YouSaid · the spoken record

Ron Shaich

lines on the record: 112
first: 2025-11-11
most recent: 2025-11-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“about discovering what's going to be needed and wanted for tomorrow. And so one of the things that I've always focused on is actually protecting discovery. And in fact, as the CEO viewing my role as discoverer and chief, innovator in chief, because that will by the very nature of centrifugal force and size and scale, you will end up decapitating discovery in these companies.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“discovery of delivery is the language of prove it to me show me the numbers let me see the spreadsheet I don't believe you and quite frankly these forces challenge each other but the language but delivery because it does add value starts to push out the discovery because discovery doesn't have oxygen if you get delivery pushing down on it and over time what happens in so many food companies is that that discovery is pushed out by delivery delivery gets stronger and stronger and stronger and it becomes the dominant force in the company and then these companies wake up after 15 or 20 years they're billion dollar companies and they're really powerful about delivering what was wanted and needed by the consumer five years ago ten years ago and twenty and really terrible”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's getting bigger. Along comes outside capital, and outside capital says, you know, we can help you grow even further. And pretty soon you have aboard meeting of people saying, you know, this business is doing great, but you know what? It could do even better if we bring in some of these I'll call them delivery people. Delivery people are, you know, financial planning and purchasing and a range of different disciplines. And the truth of the matter is you bring in the delivery people. It makes the place better. The margins get better. The business gets more disciplined. It gets tightened. But here's what begins to happen and not over six months but over years and half a decade. The delivery people in the discovery people find they're talking different languages. The language of discovery is the language of poetry. It's the language of imagine if only we could do this. The language of”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really hard because organizations by their nature don't like to change. In fact, I'll share with you something I've written about. I call it the life cycle of a business. It starts with discovery and ends with delivery. And think of it this way. When a business starts out, it's so hard to get off the ground and win. So hard. Browies are very low. You have no capital, no scale, no competitive advantage. You have the highest cost you're ever going to have. And it requires something that really is powerful to break through with the consumer, to deal with all those forces working against you. But some people do, and people discover a better way to approach the customer that touches the customer, a better experience, and they get off the ground. And they start to scale, and it works.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oftentimes once you bounce you can't come back. And remember, we're talking about fixed assets. We're talking about building restaurants. If I don't understand what I'm doing, I'm going to build it wrong. I'm going to fail. How often do restaurants? Once they start losing Rarely”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, go fast and fail makes sense in technology where it's very much there's no fixed cost and you can repair completely. I'm in a business, I call it fashion with fixed assets. You know, you build a restaurant, you're going to spend a million, a million, two million dollars, maybe more. You don't want to mess it up because fixing it is really difficult. So you want to get very clear what you're doing, what do you do first, second, third, and make sure you get it in the right order. So I am much more concerned about getting it right in a really serious way and understanding it and then taking the right steps from that than I am about getting out there and getting market chair first because the cost of failure is so high. Because the cost of failure is extraordinary.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“for how we're going to compete, and that becomes an organizing tool. I mean, just imagine Panera, we had one hundred and twenty five thousand people. How do you get them all aligned with what we're trying to create if you can't put it into words? Are you obsessed over this? You spent working on this document And you were obsessed about Details and walk me through that a little bit A lot of other people, there's sort of wisdom, which Is sort of the opposite of that”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hash that out totally consubescence was where we started every business and every business we're in today and we should talk about the multiple businesses we're in today. Every business that we're in starts with a consubescence document. What is a consubessence document? It's essentially a script for regional theater. Think of it this way. If you're in a multi-unit business, I'm running thousands of regional theater shows that are performing eighteen hours a day. And so what is that script? What is the aesthetic of the environment? What is the food and the food attitude? What is the humanity? What are the people like? How do you experience it from a consumer's perspective when you walk in? And we try to really go deep and use words that mean something in writing that script or that vision.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the same exact thing for me when I think about business. If I don't have a better competitive alternative, I don't have the house vig, this is an ugly business and I don't want to be in it. What I've come to know and what I'm trying to make sure your listeners hear loud and clear is that what matters more than anything else is genuinely having a concept a vehicle, a business that in whatever your mini market is, the physical one mile or the nation if it's real estate, whatever it might be, that you're the best alternative. When you have that, then you have the possibility of growing and building something a skip. Is that what you were trying to do at the concept essence document?”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world doesn't need another business, it certainly doesn't need another restaurant. The whole objective of everything we do is to build something that for some target customer, this is the best alternative they can find. And what I mean by that, it sounds like fancy MBA talk. It isn't. All it means is that your target consumer is going to walk past all of your competitors, all the people doing something similar to you, and choose to come to you because you do it better than anybody else. If you're able to do that, you can win. And so I tell it by way of a story. I was in Vegas speaking, I don't know, a couple of years ago, and I walked through the casino at 1130, and I see folks dumping chips into these slap machines. And I think to myself, Ron, the only way I'd ever be in a casino at eleven PM is if I owned the casino and had the house.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“myself in the Act three partners, but we don't want to be at the effect of somebody else who has a different idea, and straight up, when you have investment partners, the best way I can express it to you, it's a little like having a baby with someone. You take their money, you know, they have legitimate rights. And if you're the kind of person I am, you want to listen and you want to be responsive. And so I like generally being in a controlled position because it allows us to take a long-term approach, to do the things that don't drive profitability in the short term, but actually build a far better company. There's one principle here that we haven't talked about. And I want to talk about Act III with you. Everything I believe in about business starts with three words that are competitive alternative.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd answer it differently. You asked me if I think about control. Look it. One of the lessons I've learned is to believe in yourself. When I was growing up and coming of age professionally, if you're smart, you're always going to say, that guy's leaning on me about this or that. What am I not getting? What should I do? And one of the lessons I learned as I look back is to trust myself, that I actually know what I'm doing, and I have to believe in it and I have to have the faith to get through the long march. I have to have the faith to go through the pain of transformation. One of the really interesting retrospective lessons for me is to actually trust myself. And that has led to a decision that generally when we like to be in a control situation in a company. By that I mean that we're willing to bet our own money, we're willing to bet on ourselves.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is a little like a wedding celebration. It's the beginning of the marriage. It's not the end. And, you know, having been married, I would say to you, you want to really contemplate that on your wedding day. What is it you're going to have to do to have a successful wedding? That celebration will fall by the wayside if you don't.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Longstanding relationship with and had helped make billions of dollars for them. We brought in Capri, the capital group, which again I had been part of helping make billions of dollars for them. We brought them in as early investors. We limited the distribution. None of us were selling stock on the IPO. This wasn't an opportunity for any of the existing investors or the largest ones like me to get money out. It was an opportunity to support and fuel the company. And essentially, we only allowed the investment banker nine percent of the shares in distribution, which essentially went to their clients and the hedge funds. We protected 91% of it of that distribution so that it ended up in the right hands. And I think that we serve that company very well in taking a long term view of the IPO. To me an IPO.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We worked with great diligence in getting their narrative down. so that when they went out they knew what they were selling and they were selling to the street the possibility of participating in the growth of what would be the dominant player in Mediterranean. I think we really prepared this company when we actually went to market. We didn't let the investment bankers control the distribution we did. We brought in cornerstone investors like T-Row, who I had unheard.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were any number of those investors, they all came from very different places. Some were with us in building something for the long term, others were trading the stock for the short term, and you had all of these pressures and it all played out in a very public way. You had very limited ability to protect whatever was going on in your company and develop it. And you need to be ready for prime time. And so I'll tell you a story. When we decided to take Kafa public, I think people would consider it a very successful IPO today, three and a half times from the IPO price. But consider very successful. What do we do? We helped Brett and the team get ready for an IPO for a year and a half before we went public, we did quarterly earnings calls in the company simulated with our investors. They had to do press releases. They had to take questions.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt to all of these folks that were investing tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in this company. And the reality is when you're running an enterprise, you have a responsibility of the people that believe in you and you want to deliver. I want to deliver for the people who are buying the stock, not the ones that are shorting the stock.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say differently. I did a book called Know It Matters, and I did a chapter on the IPL. I'll warn you, Shane, I've counseled dozens of people on going public who are going public, and I typically start by telling people ninety percent of the entrepreneurs that go public live to regret it because it's a very different enterprise. Now, for me, it was phenomenal. I've done it multiple times, and it's created great blessings in my life in many ways, but they're also difficulties that go with it. And I can remember the day we went public, my partner at that time, Lou King, was on cloud nine, and I had him stop the car we were in, the limousine, and I got out and I walked through Central Park here in New York, and I started thinking to myself, just the sense of responsibility.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A four hundred, but more importantly, I mean it's perceived as a brand who's filling out a category Mediterranean and dominating in that and given its market cap, market valuation which has gyrated between seven billion and fifteen billion up and down. The market perceives this as something very real with the potential to fulfill its destiny is the next Chipotle and that's what they're paying for that potential.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“an effective CFO till we brought that in and to actually help in multiple different ways to help that business grow. And it was a very tough year, I can remember Brett, our COs to go to breakfast every other week, walking back from breakfast in downtown DC, and he looked at me wistfully and said, Run, I just wish we still had just our fifty stories, not these three hundred that we bought. And I looked at him and I go, Brett, you know, we don't have that choice anymore. Well, we need to build is load bearing people and organization around you that can take on this opportunity. But if we can pull this off, Katie bar the door, we're going to build an amazing company in a powerful category. And ultimately, Kava has been probably the single best IPO in the last half decade in the restaurant industry.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is a guy really understands discipline scaling and how you build these companies. We took out a number of people from Panera's technology function, the number three guy who built all that technology joined us and he brought a team with him. We have the capability of really doing technology. I have another partner who's a serial entrepreneur great at food, great at design, great with ideas. We get into a smaller business. I mean, he's superb in helping bring it all together. So the model for us in Act three was one to bet on a category and then have the ability to go in and help them build the dominant player in that category. And so at Kava we were able that first year to really provide a lot of technology, skills that were needed, help out in many ways as there wasn't.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Partners, not one of them is a financial guy. There's only one financial guy in the mix who was actually the activist who attacked me. I couldn't tell anybody at the time that I actually thought he was smart and liked him. But at any rate, I did. And he joined us as our CFO. And, you know, I have one partner that has been with me for 20 odd years who does all our deepest research and strategic thinking. He was the guy who has really helped me develop fast casual and that ideology I used to say from his brain to my lips I'd speak it, but he was the guy who really pushed me hard on thinking he's with us. I've another partner who's open five thousand retail locations. I have another partner who came up through Darden, who was president of Dairy Queen, the president of Bruger's Bagels, was my COO”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that have tailwinds, and then we endeavor to build the dominant player in that category. My industry is an industry of winner take all, think McDonald's and Burger King, think Panera and Corner Bakery, Chipoline, Cuidoba, all of the value creation tends to happen for those that are building something of large scale. And if you have that dominant position and you're a better competitive alternative, you win. And so we saw that opportunity in Kava, and that's what led us to make that acquisition. And at that point, Kava went almost overnight, took us six months to do the deal. But from 50 restaurants to 300, and it led to a very, very tough twenty nineteen because the company wasn't prepared or ready for it. And one of the things about Act 3 Holdings were able, I have.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This and I went and basically pitched their board on this idea. And in their wisdom, I must be straight. They understood it, and they understood the power of building a dominant brand in the Mediterranean category. And it helped that I agreed to essentially finance a large part of the acquisition to help lead it. But what it amounted to was instead of me buying Zoe's, we decided to have kava buy Zoe's, and then we would help them make that transformation. Here was the bet, that by buying a company five times larger, we could apply our discipline, our skills, our culinary skills to end up with the dominant player in this category. And the thesis stepped back, but the thesis behind act three is we bet on categories.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the number one diet in America, it was bold flavors, it was different but accessible, and you could tell this was a powerful channel with lots of winds at its back, the channel. And I began to say, who has the potential to dominate? Is it Zoe Zerka? And again, these folks were five times the size of Kava. But Kava was doing higher volumes and was a better concept. I started to think to myself, you know what? What I should do is buy the Zoe's. And it was a three or four hundred million dollar public company at that point from a billion dollars. Instead of figuring out for them, buy it and then merge it in with Kava. The one problem is I had to tell that to Kava who wanted me to join the board. And I broke the news that Brett Schulman, who was this wonderful CEO down at Kava. And Brett said, wow, okay, that's an addressing idea. And he said, before you joined the board, maybe you want to tell him about it.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“just my own money and a bit of money from some of my partners, some of the people that chose to join us and took some of the people I had worked with and decided to go do it. And essentially I created an investment vehicle because it's not a firm. It's called Actorate. You can figure out where that comes from, Au Bompan, Panera, and now Act three holdings. And within eight weeks of leaving Panera had gotten involved in our first really real deal, which was Kava. I had been an investor in Kava when it was two restaurants, just a little something. And after I left Panera, they asked me if I joined their board, another company called Zoez had asked me if I joined their board. They were a public company, you know, and it was very clear to me. Again, I could see and taste that opportunity. Mediterranean head power.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, what are the major clicks to get us to Kavanaugh? You know, it's interesting. So I left Panera. I had always had interest in a number of other little businesses. And I was doing, after I left, I was doing a lot of speaking on the pervasive short-termism in the US capital markets and how not just our body politic, but our capital markets and how that was essentially making us less competitive. It was not helping our GDP growth if we're not thinking long term, we're not going to have innovation. If all we want is to pop the stock, it's short-term cost cutting that drives it. One of my associates, a guy named Keith Pasco, oh, I've been work with me, Penera said. Why don't you take your own money and put your money where your mouth is? And I ultimately took roughly two hundred million dollars of my own money, no LPs, no external.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“European money manager JB who came along and fell in love with Panera and they wanted to buy it and though I was never selling it it wasn't my intention when somebody falls in love who is it for me to deny them what they wanted if they were willing to pay for it and they they paid for it and what at that time was the largest or second largest US restaurant deal ever done $7.8 billion and among the highest multiples and you know again it seemed like an opportunity to harvest everything that we had worked on for a lot of people that had believed in us and we took that opportunity”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“having the transform everything we transform not just technology but we transformed how we dealt with the guest what our consubessence was we transformed much of the senior management team this company had had growing in its needs and its requirements ultimately this became one of the largest transformations in the industry and it took on a life of its own and again straight up I could see the opportunity for a better panera that was not competing the way it had competed for the prior twenty years but was competing against what the possibility was of what the consumer wanted and then came the hard work of actually putting that into existence and by twenty seventeen it was work in our Aribad was up thirty five percent our comstore sales were pushing double digits”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And book came to me and said, he personally had a problem. He couldn't travel. Something had happened in his family. And he said, maybe we should make you CEO again and I should step down. And we debated it because it wasn't what I wanted necessarily, but it seemed to be necessary at a certain point, and maybe nine months or a year later we executed that. We just swapped positions. He became executive vice chairman, and I became a CEO again. And I put this in place. And again, it all sounds lovely, but it led to the worst three years I can ever imagine. I had active as investors attack me. I spent one hundred fifty million dollars on technology. I used to refer to technology as social security of Benera. It was only a matter of time till it was a hundred percent of our revenue. We were really investing in it. And you didn't know where it would end.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the United States, where your best customers were treated differently, I called for clean food, a different approach to eating and how you might eat, and I essentially called for omnichannel. And I handed in this vision for a radical transformation of Panera to Bill Morton, who had become the CEO. And Bill was my very dear friend, twenty year colleague, and looked at me and said, wow. He said, I don't have anybody to work on this. Would you go work on it? And I said, yeah, I'll have some fun with him. And $25 million later in another year, the executive chairman is working eighty hours a week on this vision for how to have integrated technology change the guest experience, change the whole deal. I was loving it. I had none of the ceremonial duties of being a CEO. I didn't have to tell people what I just did. I don't have to tell them what I was going to do. I just was dealing with the product.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it's about seeing opportunity. I had the chance to return from the west coast. I was still the executive chairman of Panera and the largest shareholder. And I did a lot of the M&A work and some of the consumer work. And I came back from a trip after a weekend. And I essentially decided I wanted to write a manifesto for how I would compete with Panera if I weren't part of Panera. I would say how I would screw with Panera. But how would you take it on? How would you best it? And I essentially at that time called for complete digital access, which didn't exist in the restaurant industry. We can talk more about that. I called for something called loyalty, which again didn't exist. It's become prevalent in the industry. It had actually been developed in the UK with a company called Tesco and came through Kroger.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I decided I wanted to go do this in some way, and I also had a desire to test out an idea I had been working on which was something called panericares, cafes of shared responsibility where there would be no set prices. It was a test of humanity. People come in and it's another whole story, but I wanted to test out these cafes of shared responsibility. And so in 2008, 2009, I stepped down as CEO. I tried to take that opportunity as jumping off a high dive board to actually learn what it felt to go in the water. And I spent about a year, a year and a half creating panericres, doing a bunch of political things. I was one of the eight or nine people that co-founded a group called No Labels here in the United States, which is meant to reduce the hyperpartisanship in DC, the polarization, and focus us on long term thinking.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A whole bunch of cash and a business that had extraordinary potential, and then I went to work to help make that happen, and we took it from what a couple of hundred stores up to two thousand restaurants very close to it by the end of that decade. And that led again to the next transformation because they come in waves. And by 2008, two thousand nine, I personally was feeling that I wanted transformation. I wanted to understand if I could take these powerful lessons I learned about long-term thinking and actually apply them in a broader civic society. I had been involved with the Obama campaign and there had been some discussion of joining the administration and I was unable to give him my commitment to.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Live with myself and I went off and came back two months later and went to my board with a proposal to sell every other business and bet the whole thing on this panero bread division. You know, I didn't control the company at that point and that was definitely a very tough situation. But ultimately they gave me the room to do it. I did it. It led to the worst year and a half of my life. I sold every other division. These aren't just businesses. These were Bonpin was my first child. My kids know that, you know. I mean, it was a part of me. These were people I had sweated with and bled with and I loved. The good news is most of them ultimately came back to work for us when their non competes were over. But we sold the Obampen in Obampen International. We sold the manufacturing business. And by ninety nine, I ended up with panair bread.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clear that we had that opportunity. And I said, you know what, we're going to screw it up. We're not going to give it the capital. We're not going to give it the human resources to get it where it needs to go. And my friend looked at me and said, Ron, what would you do if the name of the company was Panera? Panera owned everything else. How would that change the way he thought? And I looked at my friend and I said, wow, I'd never thought of it that way. If I had any guts, if I had, if it was really Panera, I would monetize every other asset, take the financial capital, and I'd also take the human capital, the best people, and I'd go down there and I'd make this happen because the greatest gem in this company was that division and the greatest risk to its possibility, its potential was that we didn't give it what it needed to actually grow and become what it could be. I'm this kind of guy if I say I'm going to do it, I often go do it.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vision, St. Louis bread company that we had renamed Panera. That's a whole nother story why we did it. But it was renamed Panera Bret. And I'm on a beach down in the Caribbean with a friend. And I'm lamenting this friend. Everybody's fighting. Everybody's angry at me. The guys at Obam Pen are angry at me. Why am I trying to take their capital and shift it to this growth thing Panera? The guys in international didn't want to call home. The guys in manufacture were trying to figure out why they were in a retail company. At any rate, we had professional managers in every one. And I said this friend, you know, the real shame here, this thing, Panera, even though it's the third biggest of our company, it's not the largest. It's not the name on the door. The name of the door was O Bomp. That was the public company. I said, This thing has the potential to be a nationally dominant company. For every thousand people say it, one ever makes it. And it was pretty clear.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“up to million seven fifteen. And we began to understand that we were actually playing in another business, a gathering place business, offering an opportunity for a place people could go to to touch base to see each other, to connect soccer moms, Bible groups, farm reps, folks doing interviews, people doing their taxes, and we created these environments. And again, this is the manifestation of this understanding that people wanted to feel special in a world in which they didn't. And Panera became the poster child for that, and we built that out. And that led to third learning and transformation. By ninety eight, ninety nine, I was feeling some real frustration. I was running a big public company. We had four divisions at that time, O Bompin, O Bompen Manufacturing, O Bompin International, and this fourth division.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“took that unit that was doing about a million dollars a year. It was basically a sandwich place in which the bread was the differentiator. And we added a breakfast business root in sourdough bagels. And the business popped from a million to a million two fifty. And then we came in and created a whole different environment for the store, a place that you wanted to set, a wonderful, wonderful designer named Terry Heckler, who actually did our logo and did the original Starbucks logo out of Seattle, who since passed away, but he was instrumental in that. And we created a kind of environment that welcomed you and invited you. I used to call it visual candy. Wherever you sat, you saw something we softened the environment, we made it comfortable, we made a place you wanted to be. And we put that into place under our stores. Very quickly, our volumes popped from a million to two.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“preservative stone deck ovens and we began to say there's a powerful opportunity in shall we say specialty food and there's no more powerful platform to compete with that than a specialty bakery and putting those two together became our manifestation of what we could do as now called fast casual concept. And so again, same thing. I saw it. I could see it. I could taste it, and it was the opportunity to go put that in place. We should come back to what the objective of all this is in a second. But that led to that second transformation and the second transformation ultimately was to apply those principles of a specialty food to one of our concepts. And I began to apply it to this one concept we held called St. Louis Break Company. And we literally completely rebuilt it.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“how insulting you. That was the deeper trend people wanted to feel special. You saw the same thing with beverages. Columpepsi morphed into Snapple into Aldo, and now you walk into a convenience store, you're going to see a couple hundred different beverage brands. The point of it is we saw the same thing, the same opportunity happening in food. At one time, all food had been local and had been commoditized into fast food, and the powerful opportunity was for specialty food, for food that was done the way it had been done, for food that people respected with ingredients, and we began to see the power that and saw the same thing happening with bakery. One time bakery had all been local in the consolidation and the commodification that had become three loaves for ninety nine cents. And by the early nineties, some consumers were waking up and saying, I want it done the way my grandparents did it. No chemicals.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Maxwell House, you can take soft drinks once it'd been local soft drink manufacturers that had become Coke and Pepsi, and every action draws reaction. And that's the deeper trend. And we began to see in different consumer categories people waking up and saying, you know, I don't want to be part of a mass market. I want to feel special in a world in which I don't. And you started to see the development of craft breweries and beer. Good friend of mine in Boston, Jim Cook, did Samuel Adams. You know, it was an answer to what had happened to the marketplace. We saw the same thing with coffee with the growth of specialty coffee. I mean, back then, if you came to my house for dinner on Friday night, I'd serve you folgers. Today, if I don't use an expensive espresso machine or an espresso.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The signal vs the noise You know what really matters because there's all this stuff coming at you but what are the deeper trends and what had become clear to me as I was traveling the country and watching people and their angst around fast food their need for speed but their need for quality their need for an experience that elevated them as I was doing that I began to understand a deeper theme post World War two all food was local but you fast forward that to nineteen ninety almost every major consumer category had been commodified it had been turned into an oligopoly you can take beer it had all once been local beer it was Anheuser Bush or Miller you can take coffee it was also again once local coffee roasters that had morphed into folgers”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michelaski and Terrabreads amazing bread he was doing up there, and we were trying to find out who are the best people that were meeting customer needs and why were people smiling when they came out of there. And it was from that that we essentially began to get it. And I can remember sitting in a bar with these two guys, Scott Davis and Troy Jewson, and Dwight was my researcher. And Troy said, you know, you really want to understand today's consumer. Look at their beer bottle. That label on it is a mirror for who people perceive themselves to be. And our opportunity is for our food to do the same thing, to give people a sense of who they were and what they are. And, you know, I began to make sense of it. And again, for me, the powerful theme here of shame is trying to search for what is the”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I saw that again at that time as a gateway to the suburban markplace El Bumpen would be urban, the St. Louis Break Company could be suburban. And it was interesting. And it was that point, this would have been 93, 94, 95. I ran it through an earnout. I began traveling the country with a guy named Scott Davis, another guy named Dwike Jewsen. These were people that worked with me, colleagues who I thought, you know, I learned from. And we began seeing these consumers who wanted something more, and it was very clear that there was this very distinct consumer niche out there that wanted something better, and we began to try to make sense of it. And again, you asked me how we did it. It was traveling into the west coast, the east coast up to Vancouver in Canada.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who was about so much more than what you put in your stomach and how cheap it was? Food industry is the second oldest profession, and it's about hospitality at its core. You know, the idea that we could create environments that people actually wanted to sit in and invite them to come in and enjoy it and to find it as a place where you really did want to have an interview, gather the soccer moms, have a Bible study group, write the great American novel. I mean, all of these were experiences that played out in environments that we created. And to me, that was a beautiful contribution to people's lives.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“powerful opportunity. Now, I was trying to figure it out for my own company, but that ideology, that view of the world which in the early nineties nobody thought would ever work, that became the ideology that fueled what's called fast casual today, which is a three hundred fifty billion dollars business. Panera became the poster child for it. Howard Schultz and Starbucks played a similar kind of paradigm, Steve Ells and Chipotle. And I think together you saw the evolution of food culture. I'm so pleased. One of the things that we did was just say.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Develop the ideology that became what is called today fast casual. It wasn't very complicated. We began to look around and could see. This been ninety two, ninety three, that one out of three consumers, one out of four consumers held their noses when they went into fast food. And you said, what is it that they're looking for? I know we spent a year or two on the road listening to people, and what you heard was that so many of these consumers, what they really thought was real food, environments that engaged them, served by people that cared, and they actually wanted an experience that elevated their sense of self, not depleted it, which is what they experienced in fast food. And we began to say if we could create that kind of environment, we could create something that actually elevated people and that this was a”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Preservatives really to push for what is now called clean food, removing the ultra processing. And I know that we've made a difference. I also think we've made a difference in the food culture. When I grew up, the only choices were fast food and fine dining. In the early 90s is, I think you and maybe some of your listeners know, we really...”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changing the marketplace is the challenger brand and doing so, we actually opened up the market, lowered the prices, and in came everybody from McDonald's to Chick fil A. We were among the first people to remove trans fats from our menu in the early 2010, twenty twelve. The US government wanted to post caloric information. The industry was fighting it intensely. Publicly said, look it. What's the problem with this industry? If people are afraid of posting caloric information, what's in their food? Maybe the answer isn't trying to hide it. Maybe the answer is to actually change what you got in your food if you think people aren't going to be too pleased with that. We were in the lead and had the opportunity to be one of the first large organizations to remove all artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners.”
2025-11-11 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Panera Founder Ron Shaich · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source