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US: How does Olive Garden get its marinara from farm to table

No matter how often one eats at a chain restaurant, whether once a week or once a year, one might ponder not just the cooking process, but also the journey of the ingredients to the plate.

At Olive Garden, a nationwide restaurant chain with over 900 locations, it can be easy to assume that a person knows the journey of any number of its menu staples, most notably the sauces, but before one imagines cans and jars of premade marinara sauce being poured directly onto your plate, take a moment. While other restaurants at this scale may work this way, Olive Garden's sauce process has a little more to it. There is a lot more to it.

It's 5:30 a.m. in Fresno, and Robert Krahn, senior manager of field operations for Neil Jones Food Company, is busy already. It's tomato harvesting season for Olive Garden, and while he's able to take a few hours to rest, the harvest itself is a 24/7 operation. Throughout the day, he's checking on truckloads, deliveries, and inventory. In between meetings with growers and industry personnel, he's monitoring the progress for thousands of acres of tomatoes, which, about nine months ago, were nothing more than seeds in a greenhouse.

The heat and intense sunshine in the Central Valley are ideal for the tomato crop, according to Krahn and his team of growers. Environmental factors are key, and tomatoes thrive in hot climates. "Mother nature has the ultimate say," noted Frank Costamagna, grower at OPC Farms, Inc. "The hotter the temperature, the higher the Brix, the sweeter the tomato. You always want that fresh tomato flavor, and that's sunshine."

Read more at Tasting Table.

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