Olive Garden introduces sandwiches made with giant breadsticks

The chain of casual Italian(ish) food is planning to take its most famous appetizer — unlimited free breadsticks — and turn them into a giant garlicky, yeasty form that will cushion gooey parmigiana sandwiches. The change to its menu starts next month as part of a continued effort to build sales momentum — and prove that breadsticks know no bounds.

The "breadstick bun sandwiches," as a spokeperson described them to Mashable on the phone, will come in two varieties: chicken parm and meatball. The meal will start at $6.99 on the lunch menu.
And yes, even the breadstick sandwiches will come with unlimited breadsticks on the side.

See also: The McDonald's makeover: New kale, new Hamburglar, same old problems

"We’ve been evolving our menu a lot over the past year and we’re really trying to give our guests more ways to enjoy the things that they love," Jessica Dinon, a rep for Olive Garden, told Mashable in an interview. "We know our guests love our breadsticks. It's iconic."
By re-thinking its signature product, Olive Garden may just earn the kind of media and customer attention that McDonald's, another restaurant chain experience lackluster sales, received last week for overhauling its famous Hamburglar character.
"Restaurant consumers are always looking for something “new,” and menu innovation, like a breadstick sandwich, can be successful in driving traffic," says Bonnie Riggs, restaurant industry analyst at The NPD Group.
The new product comes nine months after Starboard Value, an activist investor with a nearly 9% stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company, shamed the chain with a 294-slide presentation on what it claimed were Olive Garden's many shortcomings.
One item on the list: unlimited breadsticks. The investor argued the breadsticks were given out wastefully and "deteriorate in quality" after sitting on the table for more than a few minutes.
Starboard ousted the entire board of Darden in October, one month after the presentation. Olive Garden's sales, which had been on the decline, have since seen back-to-back quarterly gains.
Now the new leadership is walking back its comments on breadsticks.
“I actually like the breadsticks. It wasn’t about getting rid of the unlimited breadsticks, it was about the discipline,” Jeffrey Smith, an investor with Starboard and now chairman of Darden, said on Sunday in an interview with Wall Street Week, via Bloomberg.
He then went on to break the news about the breadsticks.
Dinon, the Olive Garden rep, declined to comment on how the breadstick sandwiches fit into the new board's vision for the company, other than to provide this line for the ages: "It’s not about giving our guests too many breadsticks. It’s about making sure that every breadstick they receive is perfect."
It just goes to show: breadsticks have always been big. It's just the investors' imaginations that got small.