Panera Bread is exempt from following one of California’s newest laws, according to multiple reports. The new law will raise fast-food workers’ minimum wage to $20 per hour and will take effect beginning April 1.
The new law doesn’t recognize places that operate “a bakery that produces for sale on the establishment’s premises bread” as fast food, according to the law’s text.
Why the line was drawn at bread remains unclear.
However, Newsom pushed for the exemption, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. One of the primary beneficiaries of the exemption is Greg Flynn, a billionaire and longtime Newsom donor who has two dozen Panera Bread locations in California.
“Bread” is a legally defined term.
I’d need to see paragraphs C and D of that section, but based on that description alone, cinnamon buns could certainly be counted as bread as long as paragraph C doesn’t forbid a couple common ingredients like sugar, butter, and of course cinnamon.
I guess you’d also need to know how they’re defining “produces,” do they have to make the bread from scratch on-location, or if they got shipments of premade dough from somewhere to bake in-store would that count as producing bread.
I’m almost certain that the answers to those questions can be found with about 5 minutes of googling, I just honestly don’t care enough to Google it myself.
Besides flour, yeast, water, milk, and egg, the rest of the ingredients are food additives. The CFR section in my comment above says that bread is produced by baking it.