Ken Rosenthal, who opened a bakery cafe in the St. Louis area, built sourdough bread in a small chain that stars and becomes Panera bread, passed away on February 14th at his home in Scottsdale, Arizona. 81.
His wife, Linda Rosenthal said the cause was Alzheimer's disease.
Rosenthal was not interested in running a retail bakery in the mid-1980s. He and his wife owned a women's apparel store called Kenlins in Chesterfield, a suburb of St. Louis.
“I've never been to the kitchen and didn't really understand how to bake anything,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1997.
But his brother, Don, told him about the business he should consider entering: a sourdough bakery cafe like Le Boulanger, which he visited in San Francisco. After several months of resistance, Mr. Rosenthal also visited the bakery.
Impressed by what he saw, he asked owner Roger Brunello to tell him the secrets of sourdough. The following year he trained with Mr. Brunello and opened his first St. Louis Pun Company outlet in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis in October 1987. Various croissants, Danes, muffins, some sandwiches.
“Roger helped him open the shop and said, 'Roger, are you sure he knows how to bake?” Rosenthal, known as Leia, in an interview I remembered it with a laugh.
She and her husband made a leap to some as competition with large apparel stores made their work even more difficult.
“I had nothing to lose,” she said. “We put everything on the table.” They sold Kenlin shortly after opening the St. Louis Pun Company.
Interviewed by a local TV station six months after the opening, Rosenthal said he had requested that the new business wake up every day at 2am.
“You have to change your life. You have to change what you do. I know that people won't call me after a certain amount of time,” he said. “I have to take a nap once in a while, but I enjoy it.”
He said, “Make sourdough bread, for example, is a slow and boring process, and it is difficult for a large commercial bakery to create that kind of product.”
Kenneth Jay Rosenthal was born in St. Louis on April 11, 1943 to Herman Rosenthal, who owned a women's apparel store, and Addis (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 female clothing salesman.
He married Linda Kramer in 1969.
He bought Karstev's, a women's clothing store in St. Charles, Missouri in 1970, and later brought his partner. In 1980 he and his partner split. His partner filmed the St. Charles Store, and Mr. Rosenthal and his wife took a second store and changed its name to Kenlin.
Mr. Rosenthal's detour from a woman's dress to baked goods proved clever. From 1987 to 1993, he and his three partners (who joined him at different times) expanded their first cafe to a chain of 20 locations in Missouri and Atlanta.
After Rosenthal's death, one of his partners, Deron Berger, told the Denver Post: It was part of Ken's genius. Because everyone tried to talk to him from doing it before he opened the first place.
In November 1993, publicly owned Au Bon Bon Pain won Saint Louis Bread Company for $24 million. At the time, Au Bon Pain had 172 bakery cafes nationwide, and Saint Louis Bread Company had earned $14.6 million 10 months before its sale.
“It was a suitable time to sell,” Rosenthal told Post-Dispatch. “We took the company to a 20-storey organization. We thought it needed external funding and could have made the concept a bigger entity.”
In 1995 there were 59 Saint Louis Bread Company Bakery Cafes under the ownership of Au Bon Pain. In 1997, when Au Bon Pain changed the company's name (except the St. Louis market) to Panera Pan, there were franchise deals in over 200 stores.
In 1998, Au Bon Pain agreed to sell a restaurant with the same name and change the company name to Panera Pan.
In 2017, Panera was sold to privately owned European company Jab Holding for $7.5 billion, more than 300 times what Rosenthal and his partners were paid for. Later that year, JAB purchased an Au Bon Pain and was reunited with Panera.
Panera currently has 2,230 restaurants in the US, making it the second largest chain in the fast casual restaurant category (after the Chipotle Mexican Grill), according to Restaurant Business Magazine.
Rosenthal stayed in Au bon's pain for a while, then became the Panera franchisee in 1997. His company, Pan of the World, owned nearly 100 Panera restaurants in Ohio and Colorado. In Scottsdale, a year after selling the last bread from a restaurant around the world a year ago.
“I sold the company and returned as a franchisee – he loved it,” said Craig Fromm, his son-in-law and longtime world executive Pan.
In addition to his wife and his brother, Mr. Rosenthal was survived by two daughters, Carly Fromm and Kari Rosenthal. two sons, Eric and Scott. 13 grandchildren.
When I spoke with Postdispatch in 1997, Rosenthal explained his business style.
“I was always the best when I tried it out completely,” he said. “I think I lose interest a little when things become routine with me.
“I'm not a great operator. I'm a better pioneer than anything else.”
