Panera Bread is banning dozens of artificial ingredients from its menu

By the end of 2016, Panera Bread plans to remove at least 150 artificial preservatives, flavors, colors, and sweeteners from its soups, sandwiches, salad dressings, and several bakery items.

The chain will discontinue using ingredients like fat substitutes and propylene glycol, a preservative used in deodorant and e-cigarettes, The Wall Street Journal reports. While a lot of food products will be affected, some offerings, like soda, will still have artificial ingredients. The company's chief executive officer, Ron Shaich, said Panera is trying to "give people a simple, easy Good Housekeeping seal-of-approval kind of approach to it."

Panera Bread has been planning to drop the ingredients since 2012, and has already stopped using the artificial sweetener sucralose and titanium dioxide, which is used to make mozzarella cheese whiter.

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