Subway sued for exaggerating meat by 200%
Subway sued for exaggerating meat by 200%
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.
...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
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a chain convenience store that is only in my city, and the sandwiches there are delicious! Usually, I can turn it into two meals, which makes it even more worth it.
I have a hard time staying away from that place lol
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.
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
Sounds… trumpian.