Why does Subway smell the way it does?

Sometimes you just don’t need Google Maps or GPS.

There are two businesses on the high street which announce their location – pleasantly or obnoxiously, depending on your viewpoint – before you’ve even seen them. You simply need to follow your nose.

One is Lush, of which more another time. The second is Subway.

I used to walk past a Subway every morning on my way out of New Street station. It’s at the top of an escalator, but you only had to get halfway up before the restaurant was assaulting your nostrils: a delicious, herby bread smell. I never succumbed, but if I’d been walking past at lunchtime, I probably would’ve.

However subconsciously, Subway’s smell is as much a part of its brand as its famous logo, or the “Doctor’s Associates” copyright notice on its advertising.

(I always feel the latter detail is a sneaky attempt to give the brand – and its low-fat sarnies – a veneer of medical approval. Actually Doctor’s Associates – Subway’s holding company – is so named because one of its founders has a Ph.D in physics. But I digress.)

It’s not just the UK’s cities that find themselves shrouded in a sandwichy smog. The Subway aroma spans the globe – and it’s utterly consistent whether you’re in Moscow or Monmouthshire. Blogger Rifka Seltzer writes:

It smells EXACTLY the same on Grand Concourse in the Bronx as it does on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. No matter where you go, Subway smells the same. And it smells strong. Actually, I noticed this when I was in Berlin. The Subway at the entrance of Ostbahnhof reeked of that…I don’t know…Subway smell.

Now, everyone knows retailers can, and do, pump carefully-chosen fragrances into their shops to drive sales and footfall. Here’s one device which can do the trick – with a range of cartridges available replicating everything from bacon (scent 127) and fresh ground coffee (88), to suntan lotion (110) and burning plastic (117), via the quite alarming-sounding smell of “internal horror” (1011).

And when I searched online, the first page I found about “That Subway Smell” suggested the signature bready odour “is clearly being pumped mercilessly out of the shop by wind turbines resembling jet engines”.

But this was a lone voice. No-one else concurred – not even the 1,346 members of the I Work(ed) At Subway And It Made Me Wanna Cut Myself Facebook group (who presumably should know). It would appear the smell is a genuine by-product of the baking process. Mark Evanier reports one Subway staff member as saying:

The problem is that despite what the ads might lead you to believe, Subway shops do not bake their own bread from scratch. They thaw and then bake frozen dough. I’m not sure if it’s in the thawing or the baking or both but the smell comes mostly from that. I realized that from working there and noticing when the smell was at its worst. It clings to the pans and racks that are used in the baking process and it also clings to the people who work there, as any of their family members will attest. I think it has something to do with the yeast in the dough.

I think it also comes partly from the marinara sauce with the meatballs in it, especially if we haven’t been selling a lot of meatball sandwiches that day. The longer the meatballs sit in that sauce, the more you can smell them throughout the shop. The smell you notice is a combination of those two fragrances.

In his pragmatically-titled 2007 post The Smell of a Subway Restaurant on Your Clothing is Inevitable After Eating There M. Marcus claimed the chain were actively trying to reduce the odour by:

installing more ceiling fans into their stores to have more ventilation. In addition, the entrance and exit doors are being left open so that fresh air can come in and the smell of fresh bread can go out.

Maybe this is the right idea – at least if you agree with one Australian blogger’s view that “the smell of yeast/herbs/bread makes Subway smell like someone farted”.

You may also be in favour of greater ventilation if you work there. Back to Facebook again, where “Amanda” writes:

DO NOT leave anything from work in your car.. I used to leave my visor in my car.. I cant anymore, my car seems to always smell like subway, and I am embarassed to have people in it… I CLEAN IT EVERY WEEK!!

Final word to Subway worker “Janine”, who appears to speak for many when she opines:

the smell of the whole place is enough to make me want to puke! i cant stand being anywhere with that smell on me.. and IT DOSENT GO AWAY! its in your hair even in your underwear! meatballs!! omg puke!!!

OMG puke indeed.

Anyway, hold on to your nostrils, because even if Subway aren’t deliberately shoving their emissions in your face, plenty of other people will be in future. There’s even a name for it: coercive atmospherics. Consider this 2006 experiment on behalf of the California Milk Processing Board:

A bus shelter usually isn’t the kind of place where people want to breathe deeply. But that may change in San Francisco next week at a few of the shelters that will be infused with the scent of fresh-baked, chocolate-chip cookies [...] The just-out-of-the-oven cookie bouquet will be embedded in scent-infused adhesive strips. They will be affixed throughout the interior of the shelters, including underneath the seats.

Just one day after their installation, the strips were removed, apparently due to allergy concerns. But as Jonathan Zittrain expounded, in truth San Franciscans’ concerns probably ran deeper than that:

Olfactory advertising is crossing a line [...] When it’s as easy as stickers, suddenly any place of public accommodation can assault your senses with whatever smell is paid for. Unlike the use of even large billboards, there’s no easy way to avert your nose the way you can avert your eyes, making the advertising much more invasive. Sure, magazines have those smelly perfume ads — but only once you’ve decided to open the magazine and try to read it.

Imagine, in other words, spam that really smells of SPAM.

You, my unfortunate friend, have sniffed the future.