Jersey Mikes: From One Store to Success

Did you know that Jersey Mikes was once just a single-location sub shop at the Jersey Shore?

As foodify experts and as Jersey Shore fans, we thought July might be a great time to dig into the history of Jersey Mike’s and its Jersey Shore roots!

Jersey Mike's first began in 1956 as  a single store (called Mike's Subs), back then the restaurant was a mom-and-pop business, set up in order to sell a relatively new invention in American culture: the submarine sandwich.

In 1971, Peter Cancro joined the Mike's Subs team at just 14 years of age. He thrived in the sub business, and a few years later in 1975, when he heard the owners discussing the sale of the business, he approached his football coach and asked for a loan of $150,000 to help him buy the shop. Surprisingly, his coach agreed, making the 17-year-old kid a business owner.

Foodify Lessons:

1. Hard work pays off:  Peter Cancro didn’t have 20 years of CEO experience when he joined the business.  He was in HIGH SCHOOL.  But what he did have was a vision for growth, and a work ethic to see this vision to reality. It was Cancro and his wife, Linda, who opened the company's next few outlets, steadily building a loyal customer base and seeking to perfect the Jersey Mike's customer experience. 

2. Resilience: After a recession hit during the company’s growth mode, Cancro found himself back behind the counter, running the company without the staff he had let go, eventually having to work more than 100 hours every week. Because there was no money for TV advertising, he was forced to take to local radio to get the word out about the business, and filled the gaps with door-to-door marketing and mail campaigns. Luckily, things eventually turned around — and within three years of the recession, Cancro had managed to hire back all the staff he had fired.

3. Building a process: Even today, as a $1Billion company, Peter Cranco isn’t afraid of hard work.  Peter spends his time training his staff and constantly improving the processes and systems that have made the company successful over the last three decades.  Today, the company has 1,400 outlets in 45 states.  One of the things which separates Cancro's business style from that of his fast food CEO colleagues is that he genuinely seems to relish getting his hands dirty.  He then joins the production line, helps make sandwiches and routinely asks his colleagues, many of whom are teenagers, how he's doing. Cancro claims it "levels the playing field and resonates." "When I was 14-years-old," he said, "it felt like a small family nucleus. That's what I want for our store teams today."

4. Foodify Quality: Freshness is an integral part of the Jersey Mike's process. The chain takes special pride in preparing all its vegetables by hand every day..  Additionally, the company bakes the bread fresh daily, shred our lettuce and cut our onions and tomatoes daily. There's nothing leftover that you will have the next day on your sub. It's all fresh that morning. The quality of the meat is USDA grade A. We do our own in-house roast beef. It's kind of a restaurant-type sub shop.

So why not you?  Are you ready to transform from a single location to a company with the processes and systems to expand? 

What if we told you this process isn’t something that takes years.  Our Foodify method delivers REAL results within 30 days!

Lets go!