ATTN: All Subway Franchisees
When Drew Mokris uploaded comic No. 77 in July 2007, he didn’t think many people would take notice. After all, his website, lefthandedtoons.com, was just a place where he and a friend could post comic strips that the two righties drew left-handed.
But No. 77, titled An Open Letter to Subway, was different. It struck a chord. Bloggers blogged, tweeters tweeted, and Facebook users erected dozens of fan groups, like shrines, celebrating Mokris’s creation. At some point, even Roger Ebert posted a message on Twitter. (He linked to the wrong page but made a correction with a second tweet.) So many people visited the website that Mokris had to find a new web hosting service to accommodate the spike in traffic. “I’ve never made anything else that had such legs,” admitted the twenty-six-year-old software engineer.
Photo: Jesse Young
Photo: Jesse Young
In An Open Letter to Subway, Mokris depicted a more efficient way for the sandwich giant to arrange its triangular cheese slices. His solution was apparently a novel one for the industry: to place the cheese together like puzzle pieces and eliminate any “unnecessary dairy overlap,” as he called it—a geometric concept known as tessellation. It seemed like such a no-brainer to Mokris, Ebert and almost everyone else on the Internet. Everyone, that is, except Subway, who remained silent for nearly three years before finally deciding to update its cheese-placement policy as of July 1, 2010.
“We thought about placing it differently for the sole purpose of having more cheese per bite. When it’s overlapping corner to corner, there would be some blank spots, and when you bite into your sandwich, there wouldn’t be much cheese,” explains Subway spokesman Les Winograd. While the company is aware of Mokris’s comic, it gives credit for the idea to another source: the folks in research and development, who are constantly tweaking things here and there.
According to company lore, early Subway sandwiches didn’t include lettuce. It just wasn’t how sandwiches were made in those days. Most delis were owned by Italians, so it was more common to find things like tomatoes, peppers and salami on sandwiches. But Subway’s founder eventually decided lettuce was a good thing, so he put it on the menu. Can you guess what else wasn’t on the menu?
“Turkey,” says Winograd. “That was something you had on Thanksgiving. But a franchisee suggested making sandwiches with turkey. Now it’s one of our most popular things at Subway.”
Which goes to show that Subway is more innovative than one may think, and it’s completely plausible that R&D, not Mokris, solved the cheese conundrum. Still, many agree that three years is an awfully long time for such a small tweak.
“It’s not just a simple matter of telling people, ‘As of some date, start turning every other cheese slice the other way,’” Winograd says. Each time there is a change, memos have to be sent out. Employees have to be retrained. Operating manuals and videos have to be redone, as do promos and commercials. “We have over 33,000 locations worldwide. That’s kind of a huge undertaking.”
On a recent trip to Subway, I noticed a Sandwich Artist—as all sandwich-making employees are called—revert to the old method of stacking cheese. While all employees have undergone retraining—which takes about five minutes—some forget to tessellate every now and then. “When they keep putting the cheese on the old way, we correct them,” says Maria Arroyo, supervisor of four Subways in the Chicago area. “I’ve worked here for seven years. It’s so much better this way.”
Three years have passed since Mokris first achieved Internet fame with his comic. He and his friend still contribute to the website, which is almost up to comic No. 800. However, a lot has changed since No. 77. For one, he is cutting back on fast food to be more health-conscious. This explains why he hasn’t visited Subway since the new cheese policy was enacted. Instead, various people send him emails, reporting on whether or not certain locations have complied.
When asked if he has any more complaints about Subway, Mokris responded, “No, I think they make fine sandwiches.”