Or they didn’t settle on those specific ingredients until it came time to put out the app.
I donno. Food photography is a specialty. I suspect the ‘best’ ingredients are whatever the photographer though looked best, did 20 different combos, and then Subway marketing looked at them for 10 minutes at an afternoon meeting and picked one.
Honestly, I’m glad for you. That’s got to be some level of satisfying. You can’t advertise your stores being filled with “sandwich artists” who don’t have some base level of what might be best on a ham and cheese sandwich. Is it so hard to say, “most people start out with lettuce, tomato, mustard and mayo”?
My job is 40% customer service - I have to find ways to serve my clients in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. I’m reminded on a nearly-daily basis of this “Milkshake Test”. Now, I understand there are a lot of low-level wage grinders out there that are discouraged from coloring a little bit outside the lines. But I really find it difficult to imagine that managers at Subway would crack down on someone for offering up a suggestion. Sandwich artists - pfft.
Man, I don’t know why I reread this topic again. Now I’m irrationally aggravated.
For a while maybe a year or so ago (probably after the OP was posted), Subway had a Reuben on the menu as a limited time promotional item. When I ordered that I found Subway did have a “recommended” way of preparing it, and of course the recommended items were the ones that come on a traditional Reuben. The guy making it did ask the usual questions, followed by “Subway recommends…”, like “What kind of bread? Subway recommends rye.” “What kind of cheese? Subway recommends Swiss.”
I will admit it does seem kind of silly to ask those questions for a Reuben, which is a very specific sandwich with a specific set of ingredients. Vary too much from that and it’s not really a Reuben anymore. But I suppose if someone asked for corned beef and sauerkraut on Italian Herb with American cheese with lettuce, tomatoes, olives, and peppers, the guy would have made it, even though that sounds awful.
Hmmm… so your theory is that Subway had a specific idea of what ingredients go with each sub but kept it secret for years and never taught their sandwich artists any of the correct combos or even put it on a card, but did tell their food photographers about it - Well, sometimes they told them and sometimes they didn’t, since the app defaults don’t match all of their advertising images.
My theory is that they put some reasonable default values in the app to make it easier for people to order and to make sure that no one ended up with a ‘no toppings’ sub unless they meant to. It seems a little simpler than the weird, inconsistent conspiracy of secretive sandwich ideals.
Subway kept it a secret because to them it was easier for every sub to just be a free-for-all at the restaurant than training their employees.
I’m assuming Subway is like pretty much every other fast food establishment where they have a chef come in and recommend specific ingredients for a new sub, then they use that as a base for their new food. The problem comes when Subway just didn’t give their employees cards for the specific ingredients for each sub because they were too cheap/lazy to do it.
I applaud a fast food place that doesn’t assume we all have the same tastes. I like that I don’t have the burden to say “Make mine different.” I get exactly what I want on the sandwich every time at Subway. That is certainly not true at McDonald’s, Burger King, or Wendy’s, which all have trouble with “no ketchup” and things like that. When you set a default for a particular order, you are going to have more mistakes when people want to deviate from the standard.
I think the workers knowing what the “standard” toppings are probably comes down to how much they are trained and/or how much they care about the job.
I know the owner of my local Subway, and we have discussions about what’s new on the menu and the ups and downs of running a franchise. I have absolutely asked him what normally comes on a particular sub and I get a good response. I also give him fair feedback later on what I liked and didn’t like.
Now if I were to ask the teenage workers running the place at 8:30pm what toppings normally come on a sub, I would expect confused silence because it’s usually just a job to them. They have no investment in the business.
Or - and bear with me here - Subway added the options that most customers use when they set up their app. An app now certainly doesn’t mean that they’ve been hiding a secret for years.
I had completely forgotten about this issue!
Recently I stopped by a Subway and saw they had a new promotional sandwich that looked pretty good. It seemed absolutely natural for me to say “That looks good just like it is, can you make mine like that?” And, predictably, we worked together to suss out what was on the photograph. My sandwich was tasty.
I’m not expecting the workers to guess food photography secrets, just to know what kind of cheese and what other toppings were used. It seems quite reasonable for Subway to provide a cheat sheet behind the counter for this purpose, for the occasional person who asks.
Every sub is completely different though, and somebody two years ago said the subway website would list exactly what specific ingredients were on a specific sub.
I don’t know why SDMB just doesn’t take the loss. Subway was hiding the ingredients list from us in-store. They knew.
Personally, I am not accepting it because I see other explanations that seem more likely to me than Subway was hiding sandwich recipes. In my mind, I don’t see a reason why they would bother.
If any of you are ever passing through Kemptville in south eastern Ontario, check out the Quickie convenience store attached to the Pioneer gas station at the corner of county road 43 and Rideau St. Excellent subs made to order.
Where do you live? In my local Subways they have posters or signs that list the ingredients of their specialty subs. Always have.
I’m trying to imagine how it would go and why it would be better
Yeah - I’ll have the Italian BMT “Subway Style”
vs
I’ll have an Italian BMT with all the veges except Beetroot and Olives.
Having both on the menu, there is just too much space for confusion from the “irregular” customer, getting confused.
I just KNOW that if you have “subway style” on the menu, someone is going to order this and then say “hold the onions” - so what advantage would you then be offering?
It may well be “better” for some customers to have a Subway Style, but the confusion and complaints created is going to far outweigh the benefits, so it would be a net loss overall.
Sounds like something the employee dealing with customers should know. At least the basic construction. “Add whatever you want to it” should follow the basic sandwich info.
Well, conceptually there is a benefit to having a trained chef select ingredients that work together to create a high quality product. Someone put a lot of effort into picking all the stuff that goes into a Big Mac. Higher end places have “create your own” burger and specialty burgers that have a predefined set of ingredients chosen to work together.
It also gives the customer the chance to avoid having to make a slew of choices just to get something to eat.
Ingredients cost money. From my personal experience, and anecdotes I’ve heard from friends who’ve worked at fast food places, ingredients and toppings are micro-managed to a ridiculous degree. Over the whole of a mega-chain like Subway, I can’t imagine the costs of training minimum wage employees to follow a specific set of explicit guidelines, which could be printed on reference cards posted behind the counter in the food prep area, could possibly be anything close to the cost savings of making sure each sandwich had the specific toppings, and only the specific toppings, that corporate decided was the optimal cost-vs.-appeal combination.
The idea that Subway is somehow saving money by not training its employees in the optimum topping lists, when literally every other fast food franchise does the exact opposite as a cost-control measure just seems nonsensical to me.
The way Subway does it, they’re wasting a lot of toppings every day, because they can’t predict how much of each they’ll need, because every single customer may order a completely different set of toppings on every single sandwich, so they have to over-stock everything. And unlike just about any other fast food franchise, Subway makes extensive use of fresh vegetables. A standardized sandwich would have to be vastly cheaper than the minimal additional training it would take to follow a standard topping chart.
The reason that there aren’t “standard” Subway sandwiches is that they’ve built their entire brand around the idea that they don’t have standard sandwiches - they have sandwiches customized for your specific individual tastes by sandwich artists.
Now, calling minimum wage teenage part-timers who barely know what their own menu is, much less have any idea of flavor profiles, “sandwich artists”, that I’ll grant you is pretentious, misleading, and just silly.
In my experience those ingredient lists only cover the base - usually the meat by which they name the sandwich. When they did that ultimate spicy italian a couple years back with the cheesy garlic bread, they gave me two sets of ingredients, one for the bread, one for the meats.
They have always offered a calorie count for specialty subs which includes only the base and the bread.
By coincidence, I also remember that the ultimate spicy italian promo only showed the meat and bread. I was like, I wonder what would go well on this? Look up at the picture, and there’s nothing but the meat and bread. There was cheese but that was technically part of the bread.
~Max