Shop Talk
Retailers, consumers and prices
Panera’s pick-what-you-pay cafe holds its own
Panera Bread’s hometown experiment in altruism appears to be working.
About eight weeks after opening Panera Cares — a nonprofit restaurant that invites customers to take what they need and pay what they can — executives say it appears to be on-track to covering its costs and becoming self-sufficient.
“It’s a fascinating test of humanity,” Panera Executive Chairman Ron Shaich told Reuters.
“On average, we’re coming in around 85 percent of the average retail price,” said Shaich, whom Panera Bread’s CEO has dubbed the “guiding light” of Panera Cares.
St. Louis-based Panera Bread provides the space to house the experimental cafe, which is run by a nonprofit group that grapples with the same labor and food costs as any other restaurant.
Shaich hopes to open two more Panera Cares cafes before the year end, likely in other Midwestern cities or potentially in the Pacific Northwest.
During his two-week stint at the first Panera Cares cafe in Clayton, Missouri, Shaich said he saw a wide range of behavior from diners — who are given a receipt with the retail value of their food and the option to leave a donation.
Will food banks need a bailout?
Job losses and rising costs for food and housing are driving up demand for emergency meals from charities and food pantries around the United States. But donations aren’t keeping up.
Demand in the Los Angeles area has risen 41 percent from a year ago, said Michael Flood, president and chief executive at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.
The food bank currently provides the equivalent of 560,000 meals a week to local charities, said Flood. Compared with last year, the LA Food Bank is delivering 33 percent more food to the 875 charitable agencies it serves, but that’s still falling short of need by 8 percent.
Such supply and demand imbalances are being seen around the country as the economic downturn triggered by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is also resulting in fewer donations from companies and individuals.
“It’s ironic and sad that in this land of plenty, so many people have to make due with so little,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
In 2007 — before the economy took a sharp turn for the worse — some 36.2 million Americans, or 11.1 percent of households, struggled to get enough food to eat. About one-third of the people in that group went hungry from time to time, according to a report issued this week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
“This is a problem that is only going to get worse,” Fielding said of the nation’s growing hunger issues. “Things are moving rapidly in the wrong direction as we get more unemployment.”
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