Panera Bread Bakery Business Model | Business Model Navigator

Overview:

Panera Bread Company is a chain store of bakery-café fast casual restaurants in the United States and Canada. Their headquarters are in Sunset Hills, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and the company operates as Saint Louis Bread Company in Greater St. Louis. Offerings include soups, salads, pasta, sandwiches, specialty drinks, and bakery items. The company, which also owns Au Bon Pain, is owned by JAB Holding Company and has over 2,000 locations.

Industries:

Retail

Consumer Goods

Business Model Patterns:

Franchising

How they do it: Panera Bread Bakery offers individual entrepreneurs to open a franchise location of their chain. Before opening, the entrepreneur has to sign a franchise agreement specifying his obligations, rights and the fees he has to pay to the company. These include e.g. franchise fee, supplies, and other fees.

Pay What You Want

How they do it: In 2010 Panera Bread Bakery opened their first pay-what-you-want cafes, nonprofit cafes in which every menu item is paid for by donations. The concept behind this is that customers who can afford more pay more than the cost of the meals, allowing customers who can’t afford the meals to also benefit. These cafes reportedly still brought a profit which was reinvested in job training programs in the cafes.

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