Subway's Chinese name is 赛百味 (sài bǎi wèi), and it is honestly one of the smartest brand translations you'll find in China. The first character, 赛 (sài), sounds close enough to the "Sub" in Subway to work phonetically, but it also means "to surpass" or "to compete with." The last two characters, 百味 (bǎi wèi), mean "a hundred flavors." Put it together and you get something like "surpasses a hundred flavors," which isn't just a nice-sounding name, it's a direct description of exactly what Subway sells: endless combinations of bread, protein, and toppings.
That technique has a name: phono-semantic matching, when a translated name sounds like the original and carries real meaning at the same time. It is genuinely hard to pull off well, and most brands settle for one or the other, sound or sense, not both. 赛百味 nails both. So does Coca-Cola's 可口可乐 (kěkǒu kělè), "tasty and happy," widely considered one of the best brand translations ever done into Chinese. Most attempts land somewhere far more awkward, a name that sounds close enough but means nothing, or means something nice but sounds nothing like the original.
But the name being clever didn't guarantee success. Subway actually entered China back in 1995, with its first store in Beijing, and then spent the next 28 years growing painfully slowly, reaching just 500 stores by mid-2023. For a chain that's the world's fourth largest fast food brand by store count, that's an almost embarrassingly slow pace, especially compared to McDonald's or KFC.
Then something changed. In just over two years, Subway nearly matched its previous 28 years of growth, crossing 1,000 stores in China, with sales growing more than 30 percent year over year and double-digit same-store sales growth on top of that.
So what changed? A big piece of it was solving a genuine cultural mismatch. Chinese diners generally prefer hot, freshly prepared food, and a cold sandwich was always working against that instinct. Subway's fix was introducing reheatable sandwiches, directly addressing the cold food problem instead of ignoring it and hoping customers would adjust.
On top of that, Subway leaned hard into localized flavors: teriyaki beef, abalone and shrimp sandwiches for Spring Festival, an avocado series, plus family meals and shareable snack boxes built around Chinese dining habits rather than the solo-diner assumption baked into the original American format. None of that was radical on its own, but it turned Subway from a strange cold-sandwich curiosity into a menu with an actual reason to walk in on a given day, whether that reason was a limited-time Spring Festival flavor or a shareable box built for a group.
Despite all that customization, tuna remains the single most popular sandwich in China, which says something interesting on its own. Sometimes the most successful localization strategy isn't replacing the original, it's giving people enough new options that the classic starts to feel like a comforting choice instead of a foreign one. The teriyaki beef and the abalone sandwich did their job just by existing, they made the menu feel like it belonged, which made the plain tuna sub feel like a real option instead of an obligation.
The bigger lesson sits underneath both halves of this story. A brilliant name buys you attention, and 赛百味 is about as good as brand translation gets. But attention isn't the same as adoption. It took Subway nearly three decades to figure out that solving one real cultural friction point, cold food, mattered more than any amount of linguistic cleverness sitting on the sign out front.
That's a pattern worth remembering for anyone launching a brand in China. The name gets people to notice you once. Solving the actual friction in how people eat, shop, or live is what gets them to come back a thousand stores later.