Panera Bread

Hot panini sandwiches heat up sales for bakery-cafe chain

It had to be hot. It had to be bread. And, of course, it had to be doable.

Those were the requirements for a new menu item that Panera Bread Co. needed to help spur lunchtime sales at the bakery-cafe chain’s nearly 370 branches in 30 states.

“Our lunch menu was soup, salad and sandwiches, all built around the bread,” says Larry Rusinko, the chain’s vice president of marketing. “ The only hot component was soup. Adding a hot component in sandwiches allowed us to extend what we do best, which is bread.”

Panera Bread saw the hot component as an opportunity to increase the chain’s appeal to a male audience. “Our lunch tended to be somewhat female oriented,” says Scott Davis, Panera’s senior vice president and chief concept officer. “Guys are often looking for a hamburger, so we wanted to create a little more cross appeal.”

The company looked at a variety of options and took note of where the industry was going. “Hot panini sandwiches were starting to pop up, but they hadn’t hit the mainstream,” Rusinko says. “A key menu strategy for us is not to get too far out. We want to be just enough ahead so customers may recognize an item from somewhere else.”

The “doable” part of the equation concerned Davis. “We were virtually running at full capacity, so we had to ask, ‘How do we make it work?’ ” he says.

To make it easy for operators to prepare in their stores, Davis explains, “We had to keep it clean, not something that would require putting hoods or flat-top grills into the stores.”

Hot panini sandwiches went into testing in 2000 and were rolled out nationally early last year.

It took the company about three to six months to iron out all the kinks, but now the hot-sandwich menu is running smoothly.

Jeff Rains, a franchisee with 32 restaurants in Denver and in Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, says: “This is definitely a home run. It offers us another option that appeals to men.” The sandwiches come in three varieties. Frontega chicken features smoked and pulled white-meat chicken, red onion, Mozzarella, tomato, chopped basil and the chain’s chipotle mayonnaise on rosemary-onion focaccia.

The Cuban pork and ham panini includes smoked pork tenderloin, sliced ham, Swiss cheese, dill pickle chips, spicy mustard and the chipotle mayonnaise on asiago cheese focaccia.

The Portobello and Mozzarella sandwich includes garlic-roasted Portobello mushrooms, fresh Mozzarella, caramelized onions and chopped basil on rosemary-onion focaccia.

While breakfast at Panera Bread is primarily a grab-and-go operation with bagels, croissants, pastries and muffins, the lunch crowd tends to sit and eat. To fit hot panini sandwiches comfortably into the mix during that busy daypart, the chain runs two production lines — one for sandwiches and another for soups and salads.

“The hot panini sandwiches work off the soup-salad area as opposed to the sandwich station, which was already at 100 percent of capacity,” Davis explains.

Rains says, “Preparation of the panini takes a little more lead time than some of our other sandwiches, so we have to plan for it, but it’s a great product.”

Rusinko notes that “hot panini really drove up our same-store sales. All retailers look at the strength of their concept on a year-to-year basis, and that’s measured through same-store sales. On a year-to-date basis for the 12-week period ending March 23, our same-store sales increased 5.5 percent system wide.”

Panera Bread Co. units typically seat about 120, feature counter service and stay open until 8 or 9 p.m. “It’s a great alternative to restaurants where you may have to wait,” Davis explains. “There are no waiters or waitresses here. You can buzz right in and eat.”

Panera Bread is based in Richmond Heights, Mo., just west of St. Louis. Ken Rosenthal, who opened the Saint Louis Bread Co. in St. Louis, founded the Panera Bread concept in 1987. When the operation was sold to Au Bon Pain in 1993, it had 21 locations.

While Panera Bread Co. bakery-cafes operate in 30 states, in the St. Louis area and parts of the Midwest the chain operates as Saint Louis Bread Co.

At Panera fresh bread is the centerpiece of every meal, from sandwiches and salads to soups served in sourdough bread bowls. The bakery offers a dozen varieties of bread as well as bagels, croissants, muffins and pastries.

Davis started with Au Bon Pain as a store manager in 1987. In 1993 he became the new-concept manager, leading the development of the Au Bon Pain Choices initiative. In 1995 he helped create a research and development group for Saint Louis Bread Co. that was instrumental in introducing bagels to the system.

A native of upstate New York, Davis currently lives in Cicero, N.Y., a few miles north of Syracuse. He gets a kick out of finding an idea, like hot panini sandwiches, that “is out there somewhere in the world, and then interpreting it for our world. Then I like to see the concept in action with customers.”