What Happens When the Process Overtakes the Brand?

Subway built its brand on one thing: consumer control. You walk in, you see the food, you point, and you build your sub exactly how you want it. Freshly made in front of you, personalised while you watch, with the customer actively involved in the process. That has always been the model. The sandwich itself matters, but the experience around it has always been doing just as much heavy lifting. That proposition is what allowed Subway to scale to a level very few food brands ever achieve. At its peak it became the largest restaurant chain in North America by number of locations, with significantly more sites than McDonald’s. It did not get there by being the fastest operator in the market or by delivering the most standardised process. It got there because the proposition was simple, clear and repeatable. Wherever you went, you knew what you were getting and, more importantly, how it would feel.

At its peak Subway became the largest restaurant chain in North America

That consistency matters more than most brands realise. Customers do not sit there consciously analysing why they trust a brand. They just know when something feels familiar and reliable. In Subway’s case, customers learned to associate the brand with freshness, visibility and personalisation. Watching the product being built became part of the value itself. But the experience now seems to be moving in a very different direction. Subway is rolling out self service kiosks across the UK and Europe as part of a wider move towards digital ordering, improved accuracy, faster throughput and stronger site profitability. On paper, the logic is obvious. Labour costs continue to rise, consistency matters more than ever, and digital ordering creates cleaner data and tighter process control. Most major operators are moving this way. This shift sits against a wider backdrop of change within Subway itself. The business was acquired by private equity firm Roark Capital in 2024 after decades of family ownership, and the brand has continued pushing heavily into digital ordering, restaurant modernisation and operational efficiency. Much of that strategy was already underway before the acquisition, so it would be too simplistic to suggest kiosks suddenly appeared because of new ownership alone. But private equity backed franchise businesses inevitably place huge focus on scalability, consistency, margin and operational control. In that respect the direction of travel is hardly surprising.

The issue is not the kiosk itself. The issue is what happens when the process starts to overtake the experience.

I experienced this first hand recently in a Subway located inside a local Spar store. I walked up to the counter and was told they could not serve me directly and that I had to order through the kiosk. Large pieces of POS directing customers towards self service ordering obscured much of the counter itself, to the point where I could not see the salad or fillings at all. My choices were made digitally rather than in front of the ingredients, and the final product was built to standard portions with very little interaction during the process. Ironically, the cookies were still clearly visible next to a now redundant till point. Seeing them did exactly what good merchandising is supposed to do and made me want one, but because I had already completed and paid for the order through the kiosk, the opportunity for the upsell had effectively disappeared. I simply walked away without that extra purchase.

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The whole experience felt far closer to ordering through Deliveroo, Uber Eats or any number of faceless delivery platforms than the traditional Subway model the brand originally built its reputation on. Subway has never competed purely on speed. Its place in the market has always relied on the customer feeling involved in what they are buying. You can see the food, influence what is happening and trust the product because it is transparent. That interaction is not an added extra to the model, it is part of the reason people choose the brand in the first place.

Once the process becomes system driven rather than customer driven, the basis on which customers make their choice starts to change. The operation may become more efficient, but the experience also becomes more standardised and less distinctive from competitors already built around automation and throughput. From an operational perspective, the logic is understandable. Kiosk ordering reduces pressure on labour, improves consistency and creates tighter process control. Those are all sensible objectives in the current market, particularly within large franchise systems where operators are under pressure to protect margin and simplify execution at site level.

However, the problem comes when the kiosk stops being an additional ordering option and becomes the ordering experience itself.

Customers do not experience operating models, franchise structures or labour strategies. They experience what it feels like to buy from you. Small operational decisions that make complete sense internally can gradually reshape the customer experience externally. No single decision looks damaging on its own, but over time the experience becomes less distinctive and the reason customers connected with the brand in the first place becomes less clear. That is the real issue here. Not that Subway is introducing kiosks, but that the brand risks losing clarity around what made it different in the first place. Customers were never simply buying a sandwich. They were buying control, visibility and personalisation wrapped around a fast food format. If those elements are reduced too far in pursuit of efficiency, the brand inevitably starts competing on different terms. That does not mean the strategy is wrong - consumer behaviour changes, technology evolves and operating models have to adapt. But successful adaptation depends on understanding which parts of the customer experience are genuinely valuable and which parts can change without damaging the brand itself.

Growth comes from a compelling proposition. Scale comes from delivering that proposition consistently over time. The moment operational convenience starts outweighing customer expectation, businesses need to be very clear about what they are changing and whether the customer will still value what remains.

Because once the experience changes, the brand changes with it.