Red Lobster is a chain of restaurants united by interior style and cuisine. The menu includes many lobster dishes, which are fished from a large aquarium at the entrance. The popularity of this restaurant chain is due to its excellent price-quality ratio. As of 2024 In addition to 551 restaurants in the U.S. and 27 locations in Canada, Red Lobster has several franchises in Thailand, Ecuador, Japan, and Mexico.
Entrepreneurs Bill Darden and Charlie Woodsby opened the first restaurant in Lakeland, Florida in 1968. In 1970, the brand was acquired by General Mills. Thanks to investments in the 1980s, the chain began to expand rapidly. And already in 1995 Red Lobster, along with Olive Garden and other subsidiary restaurant chains, became part of American Darden Restaurants, Inc.
In 2014, the holding company Darden Restaurants announced the sale of the Red Lobster chain to the investment company Golden GateCapital for 2.1 billion dollars. This decision was made due to the impossibility of competing Red Lobster with snack chains that offer fast service and lower prices.
After that, trendy dishes appeared on the restaurants’ menus: lobster tacos, chimichurri sauce, and Alaskan salmon. Marketers of the establishments noted that shrimp dishes were particularly popular, so they increased their number on the menu to 47%.
An important moment in Red Lobster’s history was the network’s mention in the Formation song by pop diva Beyoncé in 2016. This led to a surge in popularity and sales. However, over time, the company has faced several problems, ranging from poor management and lack of investment in marketing and restaurant modernization to poor quality of food and service.
Red Lobster’s largest shareholder in 2020 was Thai Union Group, a seafood distributor from Thailand, which made changes to the chain’s growth strategy.
However, the strategy that worked in the early stages still failed. Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy in May 2024, closing dozens of locations across the country. However, the company has vowed to continue operating its 600 restaurants while it looks for a seller.
According to the company’s representatives, Red Lobster was forced to close the network by pressure from shareholders, who were dissatisfied with falling sales and low interest in the network among U.S. residents. In the last quarter of 2013, Red Lobster’s revenues fell more than 30 percent.
What is Red Lobster?
Red Lobster is the name of a major American seafood restaurant chain with more than 700 restaurants in the United States and Canada, and more than 58,000 employees. The company was founded in 1968, and in the summer of 2024, it became known that Red Lobster was beginning bankruptcy proceedings.
In terms of visual identity, the Red Lobster restaurant chain has shown itself as a brand, that is not afraid of changes. The logo of the company was changed several times throughout the years, but there is one thing, that United all the badges — the image of a lobster.
The original Red Lobster logo, created in 1968, looked very chic and elegant. It was a simple rectangular badge with a white background and a delicate black frame, where the detailed drawing of a lobster was set under a fancy black inscription in a gothic-styled typeface. However, this pretty laconic badge only stayed with the brand for one year.
In 1969 a more complicated concept was applied to the Red Lobster visual identity. The white banner was placed on a red background and received several additions: the fancy traditional crest, vertically divided into white and red halves, with the contoured “RL” monogram, and a simple white badge at the bottom, with the black additional lettering on it. The main banner itself was also refined, with the name of the chain rewritten in red, the lobster enlarged, and a small black inscription added to the composition.
Another redesign happened to the restaurant’s logo in 1974. It was based on the original badge from 1968 but with some minor modifications. The cursive “Cocktail Lounge” in a sea-blue shade was written under the image of a lobster, and the additional inscriptions were set on the sides in small black capitals of a simple sans-serif typeface.
The redesign of 1984 has introduced a completely new design concept of the Red Lobster logo. The image of the brand’s mascot and symbol was redrawn in a more minimalistic way and placed in the upper right corner of the banner, which was decorated by thin wavy lines in dark blue. The bottom wave was significantly thicker than all others and became a separator between the graphical part of the logo and the name of the company, written at the very bottom of the logo in bold red serif characters.
In 1986 the logo was simplified — the color palette was reduced to red and white, and the wavy patterns were removed. The lobster image got enlarged and brightened up, keeping its upper-right corner disposition. The main part of the logo was now taken by a bold large lettering in the title case of a sharp and elegant serif typeface, executed in the same shade of red.
A completely different logo was introduced by the company in 1995. The lobster was redrawn with black accents and shadows, and placed on top of the horizontally-stretched rectangular banner with rounded angles. The banner featured a deep shade of sea blue and a thin silverfish outline. The white shadowed lettering, written across it was executed in the iconic Times New Roman typeface. This badge stayed with the chain for more than 15 years.
In 2011 another redesign was held by Red Lobster. The banner turned black, while the shades of the lobster got brighter, and the lettering was rewritten in white, making up a timelessly elegant tricolor. The inscription Is now set in the uppercase of a delicate and sharp serif font, with the first characters in both wordmarks enlarged. The additional inscription, also in white, is written in small caps of a modest sans-serif typeface.
The medium-bold uppercase lettering from the primary logging of the Red Lobster restaurant chain is set in a geometric serif typeface, which is quite similar to such commercial fonts as Adobe Hebrewtrade, Adobe Bengali, or Arnotrade.
As for the color palette of the Red Lobster visual identity, it is composed of black, red, and white, an extremely distinctive and exquisite combination, which can make any image look sleek and powerful.