Panera Bread In its 2015 Form 10-K, Panera Bread describes itself as “one of the largest food service companies in the United States” and that its success is attributable to “our ability to create long-term concept differentiation.”

The company defines its strategy as differentiation, and this aligns with the generic strategy as defined by Porter. The differentiation strategy cites differentiation as a source of competitive advantage and the market scope as broad (MindTools, 2019).

In this, Panera bread is trying to achieve competitive advantage through concept differentiation. It cannot sustain competitive advantage based on things like the food it serves (fairly standard mainstream white people fare) or free wifi, but it believes that total package concept that it offers is sufficiently unique to win business in the long run. There are individual competitors, but few major competitors that do exactly what Panera Bread does. If Panera is competing against mainly quick service or fast casual businesses, it does offer a relatively unique value proposition in terms of the...

Panera is a well-performing company, and does not have many real weaknesses, but it does have relative weaknesses, things that different competitors do better. Panera’s marketing is good, but not the...…itself, in a space where such opportunities seem few and far between.
The study of Panera’s value chain is also quite valuable. One of the major challenges in value chain is that Panera is able to execute across thousands of stores, which is an amazing accomplishment. It is very difficult to enjoy operational excellence across a large company, with systems that are so strong they can be implemented by workers of all levels with great success. There are some great lessons in how Panera Bread has been able to thrive, because on paper there are a lot of reasons why they wouldn’t. So the fact that Panera has been incredibly successful provides a lot of powerful learning opportunities.…