A restaurateur, a brainstorm and a rhyme.

Which Wich Superior Sandwiches was founded in Dallas by the restaurateur Jeff Sinelli. English Wikipedia says he opened it in 2003 with a single location in downtown Dallas, at a time when he was also chief executive of the Genghis Grill restaurant chain, and that Which Wich began franchising in 2005. A company announcement distributed through GlobeNewswire in January 2011 gave the date more precisely as “late 2003”, and the chain still has its headquarters in downtown Dallas.

The name came out of a brainstorming session. In an interview published by the trade magazine Foodservice Equipment & Supplies on 1 November 2017, the editors described Sinelli as “a huge fan of alliteration” who had come up with the Which Wich name in that session, and said he pointed to well-known names built on repeated sounds, such as Coca-Cola, Dunkin’ Donuts, Best Buy and American Airlines. The name pairs the question “which?” with the last syllable of “sandwich”, and Wikipedia says the chain calls its customisable sandwiches “wiches”.

The same interview identified Sinelli’s wife, Courtney, as a co-founder, and said she had worked with franchisees and members of the corporate team on a new children’s menu. Sinelli’s own title in the piece was “Founder, CEO and Chief Vibe Officer”, and Sinelli told the magazine that during 2017 the company had been investigating how music could feed into the brand’s innovation and creativity.

The chain’s structure has shifted around its founder without separating him from it. Restaurant Business reported on 11 September 2019 that Which Wich had promoted Cherry Hearn to president. Hearn had originally worked with the company as a trademark attorney, then became a franchisee, opening early stores in the system, and joined the corporate team as general counsel in 2012. Her promotion, the magazine said, allowed Sinelli to shift his day-to-day focus to his company’s other brands, including the Paciugo Gelato Caffè chain he had acquired in 2017 and a planned coffee concept, Supernova Coffee; a few Paciugo–Which Wich co-branded shops were already open. Writing in December 2023, QSR magazine still described Sinelli as the chain’s CEO and founder, after twenty years with the brand.

A paper bag, a red marker and a wall.

The Which Wich ordering system is its identity in practice. Wikipedia describes how customers take a pre-printed menu on a sandwich bag and mark it up with a red Sharpie marker: they choose a sandwich from a set of categories, then the bread, cheese, spreads and toppings. The sandwich is made to that order and handed back in the same personalised bag. Customers are encouraged to draw on their bags and hang the “artwork” on a community wall in the shop, so the order form becomes part of the décor.

Sinelli has described the bag as the chain’s core. “One of our main differentiators since the beginning has been our brown bag and Sharpie ordering system,” he told Foodservice Equipment & Supplies in 2017, adding that the company had recently introduced “favorites” for guests who preferred to point and order rather than customise. Six years later, he told QSR magazine’s Ben Coley, in an article published on 29 December 2023, that despite pressure to move to kiosks and online ordering, “we’re really an analog concept in the digital world.” “We started out with customized sandwiches with a simple bag and a sharpie,” he said, “and two decades later” the essence had not changed. In November 2023, for its twentieth anniversary, the chain introduced a menu called “Bag to the Future”, built around customised sandwiches.

The bag has travelled abroad. Wikipedia says the chain opened in Mexico City, Panama City and Dubai in 2013, and in Guatemala City in 2015; those shops have since closed. QSR reported that Which Wich opened in London’s West End in 2018 and later added a delivery-only kitchen in Shoreditch, and that a British master franchisee, Rami Awada, was preparing a wider rollout in the United Kingdom, with formats ranging from street-front shops and kiosks to cloud kitchens. The same article listed shops in Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Inside each, the routine is the one Sinelli described: pick up a bag, pick up a marker, tick the boxes.

Design and documentation.

A sandwich shop has a short list of surfaces on which its identity can live. Outside, there is the sign over the door and, in many cases, a window or a pole sign that has to be read from a moving car. Inside, there is the menu board behind the counter, which carries the name, the colours and the type all at once, and which has to stay legible while prices and items change around it.

The rest of the identity travels with the food. Sandwiches are wrapped in printed paper or foil, slipped into bags, stacked into boxes for catering and handed over with cups and napkins, so a chain’s name and pattern leave the shop on objects that are thrown away within the hour. Ordering slips, stickers and receipts carry it too.

Each guide in this group looks at one sandwich or sub chain through those surfaces: where the business started and who founded it, who has owned it since, and how its name, logo, signage and packaging are described in sources that can be dated. Where a fact rests only on the company’s own account, the guide says so.

Owning a colour, and a bag.

Sinelli has been explicit about colour. “When you see yellow out there, I want people to think, whether it’s a yellow taxi or yellow sports car, ‘Hey, that’s Which Wich,’” he told QSR in December 2023, comparing his ambition with the way Starbucks is associated with green. “It’s important to own something and get it in people’s psyche,” he said. “If you want to maintain the brand personality, it’s all about the brand consistency.” The magazine noted that yellow, like red, is a popular colour in fast food, so a chain that wants it has competition.

The other half of the identity is the paper bag. At Which Wich the bag serves as menu, order form, ticket, wrapper and souvenir, and when customers draw on it and pin it to the wall it also becomes the decoration. The company’s 2011 announcement described the chain as known for its “creative ordering system and personalized sandwich bag”, and Wikipedia calls the finished bags “artwork”. The red marker supplies the second colour, and the customer supplies the handwriting.

The naming system works the same way. Which Wich turns the last syllable of “sandwich” into a word of its own, and its sandwiches are “wiches”. Sinelli’s fondness for alliteration, recorded by Foodservice Equipment & Supplies, is visible in the name itself.

For a design guide, Which Wich shows how an identity can be built from an ordinary object and a colour, with the customer’s handwriting doing much of the work. Compare it with Subway, where the customer also builds the sandwich down a counter but the identity rests on arrows and type, and Firehouse Subs, another sub chain in this group. For this guide we use wich yellow, marker red and kraft bag with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Which Wich’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.