Subway is bringing the jacket potato back to the UK high street – for £5.79

Telegraph

03-03-2025

'I love baked potatoes,' divulged Margaret Thatcher to Jilly Cooper in a Mail on Sunday interview published 40 years ago this month. 'But only with lots of butter.'
We can only wonder what Thatcher, with her infamously parsimonious appetite, would make of my lunch this afternoon. I have just ordered a jacket potato from the Grantham branch of Subway – a short walk from both her birthplace and her statue – but unlike the traditional serving she describes, mine is a steaming pyramid of excess, topped with 'taco beef', jalapeños and a substantial smear of guacamole.
For the uninitiated, Subway is an American chain of build-your-own sandwich restaurants. Celebrating its 60th birthday this year, the brand now has more than 37,000 branches in around 100 countries, making it the fourth largest fast food chain in the world. The vast majority of these restaurants offer the same fundamental product – a complex, modular menu from which customers can select their preferred bread, fillings and condiments for use in the creation of a six-inch or foot-long submarine sandwich. But this month, a tiny number of UK sites has started selling that British dinner time staple: the jacket potato.
It's a savvy move that reflects several quietly developing trends in our eating habits. For one thing, jacket potatoes are 'in', with high-ish profile vendors like Spudman (who sells generously-topped potatoes from a trailer in Tamworth) attracting long queues of TikTok followers through clever promotion on the platform. Secondly, an increasing number of Brits consider themselves gluten-free, and plenty more are trying to eat less of it; potato is a welcome antidote to the bread-based lunches we joylessly consume at our desks every day. And thirdly, it's cheap – for £5.79, a generously topped jacket potato costs less than a pint in a London pub.
As my souped-up spud approaches completion, I can't help comparing Subway's offer with that of Spud-u-Like, the now-defunct jacket potato takeaway franchise that rose to prominence in the early 1980s. Back then, Britain's recession-hit high streets were hungry for an inexpensive yet substantial lunch option, which Spud-u-Like and its many thousands of topping combinations delivered; now, in the era of ' cozzie livs ', Subway is tentatively entering that space, offering near-infinite permutations of fillings, including vegetarian and low-calorie choices, for not much money. Can it succeed where Spud-u-Like failed?
The potato I receive is phenomenal value and entirely delicious. Having arrived on the Sandwich Artist's (yes, that's what Subway calls its servers) well-worn chopping board in a ready-cooked state, everything that subsequently happened to it was an improvement. It doesn't have a crunchy skin like it would if you'd sprinkled it with sea salt and baked it on the oven rack for at least an hour, but it has supremely fluffy flesh and the kind of chewy, creamy hide that makes you feel like you might be eating something healthy after all.
Of course, undermining that sentiment is whatever you've chosen to top your spud with. This particular potato has some fragrant beef, which is unremarkable but tasty, plus butter, a little bit of melty processed cheese, and avocado, which emerged from a piping bag for an additional fee of £1. It looks spectacular, smells terrific, tastes better than I've made it sound and – crucially – seems to last forever, its heft in my hand barely dissipating as I excavate great chunks from it with a small wooden fork.
Size is certainly what fuels the potato's newfound popularity on social media platforms, where gratuitous portions and outlandish toppings attract attention and engagement. Subway's offering is relatively restrained, with generous but respectable quantities of varied spud enhancements. It's relieving that Subway hasn't tried to make its jacket potatoes grotesque, like the 'dirty' burger trend of the mid-2010s. Soon, some try-hard twentysomethings will open an ironic potato shop in Hoxton, and then it will all be over. For now, though, Subway is showing us that healthy-ish, cheap-ish food is possible – and doesn't even have to be TikTok famous.
I return to the counter to order my second potato of the day. Other customers wander in for their lunch, some with potato preferences I would never have considered; one lady asks for a Philly cheesesteak topping, for example. I opt for a classic beans-and-cheese combo with an impulsive spoonful of sliced gherkins, which must seem like a beguilingly high-margin product to Subway's beancounters. Will the £5.79 price keep 'Spudway' in business? And are its jacket potatoes up to the job?
From where I'm sitting – in front of a cardboard carton filled with steaming starch – the outlook is good. While nobody since Spud-u-Like has managed to sell a meaningful number of jacket potatoes, Subway's immense economies of scale and 2,000-odd UK branches make it well-placed to try. Truthfully, I'll probably stick to my overpriced vegetarian sushi when I need to buy lunch out-and-about, but if the Spudway trial is a success, it will be a welcome addition to Britain's beleaguered high streets.