We aspire to be a company that positively affects our guests, employees, communities and business partners — quite simply, to be a company that matters. With more than 2,100 restaurants and 200,000 employees, our scope and scale enable us to positively affect the economic, social and environmental challenges facing our communities and the world. Our efforts are anchored in several core pillar areas where we feel we can have the most impact. They include:

• Darden Harvest Program: Hunger is an issue in every community where we do business. Our restaurants donate wholesome, surplus food to local community food banks and soup kitchens across the country. Since fiscal 2003, we’ve donated more than 66 million pounds of food to those in need.
• Good Neighbor Grants: We partner with local community organizations to help address priorities expressed by our guests and employees. The cornerstone of this effort is our Restaurant Community Grants program where every Darden restaurant can help award a $1,000 grant to a non-profit organization in its local community. In fiscal 2013, we awarded $1.9 million to nearly 900 non-profits.
• Preservation of Natural Resources: We are actively committed to sustainability — starting with our own operations. We have aggressive goals to reduce water and electricity consumption in our restaurants by 15 percent by fiscal 2015. We’ve already exceeded our water goal with a 17 percent reduction since making the commitment and we’re well on our way to meeting our energy goal with a 12 percent reduction to date. Since 2008, we also expanded recycling, food donations and grease recycling in an effort to reach zero waste. We invested significant time and resources into seafood sustainability and empowered 10,000-plus restaurant employees to identify new ways to improve the sustainability performance of our restaurants. Darden is also committed to partnering with others, including our suppliers, policymakers and non-governmental organizations to find collective solutions for sustainability, and we have worked with the World Bank, the New England Aquarium, Clinton Global Initiative, the Sustainability Consortium and many others. Making sure we are transparent in our sustainability efforts is key as well, as demonstrated by our second Global Reporting Initiative report and the reporting we do via social media.
• Health and Wellness: Our company is addressing one of the top health challenges facing our society today — obesity. Working with the Partnership for a Healthier America, Darden has committed to reducing the overall calorie and sodium footprints of our menus by 10 percent by fiscal 2016 and 20 percent by fiscal 2021, and to enhance the nutrition credentials of our children’s menus.