Panera testing donation-based menu item

Panera Bread Co., which through its Panera Bread Foundation has opened five pay-what-you-can Panera Cares cafes, is now testing how the model works in traditional retail stores with the introduction of a single pay-what-you-want item at stores in the St. Louis, Mo., market.

The item -- turkey chili in a sourdough bread bowl -- is priced at $5.98, including tax, but payment will be optional. The test includes all 48 company-owned St. Louis Bread Co. restaurants, said Linn Parrish, Panera Bread vice president of public relations.

“It’s a test,” Parrish said. “We were inspired by the Panera Cares model of shared responsibility. We’re taking that concept and seeing if we can scale in the retail cafes.” The test began quietly on March 27.

Unlike at the five Panera Cares community cafés — which have opened over the past three years in Boston; Chicago; Detroit; St. Louis; and Portland, Ore. — customers pay for the turkey chili at the register, not at a donation bin, Parrish said.

“A guest can say that they’d like to pay the suggested retail value,” she explained, “or you can say, ‘This is great. I’d like to pay it forward. Put $10 on my credit card,’ or, ‘Here’s a $10 bill.’ Or they can say they need the meal and, ‘Here’s a dime,’ or, ‘Here’s nothing.’”

Panera calls the turkey chili meal, which comes with an apple, its “Meal of Shared Responsibility.”

Ron Shaich, founder, chairman, co-CEO of Panera Bread Co. and president of the Panera Bread Foundation, said in a statement, “When we launched our community café concept three years ago, skeptics thought that too many people would take advantage and too few would share in the responsibility of sustaining the effort, but there are now five non-profit community cafés across the country and they’re all working.”

Shaich said Panera Cares cafés and the turkey chili test let the company, “elevate the issue of food insecurity. They offer a vehicle for those with the means to help those with a need, and they help nourish their local communities.”

The company said it decided to launch the pilot program in St. Louis because that is where the company has its headquarters and where the foundation opened its first Panera Cares community café. The Panera Bread Foundation estimates that more than one million people will be fed this year at the five Panera Cares units.

Parrish said the 48-unit test doesn’t have a timetable. “We’ll have to see it in action,” she said. “We need to learn what we don’t know.” Since the program is operated by the publicly held Panera Bread Co., “we have to make sure it makes business sense.”

Parrish added, “It’s a test of humanity; a social experiment, if you will.”

Panera Bread Co. owns and franchises more than 1,650 bakery-cafés under the Panera Bread, St. Louis Bread Co. and Paradise Bakery & Café brands.

Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].
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