SUBWAY® was founded in 1965 by 17-year-old Fred DeLuca, with a $1,000 loan from family friend Dr. Peter Buck.
The original name was Pete’s Submarines, but it sounded like “Pizza Marines,” so it became Pete’s SUBWAY, and finally just SUBWAY® in 1968.
On its first day of business, the shop sold 312 sandwiches.
The first Footlong sandwich debuted in 1967 and cost only 49 cents.
The 6-inch sandwich was introduced in 1977 as “The Snak.”
·The popular Italian B.M.T.® was originally named after the Brooklyn–Manhattan Transit SUBWAY line, later rebranded as “Biggest, Meatiest, Tastiest.”
There are nearly 4.6 billion possible sandwich combinations on the SUBWAY® menu.
Worldwide, turkey is the best-selling SUBWAY® meat.
SUBWAY® is one of the largest buyers of tuna in the world.
The most popular SUBWAY® cookie is Chocolate Chip.
Thanks to cookies, SUBWAY® is one of the largest cookie sellers in the world.
Each restaurant is required to bake bread multiple times a day for freshness.
SUBWAY® serves more fresh vegetables daily than any other restaurant chain worldwide.
The black olives used at SUBWAY® are Manzanillo olives, hand-picked in California and Morocco.
If every SUBWAY® sandwich made in a year were placed end-to-end, they would wrap around the Earth almost seven times.
The cheese produced for SUBWAY® restaurants in one year, laid end-to-end, would stretch halfway to the moon.
SUBWAY® uses about 70 million heads of lettuce per year — enough to stretch from Hartford, Connecticut, to Melbourne, Australia.
SUBWAY® serves approximately 3,000 sandwiches every 60 seconds.
At one time, SUBWAY had more locations than McDonald’s worldwide — although in recent years McDonald’s has again surpassed it in total units.”
In 2015, SUBWAY® set a Guinness World Record for the most people making sandwiches at the same time.
SUBWAY® operates in over 100 countries.
Some of the largest markets outside the U.S. include the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, and Australia.
Restaurants have opened in unusual places — churches, zoos, casinos, airports, car dealerships, and even on a riverboat casino.
During the construction of the One World Trade Center in New York, SUBWAY® built a portable shipping-container store that moved upward with the tower to feed construction crews.
In some countries, SUBWAY® has offered unique regional menu items, such as paneer subs in India, teriyaki octopus in Japan, and kiwifruit in New Zealand.
The SUBWAY® name translated into Mandarin Chinese means “taste better than others.”
SUBWAY® food has been featured in films like Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Happy Gilmore, The Coneheads, Lethal Weapon, and The Beverly Hillbillies.
The brand has been spoofed on Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman, and The Simpsons.
SUBWAY® has appeared as an answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and The Weakest Link.
Celebrities such as Tiger Woods, Christina Aguilera, William Shatner, and Kiefer Sutherland have been reported to enjoy SUBWAY®.
In 2012, SUBWAY® became an official Olympic restaurant sponsor, supporting athletes worldwide.
In 2024, SUBWAY® launched its first official merchandise line, featuring clothing and accessories inspired by its sandwiches.
SUBWAY®’s first international restaurant opened in 1984 in Bahrain.
SUBWAY® was one of the first sandwich chains to launch catering with party platters in the 1980s.
Collectively, SUBWAY® restaurants bake millions of loaves of bread every day worldwide.
SUBWAY® aired its first Super Bowl commercial in 2004.
Some early restaurants experimented with train-car themed interiors to match the SUBWAY® name.
By the early 1990s, SUBWAY® was opening an average of two new restaurants every day.
In 2017, SUBWAY® introduced its “Fresh Forward” décor package with digital menu boards, bright colors, and modern seating to update the look of restaurants.
