John Meister is Senior Vice President and CIO of Panera Bread, a chain of bakery, cafe, fast-casual restaurants with over 2,000 locations in the United States and Canada. During his last ten years at Panera, Meister has driven Panera’s customer digital experience initiatives and helped build his IT culture of innovation that keeps him ahead of rapid market changes. Under his leadership, Panera’s website and apps have won numerous awards, including #1 Food Industry’s Most Innovative Company by Fast Company and Best Technology Award by Restaurant Business.
Speaking about a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, Meister shared some of his leadership secret sauces. This includes how he navigates complexity and a passion for delivering on the promise of experience both with external customers and internally with his IT associates and teams. member. Afterwards, we spent some more time talking about his winning formula and what’s next for his team.
Dan Roberts: IT leaders are always looking to the next big thing. What are you going to do next to set Panera up for continued success? What are you and your team looking forward to in the future?
John Meister: For Panera, it all starts with the guest experience. We’ve recently done some great things with our rewards program when it comes to choosing your next reward. We’ve traditionally guessed what you’re going to be into — our “surprise and delight.” But the reality is that our guesses are not always correct. You may want to try something new. So it’s an optional addition. Popular items when you feel like trying something new, items that people like you often choose, or items you can place regular orders for.
We also think a lot about personalization. Create all these micro-moments so you can improve your orders just a little bit. For example, if you know your guests always leave onions out of their order, you can ask them about it if they forget.
We also look forward to finding ways to improve the digital drive-thru and guest experience, such as conversational AI ordering and digital order pickup at the drive-thru. For years we’ve thought about doing digital order pick-up at our drive-thru, but we figured we couldn’t train consumers to do it. I went there with So we go back to that moment and think more deeply about the interaction. These interactions show very high customer satisfaction scores. In summary, I think there is room for innovation in the wheelhouse of our main order. From an innovation standpoint, we are still excited about conversational AI. We are still excited about automation. Whether it’s accounting tasks, IT tasks, taking orders, or preparing meals in the kitchen, the possibilities for automation are many and exciting.
Roberts: There is another complex issue that businesses have to deal with. It’s a fact that 100% of sales occur in cafes every year in this industry. How are you coping and impacting?
We are closely monitoring our restaurant GM turnover and associate turnover and our operations and HR partners have done an excellent job over the past 12-18 months. It blows my mind how much they’ve improved Panera. This is amazing. Still, the new team should consider onboarding his members quickly. How do you segment people who get inspired more time? Or are they learning different roles? Or career advancement? How do you think about inspiring team members and how do you talk to them from that mindset? How do you teach GMs to treat café employees like family? ?We take a deep look at these aspects.?
At the same time, we need to keep things simple. It’s so easy that even I can go to a cafe and he can make sandwiches for an hour without much training beforehand. It’s difficult because I’m not very good at making sandwiches. We think about onboarding and usability as hard as we think about the guest experience.
Roberts: A lot of companies joke that data is a four-letter word. How do you think about data and use it to address the logistics of your business?
Step one is to hire people who are smarter than you in certain areas. There are people much smarter than me when it comes to restaurant data. The first part of working with data is really understanding what you want to do with it. What KPIs or business metrics would you like to change? Maybe it’s wear and tear. It may be profit for the store. Maybe a location analysis for choosing a location for a new property. Then look at the business situation and make a hypothesis about x. So let’s get the data behind the hypothesis and see if it makes a difference. Then, as we get closer to those learning moments, we turn it into a dashboard that lives and breathes across the enterprise. food expenses? overhead? Is it a paper product? Let’s put all the usual suspects on one page for the GM to understand quickly. If something starts to deviate from our normal, the GM should be able to spot it quickly and easily.
So, you think about a hypothesis, prove it, create a dashboard, and then you find yourself overwhelmed with millions of data at your fingertips. Next, we decide to make the data proactive. Send proactive alerts if something goes off course. Make your data more interactive: Something seems to be happening with x, should we pay attention? Yes or no? Even if it’s no, take it back and learn. Was there anything else you could look at long-term? Or you got 10 nos and you don’t know why. Let’s call some restaurant GMs to educate us. Ultimately, we get smarter and discover new things our tools can do. Our ultimate goal is always to make his GM’s life better.
Roberts: We talked a lot about the culture you’re building and how you help your employees think about their own worth and show themselves differently. , can bring employees to cafes to connect with its broader purpose. Can you talk a little bit more about that and the impact it has on customers and employees?
I loved working at MasterCard — they were at the top of the tech game and had great talent — but it was very difficult to see what I was doing every day reflected in the real world. Here, it’s just the opposite. You can code something and test it today, put it in a cafe to do a prototype or proof of concept, then go to the cafe and see your employees and customers using it. Once you’ve written some code to make your sandwiches better, you can make them yourself or watch others make them. You can experience it and live it.
All new support center employees are required to work at the bakery cafe for several days. This is part of the new hire onboarding process. It’s great because you come up with ideas to improve your business using technology to make life easier for your employees and customers. Working in a café can be nerve-wracking and intimidating, but I love it. She will spend the next five years wanting to start all over again. And when you finally get the chance, you’re so happy to have all these new insights. We really try to take walks.
Roberts: As leaders, we are under constant scrutiny. People read how we handle situations, especially difficult ones. How do you feel about it in terms of how you show up and take responsibility in difficult times?
I always say, moods are contagious. Don’t take it seriously. laugh at yourself a little At the same time, consider the big picture, understand how your role led to this situation, and remind people how we got to this point. It’s so easy to beat yourself up when things go wrong. Remember the big picture why I am here and what difference I am trying to make.
And look for ways to refresh and inspire others. I would like to remind everyone of this. We sell soups, salads and sandwiches here and make a difference in people’s lives. Go out and see customer stories about how they helped their mom or dad with cancer or made this other person’s dream come true. Melt away and be a reminder of why you are here. But always enjoy yourself as much as you can. Because moods are contagious.
Roberts: Speaking of attendance, could you share your “toasted bagel” story? Does this speak to the leadership team’s commitment to continuous improvement? I also see it as a CIO story.
This was around 2014. Every morning the CEO used our new mobile his app to order breakfast and pick it up on the way to drop off his son to school. He stopped at a traffic light and sent his son to take the order. As long as his son came back with his order before the lights turned blue, it was a nice day. I had a long morning if he had to park in the parking lot.
The CEO always ordered the same thing. Green Passion smoothie and toasted white bagel. There was no way I could ask the GM to make my life easier, as it’s an order I can’t keep on the shelf for too long. I think he spent about a week without hearing from the CEO and finally got this experience. You have 25 seconds to get out of the car, have your meal, and return to the car. I time myself again and again. But it had to be so every time. As the CEO changed cafés, we heard something again. In the end, about three weeks went by without hearing from him, and I thought that was probably the end of it.
Then I started getting these text messages: ‘This is the toasted bagel I got at this place this morning. I went to the place and this is the toasted bagel, in the picture one bagel is dark, one is light and one is barely toasted, one has toast marks and one There was no.
That’s when I knew I had arrived as the business leader because I owned this experience so much that now I wanted him to fix our toast. I laughed because I thought he could buy an AI-enabled toaster with a camera for $100,000, but that’s not what the CEO wants. I went to Boston for a Friday standing meeting with him, and he had a poster listing bagels from about 30 cafes, from light to dark.
I went back to the operational services team, who were much smarter than me, and asked for help. They suggested checking the factory settings on these toasters. Let’s put out a color guide in the cafe. If a toasted bagel goes this color, go down one notch, if that color goes up two notches, and so on. That’s when we knew technology was no longer our challenge and a little Rapid Pick-Up® channel was born.
For more information on Meister’s leadership playbook, visit Tech Whisperers Podcast.
