Why Subway Has Such A Distinct Smell

You smell it before you can see it — it smells like warm bread. And possibly cookies. Toasted cheese and herbs? Maybe there are odd hints of meatball marinara or a tuna sandwich. This strangely intoxicating perfume can only mean you're close to a Subway location. Even if you're not hungry and but inhale a whiff of Subway's signature scent, it can put you in the mood to eat one of their sub sandwiches. Theories have surfaced that the scent is artificially produced to entice customers, or it is intentionally pumped out onto the street. What makes the Subway smell so distinct?

The predominant scent wafting out of Subway is indeed its bread. While the scent of the bread being toasted is delicious, the chain actually bakes all of its bread in-store. The different bread types being baked — like Italian herb and cheese, rye, white, and wheat — each contributes to fragrance notes, like bready, toasty, nutty, buttery, and herby.

Baking bread at home or walking by a bakery smells incredible, but it doesn't smell like Subway. There is more to the Subway scent than fresh bread; cookies are also a contributor. The cookies, like classic chocolate chip, double chocolate, and white chocolate macadamia, are baked in-store from frozen cookie dough. To get scientific with the smell, Vice worked with a flavor chemist to determine what else the aroma was comprised of; chemicals found in dressing, cheese, milk fats, and cucumbers were also discovered in the air outside of Subway.

Despite being the main contributor to Subway's one-of-a-kind smell, the bread recipe is not so unique. The main ingredients are yeast, flour, water, and sugar, with the addition of vitamins. There are also no preservatives added, so this is one reason it must be baked daily. The fast-food chain makes the bread dough at 11 facilities throughout the United States, freezes it, and ships it off to individual Subway locations. Here, it is thawed, proofed, scored, and baked fresh in-store. For breads that have flavors, like honey oat or Italian herb and cheese, employees are in charge of rolling the dough in these additions before baking.

It's possible to bake your own Subway bread at home, although you might need to also bake some cookies to create the Subway smell in your kitchen. In this economy, it continues to get increasingly more expensive to eat out even at chains like Subway — so making bread could save you money. A quick Google search yields a ton of copycat recipes, with the Italian herb and cheese bread appearing to be the most popular recipe. You might already know all of the Subway order hacks, but if you want the bread and you're not a baker, Subway employees on Reddit report that you can buy the fresh bread in-store for $2 per unit.