Pasta sauce can make or break your pasta dish (so can the pasta shape, but I digress). The sauce is a crucial element that should be thoroughly thought out for a meal that will satisfy your craving. For example, alfredo and carbonara sauce require a bit more effort to make sure the sauce doesn’t break or curdle. This, however, doesn’t mean that the standard marinara sauce doesn’t require the same level of attention to detail. Last month, Olive Garden announced that it’s officially “Pasta Season” with the return of the fan-favorite Never Ending Pasta Bowl. Have you ever thought about how the Italian-style chain restaurant makes its sauces? Its addictive breadsticks, I’m guilty of wanting the recipe, but did you know that there’s an annual harvest to select tomatoes that will last Olive Garden for the year?
“It’s [a tomato] is probably nature’s complete fruit. It’s one of the most versatile fruits, if you look at other things you can do so much. You have ketchup, sauce,” Terrence Tookes, Olive Garden’s executive chef said. “It’s versatile, you can do a lot with it.”
Olive Garden invited me to this year’s harvest in Firebaugh, California with Tookes and a few other vital members of the process to see how the marinara sauce gets made.
From seed to harvest to packaging
“Depending on the size and feel, it may take a few days to harvest the field,” said Robert Krah, senior field operations manager the Neil Jones Food Company, which handles the harvesting, processing, and packaging of the tomatoes. “Once it’s harvested, it’s a matter of hours before it’s in a bag and within a day or two after that, the bag should be ready for shipment.”
When explained so plainly by those who work to create Olive Garden’s product, it doesn’t seem like much, but a lot of hard work goes into growing tomatoes.
“It’s a long process,” he said. “Once we start harvesting, it’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week from start to finish.”
The whole process starts with a seed and a team of people and machines are working together in preparation of months ahead. The seeds are dropped in the greenhouse around mid-December to mid-April, taking around 45 to 60 days for that seed to become a viable plant. Then, that plant gets planted on the farm, which will then grow for another 125 to 130 days until that plant is ready for harvest.
The first lesson about tomatoes: the fruit can be finicky. They’re ripe when they’re ripe.
Olive Garden’s tomatoes are from OPC Farms, Inc. and in its fields, 10 varieties make up the tomatoes but in the industry, there are approximately 100 different varieties. With that comes different things to take into consideration, like the sugar content, viscosity, and diseases. Weather and water quality can also affect the color of the tomato.
“The hotter the temperature, higher the brix, the sweeter the tomato. You always want that fresh tomato flavor, and that’s sunshine,” said Frank Costamagna, one of the growers of OPC Farms, Inc. (which is family-owned!).
They have already started planning the crop for the upcoming year. Everything is harvested this time of year, but conversations about Olive Garden’s product specifications start from March to May. This information, or “specs” as Tookes and others called it, include pH, brix (sugar), and viscosity as well as factors in promotional activity, the previous year’s sales, and projections. It’s all surrounding Olive Garden’s needs.
This helps create that sweet sauce, the color, how thick or thin the sauce is — it’s a standard that hasn’t been changed for a couple of years.
“We use about two to three varieties at any given point,” said Tookes. “Those to two to three varieties, that healthy blend can be a mixture of greens, breakers, and reds.”
Some tomatoes are hollow, and when you cut one open, it’s full of that watery substance. That’s a tomato that the Italian-style chain doesn’t want, the chain prefers a full tomato. This affects the viscosity of the product.
I️t’s obvious the marinara is red, but that’s because there are machines on the fields called harvesters that are programmed to separate the red tomatoes from the green ones.
After harvesting, the tomatoes make their way to the facility where the magic happens, where the tomatoes become marinara sauce. Technology works at its finest at the facility, with the team’s ability to remove as much human error as possible. This whole process takes approximately six hours maximum.
“We can’t check 100% of everything,” said Michael Dunn, director of product development at Neil Jones Food Company, “but we can catch an issue before it happens.”
The tomatoes that were just harvested, are then rinsed thoroughly (three times to be exact) and inspected for color. Just like on the farm, the facility uses the same technology that separates any lingering green tomatoes from the red ones.
We were then led to a lab where a team tests pH levels, color meters, other specs, and more (the facility couldn’t reveal all the secrets!). While at the lab we were shown a tomato filet, a peeled and chopped tomato. The tomatoes are also cut by machines.
“It’s a random cut,” said Dunn, aka the tomato mixologist. “We count on this nice cut piece of fruit to go through our system just enough that it looks just like a home-style product that you’d make at home.”
Every tomato becomes a filet as it’s used in the tomato puree of Olive Garden’s marinara sauce, which isn’t fully blended but has chunks and a peel here and there.
“It goes back to that artisan quality, it goes back to that flavor profile,” he said. “Obviously, we don’t want a lot of skin. Obviously, we don’t want a lot of peel, but when it’s just enough, you get that nice balance of flavor that’s really what it is.”
There is a bit of cooking at the factory before the sauce gets shipped to Olive Garden, specifically the sauce is cooked and seasoned lightly. Then, transferred to bags, 28 bags a minute to be exact. These bags are vacuumed sealed and stored until ready to ship.
This is the basis of the marinara sauce. It wouldn’t be a sauce without the conversations, planning, and work that goes into it before a plate of spaghetti topped with marinara sauce is set in front of you. The recipe is simple because of the preparation. It drives consistency and, theoretically, “you should go to any Olive Garden, and that product should be the same,” said Tookes.