When John Chidsey took the reins of Subway in 2019, the sandwich store chain desperately needed a refresh. The company, led by the chain's founding family from 1965 until then, hadn't updated its menu or invested in technology in the decade before Chidsey's arrival.
And it had lost ground to quick-service rivals like McDonald's and Panera. As a privately held company, Subway—the largest restaurant chain in the world by store count with 37,000 locations—is not required to disclose its financial results. But between 2015 and 2021, as business cratered, Subway closed 6,000 of its U.S. stores, almost one-quarter of them. The company has now resumed opening new ones. Four years ago, it tapped Chidsey, a turnaround artist who had fixed Burger King some years earlier as CEO, to work his magic again, with owners now eyeing a sale to private equity that reportedly could fetch $10 billion.
