Panera Bread Is ‘Un-Engineering’ Its Food, Plans To Remove All Artificial Additives By 2016

“No compromises” is what Panera Bread is telling us today. By the end of 2016, the bakery-cafe brand with over 1,900 locations promises to be a destination for “clean eats,” removing all artificial preservatives, colors, sweeteners and flavors from their food.

The move to rid their menu of ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and artificial trans fat is a noble one and Panera seems to be all-in with the effort. Our sources note more than 150 ingredients will be impacted from the change.

For more than a year, Panera’s culinary team has been “un-engineering” its food menu, something that’s gotta be hell when it comes to finding suppliers to handle the changes across their 1,900 locations. Their team is spending time finding replacements for the artificial colors in pastries and removing commonly used artificial preservatives in soups.

It’s not all pie-in-the-sky though. Panera took today to announce that all their locations will offer new “clean” salad dressings made without artificial sweeteners, colors, flavors, and preservatives.

If you’re so inclined, Panera just launched a .pdf “No No List” of their current roster of artificial ingredients. The list is color coded to identify the foods the ingredients they’ve already removed and the stuff they’re working on removing.