Ken Rosenthal, who opened a bakery cafe in the St. Louis area, with sourdough bread as its star, and built it into a small chain that would become Panera Bread, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 81.
His wife, Linda Rosenthal, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Rosenthal had no interest in running a retail bakery in the mid-1980s, when he and his wife owned a women’s apparel store called Kenlyn’s in Chesterfield, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.
“I was a person who never went into a kitchen, much less understood how to bake anything,” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1997.
But his brother, Don, told him about a business he should consider getting into: a sourdough bakery cafe like Le Boulanger, which he had visited in San Francisco. After resisting for months, Mr. Rosenthal also visited the bakery.
Impressed by what he saw, he asked the owner, Roger Brunello, to teach him the secrets of sourdough. Over the next year, he trained with Mr. Brunello, and in October 1987 he opened the first Saint Louis Bread Company outlet in Kirkwood, a St. Louis suburb, with a menu featuring 10 types of bread (including sourdough in various shapes), a variety of croissants, danishes and muffins and some sandwiches.
“Roger helped him open the store and I said, ‘Roger, are you sure he knows how to bake?’” Ms. Rosenthal, who is known as Laya, recalled with a laugh in an interview.
She and her husband took the leap in part because competition from larger apparel stores was making their jobs more difficult.
“We had nothing to lose,” she said. “We gambled everything.” They sold Kenlyn’s shortly after opening the Saint Louis Bread Company, which became known locally as “Bread Co.”
Interviewed by a local television station six months after the opening, Mr. Rosenthal noted that the new business required him to awaken daily at 2 a.m.
“You have to change your life, you have to change the things that you do; I know people don’t call me after a certain hour,” he said. “You have to take naps once in a while. But I’ve enjoyed it.”
He added, “Creating sourdough bread, for instance, is a slow, tedious process, and it’s difficult for a large commercial bakery to create that type of a product.”
Kenneth Jay Rosenthal was born on April 11, 1943, in St. Louis, to Herman Rosenthal, who owned a women’s apparel store, and Adis (Eckert) Rosenthal, a pattern maker. He graduated from University City High School in Missouri, attended community college and followed his father’s path in 1963 by becoming a women’s clothing salesman.
He married Linda Kramer in 1969.
He bought Karstev’s, a women’s clothing store in St. Charles, Mo., in 1970, and later brought in a partner, with whom he opened a second Karstev’s in 1975 in Chesterfield. In 1980, he and the partner split up; his partner took the St. Charles store, and Mr. Rosenthal and his wife took the second one and changed its name to Kenlyn’s.
Mr. Rosenthal’s detour from women’s dresses to baked goods proved a smart one. From 1987 to 1993, he and his three partners (who joined him at different times) expanded the first cafe into a chain of 20 stores in Missouri and Atlanta.
After Mr. Rosenthal’s death, one of his partners, Doron Berger, told The Denver Post: “What we were doing at the time in St. Louis, there was no competition. That was part of the genius of Ken, because everyone tried to talk him out of doing it before he opened the first location, but nevertheless he pursued it.”
In November 1993, the publicly owned Au Bon Pain acquired the Saint Louis Bread Company for $24 million. At the time, Au Bon Pain had 172 bakery cafes nationwide, and the Saint Louis Bread Company had $14.6 million in revenues in the 10 months before the sale.
“It was the right time to sell,” Mr. Rosenthal told The Post-Dispatch. “We had brought the company to a 20-store organization, we needed outside financing, and we wanted to be able to make the concept a bigger entity.”
In 1995, under Au Bon Pain’s ownership, there were 59 Saint Louis Bread Company bakery cafes; in 1997, when Au Bon Pain changed the company’s name (except in the St. Louis market) to Panera Bread, it had franchise deals for more than 200 outlets.
In 1998, Au Bon Pain agreed to sell its namesake restaurants and change its corporate name to Panera Bread.
In 2017, Panera was sold to JAB Holding, a privately owned European company, for $7.5 billion, more than 300 times what Mr. Rosenthal and his partners had been paid. Later that year, JAB bought Au Bon Pain, reuniting it with Panera.
Panera currently has 2,230 restaurants in the United States, making it the second-largest chain in the fast-casual restaurant category (after Chipotle Mexican Grill), according to Restaurant Business magazine.
Mr. Rosenthal stayed with Au Bon Pain for a while, then became a Panera franchisee in 1997. His company, Breads of the World, owned nearly 100 Panera restaurants in Ohio and Colorado, where he moved in 2002. He has lived full-time in Scottsdale since 2019, a year after selling the last of the Breads of the World restaurants a year before.
“To have sold the company and come back as a franchisee — he loved it,” said Craig Flom, his son-in-law and a longtime Breads of the World executive.
In addition to his wife 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 explained his operating style when he talked to The Post-Dispatch in 1997.
“I’ve always been best when I’m completely challenged,” he said. “When things get to be routine with me, I suppose I lose a little interest.
“I’m not a great operator. I’m a better pioneer than I am anything else.”