Panera Bread facts for kids
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Panera Bread in The Villages, Florida
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| Private | |
| Industry | |
| Genre | Fast Food |
| Founded | St. Louis Bread Co.: 1987 Kirkwood, Missouri, U.S. Panera Bread: 1998 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
| Founder | St. Louis Bread Company: Ken Rosenthal and Linda Rosenthal Panera Bread: Louis Kane and Ronald M. Shaich |
| Headquarters | Fenton, Missouri |
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Number of locations
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Area served
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United States Canada |
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Key people
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Ronald M. Shaich – founder and chairman Ken Rosenthal – founder of The St. Louis Bread Company Jose Duenas – CEO (2023–present) Charles J. Chapman, III – executive VP and COO Sue Morelli – president of Au Bon Pain |
| Products | Bakery-café serving several varieties of bread – |
| Revenue |  US$5.795 billion (2022) |
 US$145 million (2016) |
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| Total assets | US$1.301 billion (2016) |
| Total equity | US$288 million (2016) |
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Number of employees
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About 140,000 |
| Parent | JAB Holding Company |
| Subsidiaries | Paradise Bakery & Café |
Panera Bread is an American chain store of bakery-café fast food restaurants with over 2,000 locations, all of which are in the United States and Canada. Its headquarters are in Sunset Hills, Missouri. The chain operates as Saint Louis Bread Company in the Greater St. Louis area, where it has over 100 locations.
Panera offers a wide array of pastries and baked goods, such as bagels, brownies, cookies, croissants, muffins, and scones. These, along with Panera's artisan breads, are typically baked the day before by an on-staff baker. Aside from the bakery section, Panera has a regular menu for dine-in or takeout including flatbreads, pizzas, warm grain bowls, panini, pasta, salads, sandwiches, side choices, and soups, as well as coffee, espresso drinks, frozen drinks, fruit smoothies, hot chocolate, iced drinks, lattes, lemonade, and tea.
Until 1999 and again from 2017 to 2021, the company also owned Au Bon Pain. Panera Bread is itself owned by JAB Holding Company, which is, in turn, owned by the Reimann family of Germany. Panera was once the largest provider of free Wi-Fi hotspots in the United States.
Contents
History
Ken and Linda Rosenthal founded the St. Louis Bread Company in 1987 with the first location in Kirkwood, Missouri. The Rosenthals invested $150,000 and received a $150,000 Small Business Administration loan.
Au Bon Pain Co., a public company, purchased the St. Louis Bread Company in 1993 for $23 million.
In 1997, Au Bon Pain changed the company name to Panera, from a word that has roots in the Latin word for "breadbasket" (Classical pānārium, Vulgar pānāria) and is identical to the word for "breadbasket" in Spanish and Catalan. It kept its original name for locations in Missouri. At the same time, the St. Louis Bread Company renovated its 20 bakery-cafés in the St. Louis area.
In May 1999, Au Bon Pain Co. sold Au Bon Pain to the firm Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co. for $78 million, in order to focus on the Panera Bread chain.
In 2000, Panera Bread moved its headquarters to Richmond Heights, Missouri.
In 2007, Panera Bread purchased a 51% stake in Paradise Bakery & Café, a Phoenix metropolitan area-based concept with over 70 locations in 10 states, predominantly in the west and southwest, for $21.1 million. The company purchased the balance of Paradise in June 2009.
Expansion into Canada
In October 2008, Panera Bread expanded into Canada, opening locations in Richmond Hill, Thornhill, Oakville, and Mississauga in the Greater Toronto Area.
A class action lawsuit was filed against the company in February 2008, alleging it failed to disclose material adverse facts about the company's financial well-being, business relationships, and prospects. In February 2011, Panera agreed to pay $5.75 million to shareholders while admitting no wrongdoing, settling the lawsuit.
In November 2010, Panera Bread relocated its headquarters to Sunset Hills while vacating its Richmond Heights headquarters and Brentwood, Missouri offices. The company leased additional space for its headquarters in 2013.
Ordering and delivery
In May 2014, Panera unveiled "Panera 2.0", a series of integrated technologies including new capabilities for digital ordering, payment, operations, and ultimately, consumption. It includes tablet kiosks with iPads, which the company calls Fast Lane, where customers may place an order and pay without approaching the counter. Customers can also place orders and pay via an app on their smartphone or tablet. In 2017, digital orders accounted for over $1 billion in orders or 26% of sales.
The company introduced delivery services in May 2018, servicing 897 cities in 43 states, employing its own drivers. According to the company, this created 13,000 jobs.
Rebranding, acquisitions, and use of technology
2010s
Paradise Bakery & Café locations were rebranded in September 2015 as Panera Bread.
In the fourth quarter of 2015, Panera acquired a majority stake in Tatte Bakery & Cafe, a bakery-cafe concept chain with locations in the Boston area, later opening in metro Washington D.C.
On March 23, 2016, Panera opened its 2,000th location, a cafe in Elyria, Ohio.
In January 2017, Panera announced its food menu was free of artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners, and preservatives.
JAB Holding Company acquired the company on July 11, 2017, for $7.5 billion.
Panera announced on November 8, 2017, that founder Ron Shaich was stepping down as CEO, and company president Blaine Hurst would take over. Shaich remained chairman. The company also announced the acquisition of Au Bon Pain.
Panera divested Tatte Bakery & Café to Act III Holdings, LLC, owned by Shaich in January 2018.
In January 2018, the company formed a consulting business to help restaurants remove artificial ingredients from their menus.
On April 2, 2018, Brian Krebs reported that the Panera Bread website had leaked between 7 million and 37 million customer records—including names, email and physical addresses, customer loyalty account numbers, birthdays, and the last four digits of the customers' credit card numbers—for at least eight months before the site was taken offline. Panera was notified privately about the vulnerability in August 2017 but failed to fix it until after it was disclosed publicly eight months later. Panera said the leak affected fewer than 10,000 customers and had been fixed.
2020s
On October 28, 2020, Panera announced they would add pizza to their menu to increase dinner options for customers.
Panera announced on August 25, 2021, that it had merged with Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros. Bagels to form Panera Brands.
In August 2022, the company announced that it was testing the use of artificial intelligence in its drive-thru lanes via two locations in upstate New York. It used OpenCity’s voice ordering technology, Tori. At the time of the announcement, roughly 45% of the chain's locations have drive-thru lanes. In making this move, the firm was joining other firms in the restaurant industry, like McDonald's, Burger King, and Taco Bell, and it came on top of other uses of artificial intelligence at the chain.
In September 2022, Panera announced that legacy St. Louis Bread Co. locations outside St. Louis City and St. Louis County would be rebranded as Panera when remodeled, with locations in the inner core of the metro retaining the Bread Co. name. One location in St. Louis County is named Panera as it is a prototype of the "Next Gen" restaurant design.
In December 2023, it was learned that Panera Bread confidentially filed to go public again. The company was last publicly traded in 2017 before being acquired by JAB Holding for $7.5 billion.
Social responsibility
Panera Cares: non-profit restaurants
In 2010, the company's nonprofit foundation created Panera Cares, a "Pay what you can", pay it forward (PIF), and traditional charitable behavior restaurant in its home market of St. Louis. CEO Ron Shaich based the idea on an NBC profile of the SAME Cafe in Denver, Colorado. It later expanded the concept to Dearborn, Michigan; Portland, Oregon; Chicago; and Boston. Several of their sites served 3,500 customers weekly. The Panera Cares in Chicago shut down at the end of January 2015. The Panera Cares in Portland, Oregon shut down at the end of June 2016. The original location near St. Louis closed in January 2018. The last location in Boston closed on February 15, 2019.
Caged and cage-free eggs
On November 5, 2015, Panera pledged that it would use only cage-free eggs in all of its stores by 2020. Panera also announced the addition of more plant-based proteins, such as edamame and organic quinoa, to its menu. At the time of the announcement, the company said it was 21% cage-free in the roughly 70 million eggs it used in 2015. In December 2016, it published its third animal welfare progress report, announcing new efforts to improve broiler chicken welfare. In 2021, Panera announced that it had transitioned to cage-free eggs for 65% of its egg supply but not yet the remaining 35%.
Panera Bread on climate change
Panera Bread includes a cool food pledge in its campaign to curb global warming. Though associated with high carbon emissions, meat consumption in the United States remains high. Also, beef production accounts for about 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Panera Bread provides American consumers with dietary guidelines to help them change their eating patterns to help reduce carbon emissions. Through the cool foods pledge, the company uses traffic lights for different healthy and unhealthy foods. Foods labeled green are considered healthy, while those labeled yellow should be consumed in moderation. In 2015, Panera Bread also announced its policy against the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), making it the first food chain in the country to question the safety and environmental friendliness of these foods.
Community giving
The Day-End Dough-Nation program provides unsold bread and baked goods to local area hunger relief agencies and charities. Panera Bread bakery-cafes donate $100 million worth of unsold bread and baked goods annually to local organizations in need. Panera also supports events held by nonprofit organizations serving those in need by donating a certificate or fresh bakery products.
Awards and recognition
In 2005, Panera ranked 37th on Bloomberg BusinessWeek's list of "Hot Growth Companies", earning $38.6 million with a 42.9 percent increase in profits.
In a 2008 Health magazine study, Panera Bread was judged North America's healthiest fast casual restaurant.
In 2009 and 2012, Zagat named Panera one of the most popular restaurants for eating on the go.
Panera was also rated No. 1 for Best Healthy Option, Best Salad, and Best Facilities, among restaurants with fewer than 5,000 locations in 2009.
See also
In Spanish: Panera Bread para niños
- List of bakeries
- List of fast food restaurant chains
- List of restaurant chains in the United States
