If I may be allowed to piggyback a question I had about the same Arby’s commercial…
I always had the (perhaps false) impression that Arby’s roast beef was sliced from something more like a “potted” meat, like Spam, except beef. Is Arby’s roast beef actual whole meat? It sure doesn’t appear or taste that way. (Not that I particularly hate or love the stuff, it’s just meh.)
If my suspicion is correct, bragging about slicing their “meat” fresh in-house would be a pretty silly distinction to make.
So, what’s the straight dope? Is Arby’s roast beef real, whole meat, or not? I’ve never noticed anything resembling a “grain” to the meat that would make me think it’s real.
Take a plastic bag and fill it with about 7 lbs. of beef chunks. Fill the rest of the way with a beef slurry(finely ground beef and fat with some salty water) for a total weight of 10 lbs. Freeze. Thaw, roast and slice.
So, as I suspected, their bragging about slicing their “meat” fresh is tantamount to bragging about freshly sliced Spam? Yeah, that is a silly distinction to try to make…
I’ve professionally visited a commercial bakery used by McDonalds for production of some of their buns. It is definitely not McDonalds and they also make baked goods for other entities.
I’ve visited the manufacturer of a popular line of Japanese-sounding soy and other sauces that you have probably heard of. But you’ve never heard of the company that actually makes the stuff.
Finally, I’ve visited a no-name factory that cuts and wet/vacuum-ages steaks for some huge, nationally advertised family steak restaurants.
Again, this stuff is almost always contracted out. Once a chain gets to a certain size, they have to concentrate on running and marketing for those stores rather than the difficult practice of operating efficient food production factories.
A surprising one to me is that Panera actually mixes their most of their own dough at one of (I think) ten facilities which is then trucked to the retail stores nationwide where it is locally baked.
On preview, the linked Iowa article confirms my speculation. The plant in the ad is operated by West Liberty Foods.
I can’t comment on what they serve at the restaurants, but I used to work in the same building as Arby’s Test Kitchen. And they made honest-to-god, normal, really tasty roast beef there. I’ve seen it in the ovens.
Sometimes when they were playing with spice mixtures or cookies or other things, they’d leave extras with security. And security would call me and suggest that I go to the first floor for a visit.
-D/a
Not only did they used to cut the u-gouge, they put the mayo/mustard on the bread, then the cheese, then meat, topped by veggies… I ALWAYS make the employees do it in this order… It usually irritates them, as they don’t know how to cut it, and the sauces are the last step now, so they have to carry the bread all the way over to the end of the counter, and bring it back over.
The way they make it now, is just a mess… I grew up inside of two subways that my parents ran for 15 years. My father decided the last straw in his role as an owner was when they forced all the owners to ditch the “old NYC subway train” themed wall paper and pictures.
…And yes, Arby’s uses a gelatinous type of meet mold that they indeed slice “fresh”.
Applebees uses a seasoning called “apple seasoning” on EVERYTHING they serve… but that is a topic for another discussion.
My first job in highschool was @ a subway. This would have been bout 1997 or therabouts.
No meat was sliced in the store. It came in a big box (frozen, in layers between plastic, which made it easier to put the sandwiches together). We would put a few boxes in the fridge to thaw and rotate them out as needed. We did slice some veggies, cucumbers and tomatoes IIRC. Never meat. In fact, everything but the veggies came frozen: cookie and bread dough, soup mixes, marinara sauce, tuna and crab salad mixes. Any veggies that could come canned were ordered that way.
Subway is the largest restaurant chain in the world with nearly 38,000 locations. Unlike McDonalds and other competitors, Subway locations are all franchises. Ie, nit a single one is owned by the corporation. I suspect that there’s a lot of variation between locations.
But regardless, I thought the whole point of the ad was confusing. Does the fact that the cold cuts aren’t sliced in the store imply that they’re less fresh? That the quality of the meat is less? Arby’s has some cojones to be arguing either case.
When I worked at Arby’s the roast beef came frozen in unlabeled plastic wrap. Beef chunks with slurry? Ok, sure. It looked like a big ole hunk of meat to me but frozen and unlabeled can hide a lot of stuff. It took 4ish hours in the oven to cook though. The turkey came in smaller hunks labeled with an actual company’s name and had to be sliced just like the roast beef. Actually, the ham, corned beef and turkey all came in small hunks labeled appropriately and needing slicing. As far as I or anyone else was aware, the turkey we served was no different than the turkey hunks you might pick up in the prepackaged meat section in the grocery store.
I get the impression that most deli meats are just sliced meat paste. Even if Arbys does slice their meat in the restaurant, it doesn’t mean it’s any fresher or better than Subways. Maybe it is, but where it is sliced doesn’t seem like it would make much difference.
Missed the edit window, the deli meats in my local Subway definitely come in a sealed plastic wrapper, looks like about a 5" high stack of sliced meat. They cut open the bag and put the meat in one of the black plastic containers in the ingredients area, that’s it.
Really? I hated that and was glad they stopped doing it.
Since it was apparently important enough for you to (temporarily) stop eating there over it, can I ask what the big advantage is? I realize it made the toppings more visible (which was good for them, I guess, because it created the illusion you were getting more), but all it ever did for me as a sandwich-eater was force my hand into a “claw” to hold the top piece of bread, lest I get mustard/oil/vinegar smeared all over my fingers.
