The insights team at Panera Bread had a big task in front of them; in an effort to streamline their operations and deliver on the promise they make to their guests, they wanted to dramatically change their menu.

Amy Pacer, Senior Director of Insights at Panera Bread, notes:

I think most people are familiar with the Chipotle experience; you go in and you walk what we call a ‘line’ as your meal gets built. And at Panera, we had five of those going on for each of our categories…it added a lot of complexity. We knew we needed to refocus on what is core to our DNA – soups, sandwiches, and salads. And that would help operationally. It would help our franchisees. And it would also help the guests have a better experience.

They wanted to reorient their menu, developing a brand new menu architecture for the organization. A new menu architecture would allow Panera Bread to focus on fewer categories, optimizing for affordability and high quality. And consolidating to three categories would drive lower costs and a more versatile pantry of ingredients.​​

But that left the insights team with the question…how could they reposition their menu to delight guests, deliver new menu items, retain the right mix of existing offers, and drive sales?

The team at Dig Insights helped Panera Bread understand the market impact of:

• Streamlining to focus on their core categories​
• Large-scale menu architecture changes
• Brand new menu innovations
• New combinations of Panera Bread products

We have been working with Dig for many, many years. We’d previously done a Virtual Menu study with Dig – you build a robust menu and the guests can actually interact with the menu items in totality and make choices, exactly like an online shopping experience. But building a whole template menu can take a lot of time – time we just didn’t have. We needed something that was super-agile, but that still gave us the complexity to understand all the trade-offs going on behind the scenes.

Given we’d previously leveraged our Virtual Menu tool with the Panera Bread team, it was the obvious first choice for them. But given budgets and timelines, our team needed to get creative with how to set up the project. 

That’s where our Upsiide platform came in. Upsiide’s simple respondent interface captures interest and commitment to each menu item. These two inputs allow for some powerful modeling on the back-end, ultimately producing a composite metric we call the Idea Score, which has proven to predict the in-market success of products.

We ended up using Dig’s Upsiide platform, which I love because it’s a simple interface for the respondent. We had respondents screen menu items through a very simple, intuitive interface, but the back-end data allowed us to do robust modelling, which gave us the complexity we required.

In the space of a couple months, Panera Bread was able to go back to their senior leadership with clear direction on a new menu.

Overall, the streamlining of their menu was an impressive feat. They made the following reductions:

1. Menu items went from 141 → 89

2. Lunch entrees went from 42 → 24

3. Ingredients went from 220 → 153

4. Total categories went from 5 → 3

With this kind of menu transformation, you can imagine there was a lot of trepidation from senior leadership. And we were able to tell them this was the right move because we had that confidence in the methodology and approach.

We worked with our finance team to understand all the implications of these menu changes. And we laid out for senior leadership what the impact of the changes would be on revenue, supply chain, and operational efficiency.

Amy and her team are now focused on developing a standardized approach to innovation work within Panera Bread, leveraging the learnings they gathered through the Upsiide platform as their foundation.