Panera Bread Business Strategy

This paper is about Panera Bread Company and the strategy it employs to become the best brand name of fresh bread in the United States. Panera Bread specializes in providing fresh goods, made-to-order sandwiches, salads, soups, custom roasted coffees and other cafe beverages. The company generates revenues through three business segments: company bakery-café operations, franchise operations and fresh dough operations. The company’s bakery-café operations segment is comprised of the operating activities of the bakery-cafes, owned directly and indirectly by Panera. Their franchise operations segment is comprised of the operating activities of its franchise business unit, which licenses qualified operators to conduct business under the Panera Bread and Paradise Bakery & Café names while the fresh dough operations segment supplies fresh dough items and indirectly supplies proprietary sweet goods items through a contract manufacturing arrangement to both company-owned and franchise-operated bakery-cafes. Panera’s vision is to create a specialty café anchored by an authentic, fresh-dough artisan bakery and upscale quick service selections. With its goals and objectives of becoming one of the leading fast-casual restaurant chains and becoming a dominant restaurant operator across the nation, Panera Bread’s use of a broad differentiation strategy has helped their profitability and growth and rivals have found it hard to compete with the competitiveness of Panera Bread. This strategy has also being helping the company attain its goals and objectives.
According to John E. Gamble and Arthur A. Thompson Jr. a broad differentiation strategy can be defined as a company attempting to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors by distinguishing their product s through quality, presentation and diversification. Panera Bread’s way of differentiating their company and products from their rivals are through their production, distribution, presentation and quality standards.

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