Jersey Mike’s,
Indulge me briefly please. I have a simple proposal for you that is good for everyone and I have taken the liberty to “show my work”. Read on!
You serve really tasty sub sandwiches and they have become my favorite, displacing Subway and a local sandwich shop. I get the regular #5 Super Sub but do it my way, not yours. That includes adding deli mustard and mayo. Using your nutrition calculator I see that the sandwich jumps from 830 to 1070 calories when I add mayonnaise, meaning it is 240 calories. In reality it is probably a lot more than that given how liberally it is used.
According to Wikipedia you have 1,592 locations. From one of your news articles we know that one location can sell over 1,000 sandwiches in a day. While I know not every store sells that many a day, and I know that not every customer gets mayo, indulge me in a hypothetical.
If a store sells half that amount (500) and half ordered mayo (250) that means you sell 398,000 sandwiches a day (1592 * 250). We know from the calculator that the mayo is 240 calories so multiply by that number of sandwiches and we get 95,520,000 million calories in mayo alone each day. That is pretty incredible.
That made me wonder why you don’t offer an alternate to the full mayo, either light or fat free. Let’s take a look at a leading brand and compare the calories in 1 tablespoon. Kraft Real Mayo is 90 calories, Kraft Light Mayo is 35 calories, and Kraft Fat Free is only 10 calories. Dropping from full to light cuts out 62% (55) calories and dropping to to fat free cuts out 89% (80) calories. Since we only know your sandwich gains 240 calories and not the brand or how much per tablespoon, we have to use those percentages to figure out the cut from 240.
Now we know that 62% of the 240 means 91 calories on a sandwich with light mayo and a big difference with 89% of the 240 meaning only 26 calories on the sandwich. Jumping back to that 95,520,000 calories in mayo a day we have a good contrast. Switching to light mayo would cut that down to 36,297,600 calories a day and switching to fat free would cut that down to 10,507,200 calories a day.
While you probably aren’t open 365 days a year or if so, not full hours, forgive my short cut to just call it a year when we look at the bigger picture. As is, you are potentially dishing out 34,864,800,000 calories every year. That is almost 35 billion.
If Jersey Mike’s offered low-fat mayo it would potentially drop to 13,248,624,000 calories which saves over 21 billion a year. Moving to fat-free would cut it down to a measly 3,835,128,000 calories saving over 31 billion a year. The kicker? If you charged $0.25 for upgrading to less calories that would be $99,500 a day or $36,317,500 a year in profit, assuming you can get fat free for the same price as regular.
Finally, for the critics who might cry that fat-free mayo doesn’t taste as good as the full, you are absolutely right! But on a sub sandwich with a dozen ingredients and the mayonnaise mixed in with deli mustard? I doubt one in a thousand people could taste the difference. For those who disagree? Fine, see above. They could offer both.
Conclusion
Jersey Mike’s could offer low-fat mayo and remove 21.6 billion calories from customer diets or offer fat-free mayo and remove 31 billion calories from customer diets each year while making over 36 million dollars in the process. How about it Mike… this is a win-win.