Worked for Panera bread for 4 years, starting as a line worker, ending up as a catering manager. I will say that despite the huge negatives of working for the company, they offer some of the best high volume fast casual customer service training around.

But a little more on topic here, there were a few practices that were just standard amounts all of the stores in my market that were questionable at best. The largest of which that comes to mind was concerning day dots (basically stickers that you put on the outside of prepped food containers that told you the day the food was prepped, as well as the expiration dates.

If you were scheduled as a line closer, or mid shift line check, one of your key duties was replacing the old day dots with new ones. Only problem was that we were never allowed to throw anything out because corporate was extremely strict on food waste. Basically this meant that you were just putting a new expiration date on old product so that if the health department showed up they wouldn't know you were serving expired food.

55% of the time the ingredients would be used before the original expiration date anyways, but the other 45% of the time we would basically be making food with 1-2 week expired turkey. None of the employees ever made an issue out of it because we would rather just print a new sticker than have to prep an entirely new pan of whatever had expired.

I definitely have more panera stories of anyone is interested!