How Quiznos Is Making Modular Work at Scale

When Neel Patel came on board as Quiznos CEO, he saw a brand with a problem: 140 US locations, the second-highest name recognition in the sandwich category, and a growth model from 1985. His solution? Burn it down and build 650-square-foot cubes that cost less than half of traditional units and open in 45 days.

The Brutal Truth

Six months into his role, Patel told his board something uncomfortable: "We're using a 40-year-old playbook with an outdated growth model that doesn't attract capital, slows development, and perpetuates Quiznos's fade into obscurity."

The legacy footprint? Strip mall locations built for dine-in customers who stopped coming, dependent on whether the location or mall was thriving or dying. Spending $100-150K to generate $400K in sales. The math didn't work.

The Tucson Moment

Patel found a bright spot in the system: a Tucson drive-thru doing 4x the system's average unit volumes with 85%+ of sales through drive-thru or third-party. Record opening week. The problem? It cost $1.6 million and took 12 months to build.

Great sales. Terrible investment profile. That's when Patel looked at a side project that had been quietly developing for three years....

Enter The Cube

In 2022, Quiznos partnered with BCube Manufacturing on a 650-square-foot modular unit. The first one opened May 2025 in Alpena, Michigan (population: 10,000). Opening week did $30K, a $1.7M annualized run rate if sustained.

The economics that matter:

• $400-600K total cost (including site dev, lot, utilities)
• 45-90 days from order to operation
• 3 weeks for production
• 1 week for install
• Quarter-acre footprint

Compare that to the $1.6M Tucson build.

The Vegas Proof Point

Patel needed one more data point to silence doubters: can you really push volume through 650 square feet? The answer was already in the system. Quiznos operates a 580-square-foot location in the Las Vegas airport that does $4 million annually with one oven. When team members pushed back on small footprints, Patel would point to Vegas: "Anyone on my team that says we need to build a big unit, I show them this and say, 'We can make the production work,'" Patel explained.

The Real Growth Platform

Patel's realization: having a cheap box isn't enough. You need the entire growth platform rebuilt: tech stack, operations, training, marketing, financing, analytics. "We had made zero changes to our team to anticipate rolling out more cubes. Zero changes to development, marketing, operations. That doesn't make sense."

His 12-18 month checklist:

• Bring in best-in-class talent from outside restaurants (hired head of growth from CPG: Ferragamo and Estée Lauder)
• Overhaul entire restaurant and corporate tech stack
• Build their own cubes to refine the model on their dime
• Create franchise enablement and capital partnerships
• Change how they approach brand partnerships

The Rollout

The transformation timeline is aggressive:

• 2026: 50% of new development will be cubes
• 2027: 75% of new development will be cubes
• 2030: 50% of all Quiznos locations in the US will be cubes

That's a complete system overhaul in four years. To support it, they're expanding production beyond Michigan into Georgia and Arizona, reducing shipping distances and tackling state-by-state permitting challenges.

The New Statement

Patel's question to his team was: "How do we destroy the old playbook and build a new growth model that makes Quiznos impossible to ignore again?"

They've flipped it to a statement: "We ARE destroying the old playbook. We're building a new growth model and we're going to make Quiznos impossible to ignore again."

When a brand with massive awareness and 140 locations can't grow, the problem isn't the product, it is the infrastructure. Patel's betting that modular isn't a side project or a sexy marketing play. It's the core growth platform that rewrites unit economics, slashes timelines, and makes expansion financially viable again.

"If we truly believe in our investment model, we have to be able to build it, own it, and refine it ourselves."

Watch the full talk below 👇