Panera’s founder once threw a loaf of bread at his executive’s head as an ‘unconventional’ management tactic

• Panera founder and ex-CEO Ron Shaich once threw a baguette at an executive’s head in frustration.
• Shaich tells the story in his book, calling it one of his “more unconventional management tactics.”
• Shaich told Insider he was trying to point out issues the company was having with its bread quality.

Panera’s founder and former CEO Ron Shaich says he once threw a baguette at one of his executives’ heads in a “spontaneous display of frustration.”

While similar tales of eyebrow-raising CEO moments, like Elon Musk’s “demon mode” or Ray Dalio ordering a probe into urine on the men’s room floor, are often revealed in tell-alls or third party biographies, Shaich details the incident himself in his new book, “Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.”

“I’ve done a lot of strange things in the service of getting my team to pay attention to what matters,” Shaich writes. “One of my more unconventional management tactics involved lobbing a baguette toward one of my executives’ heads.”

Shaich told Business Insider in an interview that the target of the thrown loaf was the company’s COO at the time, Mark Borland — who Shaich also said was his close friend. The incident happened a little over a decade ago, Shaich said, and Panera was having quality issues with its bread at the time. Borland died in 2017.

“It was in a real meeting, a couple hundred — like 250 people in the room” Shaich told BI. “I didn’t try to throw it at him to hurt him in any kind of way. I threw it at him to make a point to everybody in the room, are we really proud of this? And he cared about as much as I did, and I loved him. And it was a point to all of us that we can do better.”

Shaich cofounded Au Bon Pain, of which Panera Bread became a division, in 1981. After selling most of the company’s other businesses to focus on growing Panera, he took the company public in 1991 and remained CEO until he stepped down in 2018.

In a recent interview, Shaich also said that during Panera’s 2015 overhaul he was dealing with so much pressure that he thought it would be easier to be “hit by a truck.”