/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>16735209
Panera wagie here. Allow me to offer a bit of insight.

All of our customers are either A) old people or B) white women, with only occasional smatterings of everyone else. The issue is that, while we have had and do have some quality items on the menu, our clientele do not like these items and do not order them, meaning that corporate eventually quietly cycles them out.

It also does not help that Panera wants to have its cake and eat it too-- salads and sandwiches are made to order, but they're made by mouthbreathing apathetic fast food workers, meaning they always do sloppy work if not completely fuck up their tickets. Similarly, we do use fresh produce and sous vide meats, but the quality control is awful because Panera uses the cheapest distributors possible.

For these reasons, corporate is continuously attempting to "streamline and simplify" the menu, which means that any item with unique ingredients-- i.e. any item that tastes different from the others on the menu-- gets phased out. The Turkey Apple Cheddar Sandwich, the Steak & Arugula Sandwich, the Spicy Thai Chicken Salad, the Modern Greek Quinoa Salad, all decent dishes that got phased and replaced due to having unique ingredients and/or because our customers only want an avocado BLT, Grilled Cheese, Caesar Salad or Mac n' Cheese.

Pic related, our new Mac n' Cheese sandwich, made entirely from ingredients we already had. It's very popular.


tl;dr: Panera has some high-quality stuff but hires cheap staff and our customers don't like flavor so we usually just keep the bland garbage that sells.