Panera Bread Essay

Panera Bread Company is a national bakery-cafe with over 1,000 company-operated and franchise locations across the United States. The chain bakery and sit in café restaurants of Panera Bread Company offer a variety of products including; breads, sandwiches, soups, salads, and other bakery items for customers that the company deemed within their strategy to be “urban workers and suburban dwellers.” In a detailed analysis and case study of Panera Bread Company, it is important to recognize information regarding the past performance, market and industry comparison with a detailed SWAT analysis, and the competing rivals and pressures that the competition places on Panera Bread Company. With this pertinent and substantial information, Panera Bread

Company will be able to identify areas of improvement and implement new strategic initiatives and goals to further place the company at the top of its industry.
First and foremost, as society has come to know the exquisite dining bakery as Panera Bread, it is vital to highlight the significant changes of ownership and name alterations the company has undergone beginning from the early 1990’s and going forward.

Headquartered out of Sunset Hills, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, Panera originally was known to the public as St. Louis Bread Company. However, in 1993, Au Bon Pain Co. purchased the small Saint Louis Bread Company of just 20 bakery-cafés in the immediate and surrounding areas of St. Louis. In the years to follow, Panera Bread Company, as we know it today, began to develop its current image through extensive studies of fast food chain restaurants nationwide and endured an extensive overhaul of its customer atmosphere and strategic vision alike. The owners of the company studied the then current leaders of the industry, such as Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Taco Bell, and determined that a new dining experience would be the most plausible way to attract new consumers and grow the company into a national leader. The organizational leaders did this by conjuring up the strategic vision by creating “a specialty café anchored by an authentic, fresh-dough, artisan bakery and upscale quick-service menu selections.” Essentially, the owners decided that they would offer to the public all the commodities of a normal fast food chain such as

quickness and low cost efficiencies while simultaneously giving the customers the looks and comforts of an upscale five-star restaurant experience. As a result, Panera Bready Company was figuratively reborn into a national operating service across the United States in the latter half of the 1990’s. Panera Bread Company continued to see growth in the years to come as they continuously strived to meet the strategic objectives of being “the first choice for diners craving fresh-baked goods…in a warm, friendly, comfortable dining environment.” The achievements of their strategic objectives directly correlated to their sustainable competitive advantage of offering, for the first time, an upscale quick-service dining with particular attention to quality and detail, which differentiated them from the rest of the industry rivals. As a result, Panera Bread Company’s financial objectives and outlooks followed suit. In 2005, Panera was considered as top growth company on the rise with earnings over $35 million and nearly a 50% increase in profits from the previous year. Furthermore, Panera Bread purchased a majority stake in Paradise Bakery and Cafe, and acquired over 70 locations in 10 states that were predominantly inhabited in the southwest and west regions of the county. Unfortunately the rapid growth of Panera Bread Company in the early and middle stages after the turn of the century has hit a rut in most recent years. Over the past two annual years, 2013 and 2014, Panera Bread Company has not matched the extensively high revenue growth and earnings per share rates that the organization had grown accustomed, and the downturn has given way for openings of top management discussion and realizing and executing strategic alternatives to return the high-end bakery to its dominant form and nature.