Panera Bread will soon close all its fresh dough facilities, ending the brand’s scratch baking operations and instituting a major change in how the restaurant’s bread is made, National Restaurant News has reported.
The fast-casual restaurant chain — which has two locations on Staten Island — will transition to a par-baked model in which bakery items arrive partially baked from external artisan suppliers and are finished in-store. The company said the move is part of a three-year transformation plan to streamline operations while maintaining product quality.
“The hardest thing for our team members is to say, ‘No, we’re out of that product,’” Brooke Buchanan, Panera’s chief corporate affairs officer, told NRN, noting that the change aims to keep baked goods available throughout the day. “If you walk into a bakery-cafe at 4 p.m. and you want an Asiago bagel, you should be able to have that, and you will through this model.”
The new model will also allow Panera to expand into areas that were previously too far from its delivery network.
“This new model allows us to develop more stores and grow throughout the United States in cities and towns that we couldn’t expand to previously because of the limited distance those [fresh dough facility delivery] trucks could travel,” Buchanan said.
The company is assuring customers that the change will not compromise product quality.
“We want to ensure that we have that same high quality and delicious bread with our amazing ingredients,” she said. “The bread that you’ll taste today is just like the bread you would receive from the fresh dough facilities.”
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