Panera Bread to move HQ from St. Louis to Boston area next year

Business admin July 29, 2026 0 Comments

Panera Bread to move HQ from St. Louis to Boston area next year

Panera Bread will relocate its headquarters from the St. Louis area to Massachusetts next summer, bringing the corporate offices of yet another major company to Greater Boston.

Panera will move to an undisclosed space in Weston in July 2027, according to an internal memo sent to employees Monday by CEO Paul Carbone that was obtained by the Globe.

The move, Carbone wrote, “will allow us to fully align our teams” around the company’s turnaround plan, an effort launched last year after years of slumping sales and operational missteps.

Panera — a chain long known for its breads, mac and cheese, and lunch deals — has more than 2,250 locations around the US and Canada. The relocation comes as the company is attempting to engineer a major turnaround in the fast-casual industry. Once a defining brand in the bakery-cafes category,Panera has struggled in recent years with high food costs and staffing.

Customers have said the higher prices also came with smaller portions and degraded quality. Stores, half of which Panera owns with the rest owned by franchisees, are often short staffed. The company, owned by private equity parent JAB Holding Co., has cycled through multiple executives and recently paused their plans for an initial public offering.

Since becoming CEO in January 2025, Carbone has been leading a turnaround plan to revive the brand, aiming to push annual sales to $7 billion through what he calls the “Panera RISE” strategy.

In recent months, Panera has added new roles in its cafes meant to focus on the customer experience, introduced a $4.99 value menu featuring half-size meals, a new loyalty program, and refreshed its menu to add bowls and new sandwiches to lure back customers.

In March, Panera closed its fresh dough facility in Franklin, eliminating 92 jobs, in an effort to shift to a new model where bread and pastries are prepared inside cafes.

The company opened a local office in West Newton in 2022, where Carbone is based. Prior to joining Panera in August 2023 as the company’s chief financial officer, he served as the CFO of SharkNinja, based in Needham, from 2022 to 2023. He worked as the chief operating officer of Talbots, the clothing retailer , in Hingham from 2017 to 2018. And from 2008 to 2018, he climbed the executive ladder at Dunkin’.

But Carbone’s journey selling food in Boston starts even earlier. When he was 7, he started working at his father’s produce stall at Haymarket.

Carbone said in his memo that the company will maintain a “support center” in St. Louis, but that many employees, including remote teams, will eventually be relocated to the Weston office.

“Multiple factors were carefully considered to determine which roles would relocate, and we understand the personal and professional impact this may have,” wrote Carbone.

The company was founded by Ken and Linda Rosenthal as the St. Louis Bread Co. and opened its first bakery in 1987. Au Bon Pain Co. purchased the company for $23 million in 1993. Au Bon Pain co-founder and CEO Ronald M. Shaich later rebranded it Panera Bread, and is widely credited with pioneering the fast-casual segment. While Panera expanded nationally, its restaurants around St. Louis continued to use the original branding. Shaich, previously a long-time Brookline resident, led Panera until stepping down as CEO in 2018.

Panera joins a growing list of companies that have shifted their corporate operations to Greater Boston in recent years, including The LEGO Group, and online monitoring firm Dynatrace. Hasbro Inc., the toy giant, is also expected to move its offices to the Seaport from its home in Rhode Island in early 2027.