Panera Bread: Pay-What-You-Can Cafes, Frozen Dough and Charged Lemonade

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Ken and Linda Rosenthal opened the Saint Louis Bread Company in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1987, after Ken spent a year learning sourdough from Roger Brunello at La Boulange in San Francisco, using $150,000 of his own money and a matching SBA loan. Au Bon Pain bought it for $23 million in 1993, renamed it Panera in 1997 everywhere except the St. Louis area, and in 1999 sold its own Au Bon Pain chain for $78 million to focus on Panera's suburban bakery-cafe model. Panera 2.0 arrived in 2014 with Fast Lane kiosks and app ordering; digital orders passed $1 billion, 26 percent of sales, by 2017, and in 2018 Panera launched its own delivery network, creating 13,000 jobs.

CEO Ron Shaich launched the Panera Cares pay-what-you-can cafes in 2010 in cities including St. Louis, Chicago, Boston and Portland, but all had closed by 2019. JAB Holding Company took Panera private for $7.5 billion in 2017, merged it with Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros. Bagels in 2021, and the company filed confidentially to go public in 2023. In 2024 and 2025 it dropped flatbreads and grain bowls, closed fresh dough facilities in favor of par-baked frozen bread, and, according to internal documents reported by Reuters, loosened ingredient and animal welfare standards ahead of the IPO. Its Charged Lemonade, about 390 milligrams of caffeine in the 30-ounce size, was at the center of wrongful death suits over Sarah Katz and Dennis Brown, and Panera announced its phaseout in May 2024.

• A 2017 pledge declared the food menu free of artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners and preservatives.
• Panera promised 100 percent cage-free eggs by 2020 but had reached 65 percent by 2021.
• A 2018 leak exposed up to 37 million customer records, eight months after researchers warned the company.
• The ShinyHunters hack in January 2026 leaked 14 million records and led to class action lawsuits.
• In 2016 a Massachusetts employee put peanut butter on a sandwich for a customer with a severe peanut allergy, leading to a hospital stay and assault and battery claims.