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Panera Bread Essay

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Company Background Louis Kane and Ron Shaich started a bakery-café enterprise in 1981, which they termed Au Bon Pain Co. Store units bloomed throughout the eastern regions in airports and shopping centers, making a name of themselves within the bakery-café division. Upon realizing the consumers in the fast food division were additionally attracted to a higher-quality dining experience, top management acquired Saint Louis Bread locations, altering the menus and atmosphere to their vision. Ultimately, in 1997, all bakery-cafes were titled Panera Bread outside of their St. Louis markets. Fast-forwarding to recent years, Panera Bread has received numerous awards, such as the Harris Poll EquiTrend, which ranked Panera as the Casual Dining Restaurant …show more content…
Panera Bread has executed substantial growth since Kane and Shaich first began their bakery-café enterprise. With their loyal customer retention and innovative approach, Panera Bread shows it has the ability to prove to be successful within the future.
Organization Strengths & Weaknesses Panera Bread has proven in the recent years that its top management comprehends how to make themselves stand out with their given industry. Back in 2010, a new chief marking officer and vice president of marketing were bought into the company, which brought their specific expertise intertwining with the firm’s long-term strategic marketing goals and tactics, providing themselves with various opportunities in the near future. One idea that I believed to set Panera Bread apart from some of its competitors was its franchising operations. The business targeted prospective franchises that were well capitalized, attained a prestige track …show more content…
Panera Bread has deals with several independent distributors to receive some of their goods, but they only have one contract with a single supplier that delivers the majority of their products multiple times a week. Steadily growing as Panera Bread is, this seems to be a very risky strategy due to the magnitude of reliability based on this single supplier. If there are complications or delays within the supplier themselves, can possibility result in poor operations or lack of resources on Panera’s end. I believe having to rely this heavily on one single supplier triggers threats to a major component of the firm’s daily activities. Back in 2010, the enterprise implemented an imitative labeled Panera’s Nonprofit Pay-What-You-Want. It was a program geared toward helping those in need, which encouraged customers to leave the set amount of more if they are able to, and those to are not able to, to take a discount. Overtime, statistically it showed that about 60% paid the requested amount, 20% paid less, and 20% paid more. Next, Panera offered a large turkey chili meal for a retail price of $5.89, hoping to help those in need. While the media supported the plan, payments were dropping and in July of 2013 Panera had canceled the program with intentions of reestablishing the program at a later date, but it never occurred. While this agenda had a good beginning, there was no thought or new course of action

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