Panera Bread is one part sandwich shop, one part coffee shop, one part bakery… and one part a popular place where people go to work on their laptops.
The company has automated the entire ordering process — from kiosk menu selections and payment to pagers at the table — so it’s possible to eat a full meal there without saying much more than “Thank you.”
Put that all together, and you have a restaurant that’s neither a fast food place, nor a typical sit-down eatery with servers to check on you ever few minutes.
As such, Panera’s fountain soda selections are pretty limited. But that doesn’t mean you will have to go thirsty, because they offer a lot of other things to sip — from charged lemonades (with guarana and caffeine added) to smoothies to all sorts of hot and cold coffee drinks.
They also have a variety of half-gallon to-go drink jugs with some of their special sweet blends, like agave lemonade, mango yuzu citrus, and passion papaya green iced tea.
