Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Ten Seventy-Five for a Cereal Company's Restaurants

People treat Darden Restaurants as an Orlando restaurant house that always printed DRI.

The 1995 issuer was General Mills's restaurant group, still inside a cereal company.

General Mills bought Red Lobster in 1970 and later built Olive Garden and China Coast. In December 1994 it announced a tax-free spin-off so the food company could concentrate on packaged brands.

Bloomberg, reported in the New York Times on 31 May 1995, recorded the first regular-way session. Shares opened at 10.75 dollars and closed at 11.125 dollars on the New York Stock Exchange.

When-issued trading had begun on 9 May 1995 at 9.75 dollars. General Mills holders received one Darden common share for each General Mills common share.

No cash IPO was sold.

The mechanism is a stock-for-stock restaurant spin-off. The operating chains stayed the same rooms. Only the listed parent changed.

Darden was named for William Darden, who opened the first Red Lobster in Lakeland, Florida, in 1968.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where DRI still prints. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.