When you’re looking for an inexpensive sandwich that tastes good and will fill you up, it can be kind of impossible to ignore the lure of a Subway restaurant. The fast food chain serves up a wide variety of sandwiches, from your classic turkey club to something a little bit more hearty, like a meatball sub filled with cheese and marinara sauce. But this place is known for more than just their sandwiches — the cookies are basically legendary, and the bread always smells incredible.
However, whether you eat at Subway a lot or just once in a while, you’re definitely going to want to hear some of these confessions from Subway employees.
Just a warning: a few of these secrets might turn you off from your favorite sandwich. For years, users who claim to be Subway employees have taken to Reddit to share what really goes on in the kitchen. Some of these confessions are more than a little stomach-churning, while others might end up just making you want to go to a Subway near you. All of them can even help you order better the next time you go in one. Check out some of these employee confessions below, and get ready to be shocked:
1. Everything is frozen.
Sure, it’s not weird for fast food restaurants to serve food that was once frozen, but Subway’s logo is literally “eat fresh,” so that makes this one kind of frustrating. Reddit user shyyyviolet, who says they worked at Subway, claims, “Nothing was fresh, everything was frozen, even the lettuce was precut in a big in the freezer.
The meat, same deal, the bread was in little frozen dough balls. I don’t understand how they can say ‘eat fresh.'” Yikes.
2. The grilled chicken isn’t what it seems.
Subway offers a variety of options when it comes to chicken, and one is grilled chicken. While it looks like it was really cooked on a grill, user uzsbadgrmmronpurpose says:
“Those grill marks on the chicken? Food coloring.” Other users in the thread backed that up, saying it was all the same chicken.
3. You can add as many veggies as you want to a sandwich.
If you want to make your sandwich larger, more filling, and maybe more healthy, just keep piling on the vegetables. User Zukas said:
“Most people know this but ask for as many veggies as you want. Veggies are free of charge. For example, ‘Can I have spinach please? A bit more please. Just grab a whole handful and shove it on there please.’ There’s no limit.”
4. Don’t get the wheat bread if you’re trying to be healthy.
If you’re going into Subway with the intention of trying to eat something healthy, you may opt for the wheat bead. One former employee, user littleredpriest, says this is the wrong idea:
“I don’t know if this has been mentioned, but don’t buy any variety of wheat bread at Subway. It’s actually worse for you than getting the Italian. It’s dyed with plenty of added shit to make it look and taste different.”
5. There’s a trick to making a hot sandwich taste better.
If you love to order onions on a hot sandwich, user k8bit has a suggestion on making it even more delicious:
“Ask them to put the onions on the sandwich BEFORE toasting, and ask them to pour a little olive oil over them first. Doesn’t save you money, but YUM. This also works good for peppers.”
6. There’s also a trick to making sure your chicken actually tastes good… and hot.
It can be kind of jarring to bite into a sandwich and realize that the middle of the chicken is ice cold. User k8bit has a suggestion for making sure that doesn’t happen to you. They said:
“If the chicken breast isn’t being kept in a hot well (the metal case that the meat balls get held in), ask them to microwave the chicken breast; even if you get the sandwich toasted. A lot of times the chicken breasts aren’t thawed properly and even if you toast the sandwich, it will be cold in the middle.”
7. The cheese isn’t exactly cheese.
If you absolutely love the cheese at Subway, you might want to stop reading this right now, because it isn’t pretty. According to user joemangle, “Subway cheese is not actually cheese!” They said, “It is a solidified cheese ‘spread’ which, if left in water for a period of time, loses all of its artificial yellow coloring and turns a pallid gray.”
That certainly sounds less than appetizing.
8. You can actually make yourself a pizza at Subway.
Subway doesn’t have a secret menu, like many other fast food places, but one employee swears that you can “make a pretty decent pizza” there — you just need to get lucky and get an employee who will work with you on it. User recyclebot said:
“1. You ask for a flat bread, tell them to put the meatball sauce on top (smeared). 2. Then ask for pepperonis (preferably sliced), and your preferred cheese (cheddar works best). 3. Before they toast it, put on all the vegetables you want (I make mine with bell-peppers, and purple-onions 4. Toast it and I swear to you it will smell exactly like a supreme pizza from Sbarro’s, Dominoes, or Pizza Hut.”
Sounds pretty good!
9. The tuna is probably the unhealthiest thing on the menu.
A lot of employees had something to say about the amount of mayo that’s in the tuna salad. User karma_virus explained:
“Your Subway tuna sandwich is 90% mayonnaise. How did we prepare the tuna? Take one can of tuna the size of your fist and empty it into a vat. Take a big 2ltr bag of mayonnaise and splosh it in the vat. Mix it haphazardly for 2 minutes until it’s a semi-consistent mush. Cringe when customers ask for ‘just a little bit’ of light mayo on their tuna sandwich because they’re on a diet.”
10. You shouldn’t order the Chipotle Chicken or the Teriyaki Chicken.
If there’s one thing to avoid on the menu, user Nope_Nope_Nope suggests making it these two kinds of chicken. They explained, “Why? Chicken is given a two day shelf life, once in the counter. However these two bypass this and get four days, and can get a little stinky.”
The user did add that Subway is “very strict on quality control and dates,” saying that “steak is probably the freshest, and safest.”
11. You can still order the pizza sub in most of the restaurants.
Like any other chain restaurant, Subway has had menu items come and go — one is the pizza sub. But if you really miss it, user tay_chason says you can still get it. They explained:
“My store didn’t advertise the pizza sub nor was it on our menu, but we had a button for it on the POS (computer) and every employee was trained how to make one, so just ask your local sandwich artist for one and I’m sure they’ll know how, if not, the manager definitely does.”
12. You should order chicken strips over the chicken breast.
If you’re going to get chicken at Subway, user Aesthos suggests going for the strips, calling the breast “disgusting.” They explained that while both the strips and the breast come into the store frozen and are “well taken care of,” the way they prepare the strips is different:
“At the beginning of the day, we are told to get them out of the freezer and put them into hot water where they remain ALL DAY. Then at the end of the day, you have to take them out and SQUEEZE the gross ass chicken water out of them, which by now has made the meat soggy. Then we put them in a plastic container where they await the same treatment the next day. You may think this is a good way of keeping it fresh, but I assure you it’s not, after a while [that] breast starts getting really mushy and smelling like ass, yet we are told to just keep on serving it.”
13. You might want to avoid ordering meatballs at night.
If there’s one thing you may not want to order later on in the day, it’s the meatball sub. User nebsA1 said:
“My store is usually really good at keeping all items fresh, BUT even at ours there is one thing I would [not] recommend. The meatballs get kind of nasty fast, so I wouldn’t recommend getting those at night when we’re about to close.”
14. Beware of the light mayo.
Apparently, not everything is how it seems at Subway. One user said:
“Employees at Subway understand that some customers eat there because they think they’re opting for the healthier fast food option. One very common way this would present itself is seeing how many people opt for Light Mayo over regular Mayonnaise. However, most of the time, whenever the Light Mayo bottle ran out, my manager would just tell me to fill it with regular mayonnaise… And this is pretty common in a lot of stores.”
15. You can get more for your money with the flatbread.
If you’re ordering at Subway, you’re already saving some cash. But if you want to save more, opt for the flatbread. One user said, “The way flatbread is made and prepared means it actually measures 14 inches in length. This does result in more calories, but if you’re just after a monster meal, go flat!”
16. You can do one simple thing to make the cookies even better.
Subway offers some of the best tasting cookies in the fast food universe… but there’s one thing you can do to make them taste even more delicious. One user says, “You want to taste pure heaven? Simply ask the person behind the counter to microwave your cookie for five-to-ten seconds so it goes lusciously gooey. Seriously, thank for me later…”
It’s worth pointing out that Subway is a franchise, meaning each restaurant location has a different owner, so they are not all run exactly the same!
What goes on in one Subway might not happen in another. Still, it’s always good to know these employee secrets. We know we’ll be thinking about them the next time we’re there.
