Overview
- Olive Garden relaunched the Never-Ending Pasta Pass on Thursday, July 16, offering 10,000 personalized passes that sold out within minutes while website queues showed tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors.
- Each $100 pass grants 13 weeks of unlimited dine-in pasta, sauces, toppings, bottomless soup or salad, and breadsticks, with passholders able to start using the offer on August 24 and the nationwide promotion running August 31 through November 22.
- This year’s promotion adds 120 pasta, sauce and topping combinations plus two new menu items, Spicy Alfredo and Crispy Shrimp Fritta, and gives passholders early access before the wider roll‑out.
- Users and reporters flagged bot activity and potential resale or scalping risks during the sale, and Olive Garden’s prior rules requiring a personalized pass and photo ID for redemption aim to limit transfers but may be hard to enforce consistently.
- Analysts say the pass typically pays off after roughly seven visits, and Olive Garden framed the revival as a loyalty and traffic strategy for parent Darden Restaurants while reconnecting with fans of the original 2014–2019 promotion.