Panera Bread
Headquarters: Richmond Heights, Missouri
Panera Bread opened its 1,000th location in the fall of 2006. John Taylor describes one recent menu success with the little-known Spanish sauce romesco, a creamy condiment made from tomato, red peppers and nuts.
Concept
We're a bakery-café in the fast-casual category. We offer made-to-order white-tablecloth quality food that you can get in a reasonably short time. Panera started in St. Louis and is still predominantly weighted to the right half of the country. We've just started expanding west. We bake from fresh dough every day. We're the only folks in the bakery-café segment that bake from scratch: loaf breads, baguettes, pastries, the full gamut.
What's new
We just launched Crispani, thin-crust, made-to-order, hand-stretched artisan pizzas with high-quality ingredients, like Muir Glen tomatoes and Niman Ranch pork.
Recent home run
A grilled turkey romesco sandwich we featured on whole-grain miche (roll) with field greens, smoked turkey and asiago cheese. Between the toasted whole-grain bread and the smoky elements of romesco, it was a dynamite combination. It did really, really well.
Birthing the idea
When you're developing menu items, sometimes stuff falls from the sky and hits you in the head. I'd been exposed to romesco several times at CIA Greystone, and every time I tasted it, I said, "This is really phenomenal." I saw romesco as a great flavor, a bold flavor, a new flavor. But how could we present it within the context of the Panera experience? Often we find in Panera that "the simpler the build, the better-eating the item." It's not about throwing more ingredients at it but about picking some great ingredients and letting them deliver.
Explaining romesco
We really didn't have to. We didn't tell customers it was Mediterranean inspired. The customer's bandwidth is only so large. If people want to know more about it, we can get them the info, but we try not to be preachy. We do have table tents and banners, but we try to keep the messaging targeted. It's just, "Try a great new sandwich."
Adapting romesco
The challenge was finding a niche manufacturer who could keep the flavor and integrity of the product, and making sure that we kept close to the gold standard through the commercialization process. Somebody from Spain might say, "That's not how we use romesco." We've taken some liberties. But we introduced a lot of people in America to romesco.