Ken Rosenthal, who opened a bakery cafe within the St. Louis space, with sourdough bread as its star, and constructed it right into a small chain that may grow to be Panera Bread, died on Feb. 14 at his house in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 81.
His spouse, Linda Rosenthal, stated the trigger was Alzheimer’s illness.
Mr. Rosenthal had no real interest in operating a retail bakery within the mid-Eighties, when he and his spouse owned a girls’s attire retailer known as Kenlyn’s in Chesterfield, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.
“I used to be an individual who by no means went right into a kitchen, a lot much less understood easy methods to bake something,” he advised The St. Louis Publish-Dispatch in 1997.
However his brother, Don, advised him a few enterprise he ought to take into account stepping into: a sourdough bakery cafe like Le Boulanger, which he had visited in San Francisco. After resisting for months, Mr. Rosenthal additionally visited the bakery.
Impressed by what he noticed, he requested the proprietor, Roger Brunello, to show him the secrets and techniques of sourdough. Over the subsequent yr, he skilled with Mr. Brunello, and in October 1987 he opened the primary Saint Louis Bread Firm outlet in Kirkwood, a St. Louis suburb, with a menu that includes 10 sorts of bread (together with sourdough in varied shapes), a wide range of croissants, danishes and muffins and a few sandwiches.
“Roger helped him open the shop and I stated, ‘Roger, are you positive he is aware of easy methods to bake?’” Ms. Rosenthal, who is called Laya, recalled with fun in an interview.
She and her husband took the leap partly as a result of competitors from bigger attire shops was making their jobs harder.
“We had nothing to lose,” she stated. “We gambled all the things.” They bought Kenlyn’s shortly after opening the Saint Louis Bread Firm, which turned recognized domestically as “Bread Co.”
Interviewed by a local television station six months after the opening, Mr. Rosenthal famous that the brand new enterprise required him to awaken every day at 2 a.m.
“It’s important to change your life, it’s a must to change the issues that you just do; I do know individuals don’t name me after a sure hour,” he stated. “It’s important to take naps occasionally. However I’ve loved it.”
He added, “Creating sourdough bread, for example, is a sluggish, tedious course of, and it’s tough for a big industrial bakery to create that sort of a product.”
Kenneth Jay Rosenthal was born on April 11, 1943, in St. Louis, to Herman Rosenthal, who owned a girls’s attire retailer, and Adis (Eckert) Rosenthal, a sample maker. He graduated from College Metropolis Excessive College in Missouri, attended neighborhood faculty and adopted his father’s path in 1963 by changing into a girls’s clothes salesman.
He married Linda Kramer in 1969.
He purchased Karstev’s, a girls’s clothes retailer in St. Charles, Mo., in 1970, and later introduced in a associate, with whom he opened a second Karstev’s in 1975 in Chesterfield. In 1980, he and the associate break up up; his associate took the St. Charles retailer, and Mr. Rosenthal and his spouse took the second and adjusted its identify to Kenlyn’s.
Mr. Rosenthal’s detour from girls’s attire to baked items proved a sensible one. From 1987 to 1993, he and his three companions (who joined him at totally different instances) expanded the primary cafe into a sequence of 20 shops in Missouri and Atlanta.
After Mr. Rosenthal’s dying, one among his companions, Doron Berger, advised The Denver Publish: “What we have been doing on the time in St. Louis, there was no competitors. That was a part of the genius of Ken, as a result of everybody tried to speak him out of doing it earlier than he opened the primary location, however nonetheless he pursued it.”
In November 1993, the publicly owned Au Bon Ache acquired the Saint Louis Bread Firm for $24 million. On the time, Au Bon Ache had 172 bakery cafes nationwide, and the Saint Louis Bread Firm had $14.6 million in revenues within the 10 months earlier than the sale.
“It was the fitting time to promote,” Mr. Rosenthal advised The Publish-Dispatch. “We had introduced the corporate to a 20-store group, we wanted outdoors financing, and we wished to have the ability to make the idea an even bigger entity.”
In 1995, beneath Au Bon Ache’s possession, there have been 59 Saint Louis Bread Firm bakery cafes; in 1997, when Au Bon Ache modified the corporate’s identify (besides within the St. Louis market) to Panera Bread, it had franchise offers for greater than 200 retailers.
In 1998, Au Bon Ache agreed to promote its namesake eating places and alter its company identify to Panera Bread.
In 2017, Panera was bought to JAB Holding, a privately owned European firm, for $7.5 billion, greater than 300 instances what Mr. Rosenthal and his companions had been paid. Later that yr, JAB purchased Au Bon Ache, reuniting it with Panera.
Panera currently has 2,230 restaurants in the US, making it the second-largest chain within the fast-casual restaurant class (after Chipotle Mexican Grill), according to Restaurant Business magazine.
Mr. Rosenthal stayed with Au Bon Ache for some time, then turned a Panera franchisee in 1997. His firm, Breads of the World, owned practically 100 Panera eating places in Ohio and Colorado, the place he moved in 2002. He has lived full-time in Scottsdale since 2019, a yr after promoting the final of the Breads of the World eating places a yr earlier than.
“To have bought the corporate and are available again as a franchisee — he beloved it,” stated Craig Flom, his son-in-law and a longtime Breads of the World government.
Along with his spouse and his brother, Mr. Rosenthal is survived by two daughters, Carlye Flom and Kari Rosenthal; two sons, Eric and Scott; and 13 grandchildren.
Mr. Rosenthal defined his working type when he talked to The Publish-Dispatch in 1997.
“I’ve all the time been finest after I’m utterly challenged,” he stated. “When issues get to be routine with me, I suppose I lose somewhat curiosity.
“I’m not an awesome operator. I’m a greater pioneer than I’m the rest.”
