Panera Bread is banning dozens of artificial ingredients from its menu

Panera Bread sandwiches.
(Image credit: Jesse Grant/Getty Images)

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."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.