A Canadian investigative consumer program ordered DNA analysis of several fast-food chicken sandwiches and concluded that Subway chicken was only half meat — with the other half soy.
The sandwich chain strongly rebuts the allegations, with a spokesman calling them "absolutely false" and calling for a retraction.
The tests were conducted by a DNA researcher at Trent University's Wildlife Forensic DNA Laboratory, for a CBC Marketplace episode dedicated to testing fast-food chicken dishes, and have not been independently confirmed.
On the episode, which aired Friday, the show found that dishes from McDonald's, Wendy's, A&W and Tim Horton's restaurants in Canada came in at 80 percent and 90 percent chicken DNA. (The meat was tested without any sauce or condiment, but seasoning and marinating would keep any chicken down from a pure 100 percent result, the CBC notes.)
But Subway's dishes were an outlier. "The oven roasted chicken scored 53.6 per cent chicken DNA, and the chicken strips were found to have just 42.8 per cent chicken DNA," the CBC reports. "The majority of the remaining DNA? Soy."