MyPanera

MyPanera is unusual among large restaurant programs because it has never been built on points. Instead it is behavior-based: the program reads a member's visit frequency and ordering history and issues personalized rewards and challenges, often framed as a number of visits needed to earn a surprise reward. Notably, it rewards habit over spend, so a member who orders the same soup and sandwich consistently can see better offers than someone who spends more but visits erratically.

Panera pairs this free personalized layer with a separate paid tier, the Unlimited Sip Club, at 14.99 dollars a month plus tax or 119.99 a year for drip coffee, tea, and select drinks. The subscription is a frequency lock: it gives a member a standing reason to walk in, and Panera has tuned the rules so a subscription-only visit does not by itself advance the free rewards. From August 2026 it stops being unlimited: the tier becomes MyPanera + Sip Club and caps self-service drinks at 30 a month for the same fee, which is what an unlimited promise usually costs an operator once the heaviest users find it.

For an enterprise operator, MyPanera shows the two poles of modern loyalty living on one identity. The lesson is that algorithmic surprise-and-delight, which rewards habit, and a paid subscription, which buys frequency for a fixed fee, are complementary. Running both on the same member profile is where the category is heading, and a reported points pilot suggests even Panera is testing a more conventional currency alongside it.