How Panera increased ordering efficiency and growth with in-store touch screens, mobile ordering, and delivery
Julie Jargon / Wall Street Journal : Tweets: @shaich Tweets: Ron Shaich / @shaich : You might find this article from @WSJ interesting. It tells you how I spent the last six years @panerabread and why. http://www.wsj.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Ron Shaich's six-year buildout of in-store touch screens, mobile ordering, and delivery at Panera landed in 2017, when third-party delivery was just becoming consumer infrastructure — DoorDash was already reaching one in three Silicon Valley households the year before. The piece reads as Shaich's case that owning the ordering layer, not renting it, was where restaurant margins would move.
The arc since has validated the bet from both directions: Toast built its cloud-based restaurant software business serving exactly this transition to takeout and delivery, while McDonald's push into edge computing and computer vision for order accuracy shows where digitally ordered, kitchen-optimized quick service ends up.
First-order effects
- Panera converts walk-in and phone orders into digital transactions it owns end to end, raising per-order efficiency and giving it first-party customer data competitors taking orders at a counter don't have.
- Delivery moves from an outsourced afterthought to a managed channel inside Panera's own system, putting it ahead of casual-dining peers still dependent on foot traffic.
Second-order effects
- Competitors face a rising customer expectation that ordering be screen-first, forcing chains to either build comparable digital stacks or route volume through third parties like DoorDash — ceding margin and data.
- Vendors selling restaurant operating software, the space Toast came to dominate, get their founding market as operators who can't build in-house pay for the capability instead.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, quick-service competition shifts from food and locations to ordering infrastructure itself — the endpoint visible in McDonald's later investment in predictive, vision-checked kitchens.
- Restaurant technology splits the industry into operators that own their digital front door and those that rent it from platforms, with pricing power following whoever holds the customer relationship.
The trend: Restaurants are rebuilding themselves around owned digital ordering — kiosks, mobile, delivery — turning what began as a convenience feature into the core operating system of the industry.