July 15, 2021 — Subway’s CEO defended the company’s sandwiches after a class-action lawsuit questioned the veracity and sustainability of the chain’s tuna.
“We’re very proud of our tuna,” Subway CEO John Chidsey told CNN, adding that it is one of his two favorite sandwiches.
July 15, 2021 — July marks month number seven of the great Subway tuna sandwich debate. In January, two California women sued Subway, alleging that they tested several of the chain’s tuna sandwiches in a lab and found that the ingredients were not tuna nor fish, but a “mixture of various concoctions” mixed together to “imitate the appearance of tuna” (via the Washington Post). Subway fought back, saying that it uses only wild-caught tuna in its subs. The plaintiffs then slightly amended the lawsuit, The New York Times reported, questioning only whether or not the tuna is “100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin.”
That was only phase one of the controversy. Next, news outlet Inside Edition conducted its own investigation of the sandwiches. Reporters sent samples from three tuna subs to Applied Food Technologies for DNA testing, according to a press release sent to Mashed, and received confirmation that they all contained tuna. The story doesn’t end there. Last month, The New York Times published a story detailing its own investigation, which hired an anonymous testing center to test another round of sandwiches. The results? “No amplifiable tuna DNA was present in the sample.”
June 25, 2021 — Subway Restaurants has come to the defense of its tuna products and said it utilizes 100 percent wild tuna, after facing a class-action lawsuit and a New York Times report that claimed testing found no tuna DNA in the restaurant chain’s tuna sandwiches.
The DNA testing utilized by the lab in the New York Times report is not accurate for canned and/or processed tuna, according to both Subway and the founder of a top DNA testing lab for cooked and processed tuna who spoke to SeafoodSource.
June 23, 2021 — After facing a class-action lawsuit claiming that Subway’s tuna sandwiches do not contain tuna and the restaurant chain cannot prove the fish is sustainable, a new DNA lab report shows there is no tuna in the company’s tuna sandwiches.
The New York Times set up an independent lab test of 60 inches of tuna sandwiches from three Subway restaurants in Los Angeles, California. The testing, which included a polymerase chain reaction test that searched for DNA of five different tuna species, detected no tuna in the sandwiches.