If anyone thinks this sounds frivolous just remember that we have to keep tabs on these corporations. Chipotle walked backwards after people started smelling the bullshit and quit going
Subway has previously made headlines in legal news because their footlongs were under a foot long, and because their 100% chicken was half soy. If anything, they deserve some extra scrutiny.
Love to see this
Subway has constant contamination outbreaks causing waves of food poisoning like every year. They killed someone in the UK. McDonald’s literally just killed someone with bad quarter pounders.
I got food poisoning from subway once and have never had it since. Being concerned about whether it looks like the advertisement is gone, we’re back to having to be concerned about whether you could die from eating something. Isn’t it nice, I feel far more connected to the traditional ways before germ theory.
They killed someone in the UK. McDonald’s literally just killed someone with bad quarter pounders.
To add context, the CDC announced the cause to be the yellow onions [1] in the quarter pounders; McDonalds stopped serving onions in their quarter pounders and stopped sourcing onions from that supplier facility “indefinitely” (Taylor Farms in Colorado Springs) [2].
- https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/outbreaks/e-coli-O157.html
- https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/our-stories/article/always-putting-food-safety-first.html
(Edit: grammar)
Subway has the lowest cost to enter a franchise, so it attracts a lot of people that can’t really afford a better brand. So everything goes to the lowest bidder, so everything is shit.
At the far opposite end of that scale is Chik-Fil-A, which is the hardest to get into and has much stricter standards about everything, and even treats their employees comparatively well for a fast food joint. They just also support evangelical Christian anti-LGBT stuff, which is the biggest complaint against them.
Yea it’s a deal breaker for me
Are health inspections on a state level? I think they are.
In California the rules seem different in every county, or at least the rating systems. (I’m no expert I just eat out sometimes.)
LIKE THE PEPSI JET LAWSUIT THAT ENDED UP IN FAVOR OF PEPSI
That was an awesome documentary (I forgot the name) but yeah Pepsi is underhanded and that was fucked up, countersuing and picking a favorable judge
I did a paper on that in uni and was wondering why the hell Pepsi did not lose. It was a technicality but I don’t think they would win again in this day and age. The deciding factor was that a commercial was supposed to be wild and funny and that no reasonable person would believe they could win a harrier jet.
Liquid Death had their own giveaway and made shots at Pepsi (sorry, SLAMMED) about the jet.
I did a paper on that in uni and was wondering why the hell Pepsi did not lose. It was a technicality but I don’t think they would win again in this day and age.
You’re way off on this. It wasn’t a close case back then, and since then the law has since shifted considerably towards Pepsi on this (advertising is very rarely construed as an actual offer in the contractual sense), so that it would be an even more lopsided win for Pepsi today.
Well that’s just silly from the opinion of a random numbered citizen.
Well I’m actually sitting at a computer right now so I might as well provide citations in support of what I was saying.
It wasn’t a close case back then
Here’s the judicial ruling. Note that the plaintiff lost on three independent issues, each of which was enough by itself for Pepsi to win:
- Advertisements are almost never binding offers, and this ad didn’t fall within the requirements to be a binding offer. In fact, even order forms and pricing lists/catalogs printed by the merchant aren’t binding offers by the merchant to sell the items on the list at the listed price, and must be affirmatively accepted by the merchant in order to form a binding contract.
- No reasonable person would understand this joke as an offer, even if it weren’t an advertisement, so even if analyzed outside of the advertising context Pepsi would still win.
- There’s no written contract, and contracts for the sale of physical goods worth over $500 require a written contract. The actual written materials in the points program all indicated that the only items available are those within the points catalog, and there was no Harrier jet in the actual printed catalog.
Then, on appeal, three other appellate judges unanimously ruled that the district court got it exactly right.
Wait, what did Chipotle walk back? Prices? I haven’t gone there in at least a year.
Their CEO is all about larger portions after them trying to go the other way to the point that it turned people off
Oh is it actually a burrito now? Last time I went hey gave me something not even half the size I would have received in 2015 so I stopped going.
…oh that’s a lot worse than 200%
Very scientific approach.
I worked in one as an evening job while at school 20 years ago. They took pride in this stuff back then. You were trained on how to place the fillings in just the right way to make it look like it should. You had a booklet you had to memorise on it. I remember people took pride when customers remarked “wow it actually looks like the picture”.
They had area managers and secret shoppers come in and grade you on this stuff, and you’d get put on out of hours training if you failed (they would do stuff like get a group in the back just cutting all of the left over bread from the previous day, to learn to cut it at just the right angle).
Not any more, and hasn’t been like that in some time.
I worked for Subway back in ‘99 when I was in high school. We took pride in it back then, as well. Now, the pictures still didn’t match the product back then. The steak was a relatively new product back then, and I do remember the photos being sort-of like this one: All the meat pushed toward the camera. But nobody cared. You got to watch that shit being made right in front of you. It was always status quo as far as I can remember that pictures never matched what you got at a fast food place. BUT, if you did a good job, you’d sometimes learn just how happy somebody was to get a sandwich EXACTLY the fucking way they wanted it to be.
That’s not to say there’s not something very wrong there and that a line shouldn’t be drawn, though. They’ve gotten away with it for far too long, I think. In fact, I don’t think it was ever this extreme in the manipulation. Yeah, I’m going to actually side with you on this one and say that they definitely went too far in the image manipulation department. Expectations are everything, and I would actually hate to work at Subway now if this is what people’s expectations are set at. You would probably almost never get that stoked customer that got an exactly what they wanted. In a customer service field, that’s basically a death rattle.
Very interesting
When you only have so much meat to work with, it’s vital to at least learn how to photograph it flatteringly.
ಠ_ಠ
It’s all about the angles
What formula do you use for measuring your meat?
Pornhub mainly
Maybe they just trimmed the bread back to make the meat appear more substantial…
I’ve watched videos on how they photograph food and let’s just say that this cheese is probably some coloured PVA glue or something.
Due to the time it can take to shoot food and the heat from the lights it’s not ideal (I think they should be forced to photograph the actual product and this is all absurd, but I’m just talking about this photo) to use the actual food.
I’ve seen glue in lieu of milk for cereal adverts, as one such example.
It’s pretty interesting from a technical viewpoint and you can search it up on YouTube.
At this level of food photography you can be sure they are using the actual product, and weighing it so their lawyers can argue it represents some kind of reality. When they get the inevitable lawsuits.
I like it that Subway’s bread can’t be considered as bread, because of the high ammount of sugar.
In 2020, it ruled that the sugar content in Subway’s savory sandwich bread was above the legal limit required to be labeled “bread,” according to the country’s Value-Added Tax Act of 1972, which states that for a baked good to qualify as bread, its sugar content cannot exceed 2% of the total weight of flour.
2 percent is frankly a little low for the bar sugar by weight to still be considered bread, but 10 percent(which is where they were at) is obviously outrageous. If you want a really aggressive rise while keeping a high hydration, adding sugar and heat can get you there. I don’t think you’re making bread anymore beyond 4 percent though.
Maybe I’m too European for this, but I would never have thought of putting sugar in regular bread. Even milk buns don’t have added sugar in them, unless you count lactose.
…I’ll have to try this, because it sounds off to me. Like putting a dishwasher in the bathroom. Not really insane. But I’d quietly judge someone who does that.
Edit: Not great for bread.
The only reason I would use a very small amount of sugar is to jump start the yeast. That shouldn’t even take a teaspoon though, and it’s only necessary when you have to get a faster rise.
The bread tastes better when you let it rise slowly though.
It’s common in America when you want a quick rise or to increase moisture in the end product. Conversely, some recipes encourage proofing the dough in the fridge. This reduces yeast activity while retaining amylase activity, resulting in more sugar (maltose usually in this case) in the bread. In general, the best practice is to use the starches in the bread as the sugar for the yeast to develop complex flavor.
In the end bread is not an exact science and there’s lots of variables to play around with to get what you want. It’s just at 10 percent sugar you’ve certainly gone beyond that.
Ive made bread a handful of times and I’ve never used sugar.
Here is the BBC Website with recipes for bread and checking the regular British breads I don’t see sugar listed on any.
That’s interesting! I don’t know if it’s a north american thing, but I always start the yeast with either sugar or honey before I add the flour.
It gives an initial boost, but not necessary. All my bread is sugar and milk free. The yeast and flour figure it out
I’ve heard this a few times and have always wondered - what do Europeans use in bread to feed the yeast and make it rise, if not sugar?
Flour
Flour doesn’t feed yeast to make it rise.
It does.
Look up sourdough recipes. The bacteria and yeasts will eagerly eat some longer-chain carbs. They aren’t picky. Same goes for commercial supermarket yeasts.
It does. The bread I make is only flour, yeast, water and salt. Toss them together and wait 2 hours you have a risen bread
You can test for yourself if starches are sugar.
Grab a spoon of oat flakes, no milk no nothing, but em in your mouth and chew and chew. It’s a fair bit of work, but soon you’ll taste the sweetness.
Starches are just chains of sugar.
Yeast does rise from “sugar” but it’s actually the glucose contained within the flour. Bread yeast does not directly feed on sucrose. The process of breaking down starches into sugars is actually what gives bread a lot of it’s flavor.
That said lots of European bread uses sugar too, just in lower percentages. American white bread is quite similar to French pain de mie.
Wasn’t that in France specifically where they have more legal and commercial terms for bread than English speakers? For example a term more descriptive of what Subway serves translates to a “Sweet”.
But yeah 10% is a lot.
I don’t know that it wasn’t also France, but I know this categorization was done by Ireland.
It was Ireland, but the same rules apply for the EU as a whole I am to understand.
every shred of meat is pictured. the rest of the bun is empty and its propped up and angled as such to make it appear ‘full’.
arbys does the same thing. you have to literally pile all the meat on one edge of the bun and take the picture at a certain angle to hide the emptiness behind it.
The image of a food staging crew and photographer also having an independent auditor signing off that yes that is 2.2oz of meat popped into my head. Auditor is dragged into court with scale calibration reports all over a sandwich. No matter what it is deceitful advertising.
I worked at Arby’s in the 90s, we did not have to fake the meat back then.
Does that make it legal in your country?
There’s no way companies should be able to abuse these technicalities. Don’t you have teleological interpretations of laws - meaning laws being interpreted by considering the intent behind them?
In the US? Unfortunately, yea probably. These judges will look for literally any reason to give corporations a free pass or a leg-up.
there is a whole video on how they do it, by McDonald’s I think. they buy a burger at a local restaurant, take it to a studio and rearrange the fuck out of it and pile it up for a photo op. I can imagine it’s pretty accurate, but there is still a little Photoshop going on and probably more that is off camera. hard to trust any companies nowadays.
I just want to know why the Subways in my city are now both more expensive and less tasty/filling than any other sub/hoagie options in the area.
I don’t go to subway anymore because the last footlong I bought cost me $13, no drink no chips, and was skimpy as hell. The next day I went to a deli/convenience chain and bought a $10 sandwich that was longer, fresher, and thicker.
In the past, they used their relatively low prices to gain customers and are now exploiting people who just go there out of habit or don’t pay much attention to prices. A lot of the large chains are now more expensive and have worse quality than smaller stores and chains now.
Same. You can get firehouse for the same price as subway here. It’s a no brainer. We still have a few quiznos around as well, which are marginally better than subway. I can’t imagine why anyone would visit one anymore outside of it literally being the only option in the immediate area.
There used to be a Firehouse literally 7 minutes from where I live, but it closed a few years ago. :( That used to be my go-to sandwich place, now I’ve settled for Jersey Mike’s (which I expect to start enshittifying now that some holding company or whoever bought them).
Once that happens, I’ll just go back to ordering subs from Italian places. You pay $20 for a 16"-18" sub, sure, but you at least get what feels like $20 worth of food.
Jersey Mike’s is my chain goto.
Jersey Mike’s is pointless since they got rid of the griddle (and thus all hot sandwiches). RIP Chicken Parm sub. Jersey Mike’s is dead to me.
All of them in my area have the grilled hot sandwiches.
Yeah that guy just lives in Iowa, his Jersey Mike’s doesn’t have heating because they regressed to the point they don’t have access to electricity anymore.
But hey, at least all the ingredients are more or less farm fresh. If they weren’t they’d be rotten. Some of them do get a little “over-ripe”, of course, but not usually to the point of food poisoning.
Damn, they’re gonna have a lot of catching up to do before Kirk is born there
Good to know because we border Iowa. I stopped going to Jimmy John’s because their turkey always tasted a little old like it was just starting to get slimy.
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I should call her.
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Mf down horrendous.
You can just say in love
I used to get their meatballs subs because they were fairly cheap ($5 per footlong). It’s supposed to have eight meatballs per sub. Once they gave me seven. I thought maybe the guy made a mistake and didn’t think much of it. The next time I went, it was seven meatballs again. That was the last time I had Subways.
If you have a tightwad owner and chances are you do they will short change you every way they can.
We need to incorporate portion veracity into food sanitation checks. Food safety guy goes in, buys all three sizes of fries, weighs them all, compares to the nutritional fact values posted by the company.
I got a large fry from BK a couple weeks ago and it had less fries than my wife’s medium. BK’s response was that mine probably settled more than hers.
A nice way of saying Fuck Off, basically. No consumer protections for this kind of thing exist, at least in the USA. Other than Weights and Measures enforcing scale calibrations if you buy things by weight.
I’m all about this, except for the side effect that it might force Five Guys to give less fries with the “little” and “regular” sizes.
Right now they just throw a cup in a bag, and then fill the bag with fries no matter what size you get lol
They’re already required to provide nutrition info. They’re free to have undersized fry cups as a marketing gimmick, but need to accurately represent how much they give you.
After this is over I’d like them to look into Honey Bunches of Oats cereal. The name starts with Honey and the word “honey” is used more than any other noun on the box, which is designed to look like the stuff is dripping with honey, but in the ingredients list honey is way down at the bottom between salt and food coloring.
Raisin Bran…barely a raisin in it now.
Interesting - Instead of Kellogg’s I buy the non-name brand at Safeway and it has tons of raisins.
Yeah, we found the same. Cheap brand is much better.
This is why I haven’t eaten fast food in years. Precisely because I haven’t had good fast food in years.
All the while it’s more expensive than ever. Why are execs surprised sales are dwindling?
The $5 foot long was their whole ad campaign for years, now they’re running ads about LOWERING the foot long price to 6.99. The quality never improved and quantity has gone down, but still they must charge more to make line go up forever. It’s insane
Gang, we’ve just been handed our next mystery.
While I think they have an excellent case here I don’t think the image on the right is a fair comparison photo. They should both be lined up in the same orientation without being handled.
When my kid was little, he had some food allergies (thankfully he grew out of them). The last time I went to subway they refused to share allergy info AS MANDATED BY LAW. That was the last time I went
dudes be like “subway sucks”
Subway is SWAV: secretly we are vegans
