Last week, a Panera Bread employee (@briannaraelenee) posted a short video of the back-of-house preparation of the restaurant’s mac and cheese on TikTok. Titled ‘Exposing Panera,’ the video quickly got picked up by several popular sites, racking up more than 950,000 views in a few days. The video shows the employee removing a plastic bag of the product from the walk-in freezer, submerging it in a hot water bath, cutting open the top and squeezing it into a bowl for service. Some users were outraged by what they saw. User @kaibrow commented, “Panera is just glorified hospital food.” @stunna_baby said, “ty, I always thought it was freshly made, smh,” (if you don't speak text: ty= thank you; smh = shaking my head) and @simplystrider said, “…but I thought they cared about what they cooked.”  Others were not surprised, comparing the prep to standard fast food or even gourmet sous vide cooking. Panera responded by saying the product is “made off-site with our proprietary recipe developed by our chefs and using our sourced ingredients that meet our standards for our clean menu offerings” before being frozen and shipped to stores. Within days of posting on TikTok, the Panera employee posted a tearful video telling her viewers she had been fired.

So What?  For many consumers, this story was a non-issue. CNN’s headline even mocked shock, ‘Panera defends its mac and cheese after a video exposed the menu item is, gasp, cooked in a bag.’ However, what is interesting, especially from a food industry perspective, is that for a significant portion of Panera’s consumer base--especially for younger consumers, TikTok’s main user—this story WAS trust-breaking and shocking. If Panera, a company whose success has been fueled by its clean food philosophy, can be momentarily weakened by an employee with a cell phone and a social network showing the truth (not some egregious action), what does that say about less prepared companies?  
‘Trust’ has become a hot topic in business lately. Books, seminars and whole conferences have been created to discuss the ‘trust issues’ that today’s consumers seem to have with brands. In the process, the whole concept of ‘trust’ has been complicated and contrived. ‘Building trust’ and ‘maintaining trust’ has been spun into a complex and multi-faceted ‘program’ that brands are now implementing on top of their day-to-day business. Companies now have ‘trust initiatives’ baked into their c-suite plans and ‘trust czars’ that sit on their boards. Honestly, I think this is all wrong-headed; an effort likely created by consulting companies looking to sell one more ‘process’ to deep-pocketed clients.  
In my opinion, the concept of ‘trust’ in companies is not a new issue and it doesn’t need novel solutions, just the better application of marketing principles that already exist. Let me take a step back. Trust is the reason that brands were invented in the first place. Faced with products of uncertain quality at a general store a few centuries ago, consumers looking to buy oats or tinned meat could put their trust in new ‘branded’ products like Quaker and Underwood that promised guaranteed quality. By slapping a name and a face on the product, early companies courted a relationship with consumers predicated on a simple contract of unwavering consistency. Even today, as brands have become much more complex and stand for more than just safety or quality, the central reason behind branding and messaging remains the same: to magnify the core values and communicate the implicit promises of the company.  As Dan Wieden (legendary adman behind Wieden & Kennedy) used to say, brands are verbs that shout their core values: Nike exhorts. IBM solves. Sony dreams. 
What’s happening today isn’t that consumers are becoming so untrusting that we need to upend the basics of marketing or advertising to win them back, its that brands are losing their ability to clearly and consistently communicate their core values across an ever-broadening sea of channels. I contend that while we blame consumers for becoming increasingly skeptical and less trustworthy, we are equally (if not more) at fault. Giddy with the potential behind all of the new avenues of advertising, we’ve spent too much of our time creatively blasting consumers with messages on every device they own and not enough time reflecting on how those messages are being interpreted, their consistency across channels and the expectations they are creating. As the saying goes, “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear,” and when I look at some of Panera’s advertising, I can see where the problem started.
Here is a TV spot Panera ran last year and a print ad campaign showing bread baking, vegetables being cut and “specially shaped pasta, crafted to be delicious.” Most consumers undoubtedly didn’t take these culinary displays at face value, but quite a few did. In addition to doubling down on new messages that reinforced the idea that their ingredients were brought directly from the field to the kitchen, the company should have been checking in with consumers to understand the expectations they were setting up. Panera didn’t need to tamp down their focus on ‘clean food,’ but they probably should have inserted more clarity on how that ‘clean food’ is made possible. High expectations are a great thing to have in a consumer, but only if you can deliver. If their belief in you becomes too divorced from reality, you are living in a powder keg that can easily be ignited (i.e. a TikTok video). Checking in regularly on their expectations and maintaining a tight focus through all of your communications channels is the only way to keep your relationship on the right track.  
Oh, one last thing. You’ll notice that in all of this talk on trust I failed to mention the word ‘transparency.’ That’s because I think that concept too has been overblown. If we go back to the idea that brand relationships are like any other relationship, you’ll see my point.  For example, the reason we can maintain trust in our romantic relationships is because we set expectations  early in our courtship and live up to them every day through our actions. We don’t maintain them by arriving home every night and showing our significant other a log of our day’s texts or our daily Google Maps locations. Such blatant acts of transparency, much like brands that lead with transparency messages, have no place in a trusting relationship—in fact they resemble a relationship where trust has already been broken. That being said, that doesn’t mean that transparency is irrelevant. However, it should be kept in the background. Your significant other knows that IF they wanted to peek at your texts, you won’t hide them. Likewise, consumers need to know that IF they wanted to see where you sourced your vegetables, they could easily find out. The problem is, implementing transparency initiatives is so expensive that many companies insist on pushing them front and center to ‘recoup’ their investment—potentially hurting the very relationships they spent so much money trying to maintain.         
Take away message: when it comes to brand trust issues, the fault might be just as much with companies as with consumers. Focused, consistent, core value messaging and balancing expectations with reality will go a long way toward keeping your consumer relationship strong.