In September, shortly after the Double Bread Bowl test-run began, Refinery29 talked to Tom Sadler, Panera's vice president of food & beverage product development, about the innovation, and according to him, the Double Bread Bowl's creation was actually born out of another Panera innovation, the Build Your Own Mac & Cheese Bar . According to Sadler, one of the most popular ways customers enjoy Panera's mac and cheese is in a bread bowl , so when the chain decided to come out with several new ways for customers to personalize their mac and cheese, they wanted to find a way for these fans to enjoy more than one of those many new options all at once. In fact, the development team wanted to give customers as many opportunities to try customized mac and cheese at once, that they even tried making a triple bread bowl during the development process but were unsuccessful.