With tens of thousands of stores and millions of sandwiches to make and serve every year, how does Subway even begin to find enough raw materials to meet all of the demand? We buy about 70 million pounds of chicken a year, about 60 million pounds of turkey a year, about 30 million pounds of pepperoni and genoa salami a year. When I get to the equipment side, you know, We're opening up over a thousand stores a year, so we've got to make sure that everything is working in order to supply the system.
It sort of shocks me sometimes when I think about the sheer volume. fields have to be planted or grow out times for animals which sounds kind of crazy but it's true and we've even had to build additional production facilities and order equipment and actually do brick-and-mortar building in order to accommodate promotions let's get a behind-the-scenes look at the story of subways $5 footlong as it worked its way all the way through the subway system the creativity from the field a lot of ideas come from individual store owners or local markets. Our five dollar foot long phenomenon came from a local market in Florida. Sales shot up at that store.
It wasn't long before stores in other states were seeing the same results. Then Subway decided to roll out the promotion nationally and things came to a screeching halt. We could not do it. We could not accommodate the promotion. If in fact the sales did what the test markets did, we thought if this thing hits around the country like that, there's not enough bread in the United States to accommodate this.
I mean literally, it's not going to happen. We had to go look for equipment. that would be capable of making the bread at the lowest cost.
I think it's critical that anytime people talk about a promotion and get excited about introducing a new product or plan for a promotional item, that we have the global supply. not just the supply of an entire supermarket, not just the supply of an entire nation of supermarkets, but a global supply of fresh ingredients for bread. Tremendous amount of planning goes into that, whether it be planting seeds or building brick and mortar to accommodate the promotion or the product. Sometimes it can take well over a year to accommodate that type of promotion because of just the sheer number of units.
What's significant about the $5 footlong is anybody that would typically go into subways and order a six-inch is now ordering a footlong. And then a lot of new people came in. So our sales of bread, even though our sales went up 20%, our sales of bread went up over 40%. And we could not have kept the system in bread had we not gone out and planned for the growth of the system.
As Subway began to expand in leaps and bounds, instead of looking to buy maybe two or three hundred cases of food, the shopping list grew to more than two or three hundred thousand cases each day. In the early 1990s, with just a few thousand Subway stores, franchisees generally purchased their own supplies from approved vendors. Let's just take turkey for example.
There might be five different quality levels of turkey, and some franchisees would buy turkey based on the quality. Others would buy turkey based on the price. but they were all different, so the customers were getting different experiences. Since Subway franchisees wanted to focus on operating results, they created what's known as the Independent Purchasing Cooperative to handle all of the shopping and negotiating for them.
What we first had to do was come in and establish a specification for a given product. When we started that, we set that specification at the highest quality level, and then we went out and negotiated that particular... specification among all the suppliers. It really was a wake-up call for us that we're such a big brand and we can really mitigate cost increases if we do some things a lot better and a lot smarter and a lot of it had to do with vertical integration. So if you look at the total process of what we do, we go back to the grain, control the fields, work with the growers, we're going to then sell to the processors, we're going to sell all the distribution in between and the freight lanes in between until it ends up in the restaurants.
50 to 80% of the price of any one product is in the raw material. And so you want to make sure that you're buying that. best way you can. And commodities move up and down. A lot of it is predictable.
And so if you can buy bacon right after Easter when the prices start to go down a little, you do that. And you build up your inventory and then you use it during the summer when bacon prices are always at their annual highs. And that's what we do.
We try to make our best educated decisions on when to buy into the market and when to stay out of the market. In tandem with controlling costs is key to keeping each aspect of Subway's product at a reliably high standard, otherwise known as the gold standard. The gold standard will define the quality requirements and the food safety requirements of any item and then it's something that we can use to measure the performance of that item over time.