A lot of that is about the bread wall. You can buy the full miches, among other things, off the bread wall behind the counters. I guess they’ve found that having all that fresh bread out front increases sales (kind of like how groceries stores out fresh flowers out front and then having the produce section be right near the front door), but a lot of the big ones sell really inconsistently. Not many people are doing grocery shopping at Panera, you know? Some days the bread wall empties. Other days, it’s half full at the end of the day with bread that’s only a couple days away from being moldy or so hard it’s not edible. So they mark up the bread that’s most likely to remain on the shelf anyway and it becomes tax deductible when they donate it to a local charity. They get their pretty bread wall that sells out two days a week and they get to write off their losses.

But if they don’t donate the bread, it’s not deductible. And if you let employees take enough extra bread, they stop buying as much on their lunch breaks and you start getting empty bags arriving at local soup kitchens, which is a bad look and can jeopardize the arrangement.

I work at a chain bakery and it’s the same. Every day there’s so many sweet + savoury goods left over and they just get thrown away. It used to be allowed that you could just take them home but that got banned for…no particular reason. The managers at the place I work are really nice but I guess they’re sticklers for the rules as they don’t ignore it-which I don’t blame as apparently the loss prevention team already installed a secret camera in there (they came in overnight!) because people kept messing up the tills and they think people are stealing money. Plus I guess if they don’t get enough food waste they get suspicious. It’s a load of shit…