NICK EICHER, HOST: Subway restaurants are known around the world for their sandwiches. So it may surprise you to know that Subway restaurants in Ireland don’t sell sandwiches.
That is, if you define a sandwich as a meat between two pieces of bread, because Ireland has a pretty exacting definition of what’s bread and what’s not.
That country’s supreme court has just ruled that Subway’s bread isn’t bread.
Why did it weigh in here? Well, you see, bread is exempt from Ireland’s value added tax, so a Subway franchisee argued it shouldn’t be taxed on its sandwiches.
But the legal definition of bread in Ireland requires sugar to comprise 2 percent or less of the weight of the flour used to make the dough. Subway’s sugar content is 10 percent.
So the court ruled that Subway’s almost-bread is taxable.
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