Credit: Peter Summers/Getty Images

Subway bread is too sweet for its own good.

When you’re running a major fast food chain in the middle of a global pandemic, you gotta try to scrounge money wherever you can. Some chains use inferior ingredients, some hire less employees, and some try to get particular tax breaks. Subway tried their hand at the third category, attempting to get a tax break in Ireland granted to restaurant chains that serve staple foods. The most common staple food is bread, which Subway serves in spades, but according the Irish Supreme Court, Subway’s bread isn’t bread-y enough.

According to the rules of Ireland’s staple food tax break, specifically for bread, the weight of sugar and fat in a bread product can’t be greater than 2% of the total weight of flour in the dough. The purpose of this distinction is to separate bread from baked desserts like cake and cookies, which are most definitely not staple foods (much as I wish they were). According to the court’s ruling, Subway’s bread has a sugar content of roughly 10% the weight of its flour content. That’s about the same sugar-to-flour ratio as an Oreo cookie.

Credit: Gabriella Bass

A Subway franchise owner, Bookfinders in Galway, argued that Subway didn’t need to meet the sugar standards for things like heated sandwiches, tea, and coffee, and demanded that they receive a refund for previous years’ taxes. The court denied their demand, labeling all six varieties of Subway bread too sugary to be considered a staple food.

“The argument depends on the acceptance of the prior contention that the Subway heated sandwich contains ‘bread’ as defined, and therefore can be said to be food for the purposes of the second schedule rather than confectionery,” ruled Justice Donal O’Donnell. “Since that argument has been rejected, this subsidiary argument must fail.”