Comment by firstplacelast

5 days ago

I agree here. I more often see bakeries selling sandwiches that they make in house (although no clue as to the volume/financials of it), but rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking. The independent ones out-source to a bakery and if it's a well known bakery, they will advertise where they get their bread.

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firstplacelast

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SoftTalker  5 days ago

> rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking

Subway?

  • estimator7292  5 days ago

    Also Panera.

    Though I should point out that this is not baking, but simply putting premade delivered dough into an oven. The dough is baked, yes, but this is not what people mean by baking.

    A bakery generally is mixing flour themselves.

  • bell-cot  5 days ago

    From a quick web search - Subway has an often-changing network of contracted suppliers of frozen bread dough.

    It's been a while since I ate there, but the bread quality was for-sure not up to "we hired a baker to elevate our sandwiches" standards.

  • 7thaccount  5 days ago

    Don't they just heat up frozen/pre-made bread? I don't know...just I don't think they have enough room to be a real bakery. Also, corporate financials would have centralized that a long time ago.

    • estimator7292  5 days ago

      No, subway and panera do the same thing. Fresh premade dough is delivered every night, refrigerated. At Panera, a baker runs it through the oven overnight and finishes baking just before open. Subway throws dough in the oven as needed throughout the day, they have much higher volume.

      Frozen dough doesn't come out the same, nor does reheated pre-baked bread. It's fresh it just isn't made from scratch there in the store.

      There's a couple dozen fresh dough facilities scattered throughout the US that serve all of these restaurants that need fresh bread, but without the cost of paying someone to mix flour locally.

      3 replies →

    • potato3732842  4 days ago

      Pretty much all these franchise chains operate on hub and spoke for their fresh baked stuff.

      The thing you buy at 6am (or 6pm, lol) was in an oven or a mixer (depending on whether the chain in question is baking on site or at the hub) at 12am that morning and on a truck at 3:30.