After delivering to a Panera Bread in Easton, PA, we began to learn how dedicated this company is to bettering the community. In fact, they put an impressive amount of effort into donating to the less fortunate. We were inspired by their work and thought we should do our best to share this with our other customers. It’s always nice to know you’re spending money at a business who will put it to good use.
Called the Day-End-Dough-Nation program, Panera Bread donates all unsold bread and baked goods to local hunger relief programs at the end of each day. This amounts to around $100 million worth of unsold food each year. Similarly, the Community Breadbox program allows the same soups sold in Panera stores to be served at local food pantries.
In addition, Panera initiated facilities called Panera Cares Cafes to make the “Panera experience” available to everyone. They are set up in economically diverse areas and are sustained from donations from customers. Basically, customers are not required to pay for their food. There are donation suggestions listed by Panera, but ultimately the customer is able to decide how much he or she would like to pay. Some customers donate an hour of volunteer time at the cafe rather than paying for their meal. This is a really beautiful way of showing kindness within the community.
These are just a few examples of all that Panera is doing to help the communities that they serve, and we hope it inspires our readers to go out and do some good too.
