Monday, March 21, 2005

Nutritional transparency for fast food restaurants

Here is the response to my inquiry into the nutritional profile of the Quiznos sub that the USDA-sponsored beef checkoff is promoting:

I appreciate your interest in our menu here at Quizno's. I would like to point out that there is a list of selected sandwiches available on the website. The others are still being changed due to vendor changes and the data is not available as of yet. Please keep checking back for more information at www.quiznos.com

Sincerely,
Quizno's Customer Service Department

For the record, the response seems inconsistent with the tear sheet that I received from the Quiznos restaurant at Downtown Crossing in Boston. The tear sheet had "net calorie" information, indicating that somebody at Quiznos knows the nutritional profile. Here is the website for Quiznos' dominating competitor, Subway. It provides nutrition information for products of all types, and emphasizes a half-dozen sandwiches with particularly good nutritional profiles. Kudos to Subway. How on earth did the Beef Board and USDA come to work with Quiznos instead of Subway?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You got more information from Quizno's than I have been able to. I've filled out their "request nutritional information" form on their web site several times in the past year and have never received any response.

I asked for nutritional information at one of their locations and was told it's on their web site. I told him that only a couple of sandwiches are on the site. So, he took down my email address and promised to send me the information within a few days. Never got anything.

I went back to Quizno's site and filled out their form one last time, saying that if they didn't send me the information, they would lose my business for good. Still, I never got any response whatsoever.