Case study part 2 · public data + live prices · part 1: the Red Lobster autopsy →

The operating graph: what a restaurant CEO's data should look like.

Part 1 showed a dependency graph reading a company its last rites. This is the same machine pointed forward — at Darden Restaurants, the $12.1B company that sold Red Lobster in 2014: 11 brands, 2,159 company restaurants, 1,400 suppliers, and every competitor and commodity that moves its P&L, joined into one graph. Built entirely from the fiscal-2025 10-K and live market feeds — the questions a CEO actually asks, answered by clicking. Click any circle to drill in.

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● company & brands ● people ● commodities (live futures) ● supply & ops ● live decisions

What the CEO gets that the board deck doesn't

Everything above is one connector: public filings plus live tickers. It already answers portfolio, expansion, commodity, and competitive questions by pointing at a node. The installed version joins what only the company has — and that's where it stops being a map and becomes a simulator:

  • Store-level P&L + traffic joined to the graph → "rank every trade area in America for the next 60 openings, netting out cannibalization of my own 2,159 stores" becomes a query agents run nightly, not a consulting engagement.
  • Supplier contracts + commodity positions → "beef is up 8% this quarter; show me the margin hit by brand, by region, before the quarter closes" — the graph already knows beef touches LongHorn hardest, and the futures feed is already on the node.
  • Brand-conversion simulation → Darden is exploring a sale of Bahama Breeze's 28 locations or converting them to other brands. With per-site economics in the graph, agents can score every location against every brand's demand model and hand back the conversion map that maximizes value.
  • The Ruth's Chris lever → one brand in the portfolio already runs 76 franchised units. An agent that can query the whole graph can model which other brands' markets clear the franchise-economics bar — asset-light growth hiding in the org chart.

    • That's the offer: the demo runs on your public shadow. The install runs on your data. Same graph, same agents, real answers.

    If you run a multi-unit company — restaurants or anything else — this graph exists for you whether you build it or not. Your competitors' versions are just slides. I install the queryable one, with the agents, in weeks. The lab takes two builds a quarter.

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    All figures from Darden's fiscal-2025 Form 10-K (FYE May 25, 2025) and Q4 FY25 results; prices via Yahoo Finance, delayed. Barnett Labs has no affiliation with Darden Restaurants. Analysis of public records; not investment advice. ← Part 1: Red Lobster · All demos