Ron Shaich

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, you know, Au Bon Pain in Au Bon Pain International.

We sold the manufacturing business.

And by 99, I ended up with Panera Bread and 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 2,000 restaurants.

We're 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, 2009, 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 my commitment to Panera.

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 Panera Cares, 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.