In the News - When is Bread not Bread

Did you see the news article about Subway's bread quibble with the Irish state? The Irish courts ruled that since Subway's bread contains 10g of sugar for every 100 grams of flour... it doesn't count as bread. Apparently Subway was trying to get around the VAT (Value Added Tax) by saying that their sandwiches and their bread are "staple food". But the Irish system says that in order to be called "bread", the object in question can only have 2g of sugar for every 100 grams of flour. Beyond that... you're looking at cake or some other confectionary. Sooo... Subways sandwiches now get slapped with a 13.5% VAT...

Wow.

So I dug into Subway's site to see for myself... It's kind of hard to tell since, while they list the sugars in a typical 6" piece of bread, they don't list the amount of flour. Although, the carbs are there... so let's see...

A 6" 9-Grain Wheat bread has 36 grams of carbs and 3 grams of sugars. Yep, that's around 10%. And the 6" 9-Grain Honey Oat has 39 grams of carbs and 5 grams of sugars. Ooops... way more than 10%. So, yes... it would appear that Subway bread is, in fact, not bread... at least not by the standards of the Irish system.

Mind you... sugars are present in flours too, so this might not be an exact correlation. I had a look at my favourite rye bread and it contains no sugar in the list of ingredients but still has sugar in the list of nutrients. I presume that the Irish courts actually got to see the Subway bread recipes...

Here in Canada, we seem to have a different standard. Sandwiches are taxable by the GST or HST unless they are frozen, mostly because they are considered ready-to-eat with very little preparation. Whew... at least we don't have to wonder if our bread is actually bread!