firm thought were ruining the company and keeping investors away, such as too much sauce and a menu that had strayed from its Italian-American roots.

My colleague Cristina Alesci and I did our own taste test in 2014 after Starboard unleashed its attack on the company — and we concurred with Starboard. We did not find Olive Garden’s food to our liking.

But since Starboard took over, the company has been in growth mode again. And the investment has been such a success that Starboard leader Jeffrey Smith decided to step down as Darden chairman last year, citing the progress the company had made in its turnaround.

Olive Garden sales have picked up, largely because of a changing menu mix and higher prices. One problem the company is still having is that it has been unable to dramatically expand its customer base.

The chain’s traffic fell slightly again in the quarter and is lower for the fiscal year as well. But Darden has held up well in an environment that has been tough for some other restaurant chains lately.

Lower prices for many agricultural commodities have led people to take advantage of cheaper groceries and dine in more instead of eating out.

And as long as Olive Garden keeps offering its famous breadsticks and neverending pasta passes, it looks like investors will be just as satisfied with Darden’s stock as Olive Garden loyalists are with its food.

CNNMoney (New York) First published March 28, 2017: 11:42 AM ET

Amid turmoil, Uber releases first diversity report

On Tuesday, the company released its first ever diversity report. Unsurprisingly, it revealed that female techies aren’t the standard at the firm: Just 15% of its technical workers are women.

That’s the same percentage as Twitter (TWTR, Tech30), but smaller than Facebook (FB, Tech30) (17%) and Slack (24%).

Uber’s culture — and its treatment of female employees — has been in the spotlight after a former female engineer alleged sexism and harassment at the company last month.

The allegations prompted CEO Travis Kalanick to call for an “urgent investigation.” He hired former attorney general Eric Holder to lead the investigation, which is expected to conclude at the end of April.

But that’s far from the only damning headline the company has faced recently. Google’s Waymo is suing Uber for allegedly stealing self-driving car trade secrets, and several high level executives have departed in the last few weeks. There have also been reports of questionable behavior from Kalanick, from arguing with a driver about the company’s fares to allegedly visiting an escort-karaoke bar in Seoul in 2014 with Uber staff.

The company has been working in overdrive to paint itself as a equitable, inviting place for people of all backgrounds to work.

In a conference call last week with reporters, board member Arianna Huffington, human resources head Liane Hornsby and U.S. General Manager Rachel Holt took the helm. When asked by two reporters why only women were representing Uber on the call, Huffington said, “I think we should take it as a really good sign of how women are valued at the highest levels of Uber.”

But numbers talk, too.

According to the report, which is based on data through March, just 22% of Uber’s overall leadership positions are held by women. When it comes to technical leadership roles, that percentage is halved.

But Uber’s demographics aren’t far off from other tech companies. In fact, in some cases, it fares better.

36% of its 12,000 global employees are women, compared to 33% of Facebook’s 17,000 employees. (The figures don’t include drivers, who are contract workers.) Uber’s numbers are buoyed by its foreign operations, where women make up a slightly bigger sliver of its workforce compared to its U.S. and Canada operations.

When it comes to ethnic diversity, Uber has zero technical leaders who are black or Hispanic. That’s only bumped up slightly when looking at non-technical leadership positions: (3.7% are black and and 1.2% Hispanic). However, the report noted that in the last 12 months, it’s increased its hiring of black and Hispanic employees.

Last week, Kalanick met with civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson to discuss diversity. Uber has also pledged $3 million over the next three years to organizations helping women and underrepresented groups in tech.

“I know that we have been too slow in publishing our numbers — and that the best way to demonstrate our commitment to change is through transparency,” Kalanick said in a statement on Tuesday. “And to make progress, it’s important we measure what matters.”

On its diversity page, where it published the report Tuesday, Uber lists its various employee resource groups. They include “Shalom,” a group for “connecting Uberettos and Jewbers from all backgrounds” and “UberHue,” its black employee resource group.

In addition to its gender and ethnic stats, Uber disclosed that 15% of its U.S. employees hold a work visa, and come from 71 countries.

CNNMoney (New York) First published March 28, 2017: 1:15 PM ET

VSCO now has 30 million active users

VSCO, the company behind popular apps VSCO Cam, DSCO, and VSCO Film for Lightroom, announced today that it now has 30 million monthly active users across its platform. This is the first time that VSCO has revealed statistics of this sort, and the company says its number of accounts have grown 802 percent year over year. Images published to the platform are up 952 percent, and 5 billion images are viewed (or “consumed,” in VSCO parlance) each month. VSCO says that 80 percent of its userbase is international, and that it’s seen “explosive growth” in China in the past year.

Still, 30 million active users doesn’t compare too favorably to the 400 million Instagram, the app most often compared to VSCO, reported back in September of last year,…