Subway delivery COVID market description guide

Two words in this instruction do most of the work and both are easy to miss. The first is brief: this is one section of a longer paper, not the paper, and the instruction says so twice. The second is the warning against repeating the case materials, which rules out the obvious opening — a paragraph explaining that Subway is a sandwich chain and that the pandemic closed dining rooms. Your reader has the case. What Section II adds is the market Subway is moving into, described from outside the case, so the sections that follow have something to argue against. Define that market before you describe it: quick-service restaurant delivery in the United States is a defensible scope, whereas food delivery generally pulls in grocery and meal kits and makes every share figure you quote incomparable. Write that boundary down in the first two lines, because a reader who does not know the market cannot judge the numbers.

The three named elements should each carry a fact rather than an impression. Major competitors means naming them and saying what they compete on: other quick-service chains that built or bought delivery capacity, the aggregator platforms that sit between restaurant and customer and take a per-order cut, and the convenience and grocery channels that absorb the same lunchtime spend. Market share means numbers with a source and a date attached, and it is worth being explicit about whose share you mean — Subway's share of quick-service restaurants is a different figure from any platform's share of delivery orders, and conflating them is the most common error in this section. Trends means direction over time rather than a snapshot: the shift in channel mix away from dine-in, the growth in digital ordering, and the change in average order value once delivery fees enter the basket. Each of those is a line you can draw, which is what the word trend asks for.

One structural decision decides whether this section reads as analysis or as a data dump, and it is worth making on purpose. Every fact you include should be one the later sections need. If your recommendation is going to be that Subway develops its own ordering app, then the aggregator commission rate and the platform's ownership of customer data belong here, because they are the premises of that argument. If your recommendation concerns store footprint, then delivery radius and order density belong here instead. Facts that support nothing later are what makes a market description feel padded. Cite everything with a date, since pandemic-period figures move quickly and an undated share number cannot be checked or trusted by whoever marks it. Where two sources disagree, quote both and say which you are using, because acknowledging the spread is stronger than picking the convenient figure and hoping nobody looks. That habit also protects the sections that build on this one.