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Business|Ken Rosenthal, Founder of Panera Bread’s Forerunner, Dies at 81
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/23/business/ken-rosenthal-dead.html
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He built a small chain of bakery cafes, with sourdough bread as its star. A few years after it was sold, it became nationally famous under a new name.
Feb. 23, 2025Updated 5:25 p.m. ET
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.
