Puffed baked potatoes with skin on are besieging stores in Ireland, with salad giant Subway unveiling a new jacket potato line.
The company had by September 5, 2025 unrolled its fluffy tubers across nationwide stores. It will be serving these with cheese, tuna in mayonnaise, chicken tikka, among other toppings.
This marks the first time the delectable product has achieved full-blown distribution after a trial period in early 2025.
Spuds, as the Irish call them, are now turning into “Spudway,” basically a baked potato replacing bread as a snack.
Because not everyone agrees with the current toppings, Subway is giving consumers freedom to choose its other jacket potato-topping salads.
“Non-Jacket Potato” Commemoration
Interestingly, the rollout comes in the same week that Ireland is commemorating the 1847 potato blight that spotlighted the national tuber.
It all began on September 13, 1845 when potato blight (Phytophthora infestans) landed on local shores from the eastern U.S.
By 1847, famine had descended on the island, exacerbated by absentee landlords in the U.K. who taxed growers.
The disease decimated 85% of the local crop in 1847 alone but still persisted for five years till 1852.
Estimates from literature sources put starvation deaths at 1 million while permanent departures to mainly North America numbered 2 million.
Luckily, production quickly reestablished a decade later from which time output fluctuated below its 1840s peak.
In modern times, output peaked in 1961 at 2.145 million tonnes but bottomed out in 2012 at 232,000 tonnes, per the Helgi Library. As such, the statistics below offer extra bits on Ireland’s potato production throughout their cultivation history.
Ireland Potato Statistics
Clad in a rich history of potatoes, Ireland is to many a country of the tuber -hence the term Irish potato. This breed in turn has many cultivars including the Rooster variety, which represents 60% of all potato sales in local supermarkets, according to Medium. Yet, Irish potatoes came to Ireland from South America by way of Canary Islands in the 1500s. Till the potato famine of 1847, acreage under the crop hovered at over 300,000 hectares, annually. After the blight, it slumped to 258,000 ha in 1848 but recovered to 359,000 ha in 1858.
Cultivation has however diminished in recent years, starting 2008, levelling in 2022 at 8,470 hectares, according to the FAOSTAT. Likewise, production has also been volatile in the half decade ending 2022. It sometime flopped to 300,000 tonnes (2020) and then touched 407,500 tonnes (2021). All this owes to the fact that most of the land goes to pastures for livestock with only 2% for cereals and other crops. Despite this, potato productivity has been rising against all odds, increasing by 13 tonnes/hectare between 2008 and 2019.
What is the recent production history of Irish potatoes?
In the yearly period ending 2023, Ireland’s potato production became a game of volatility, jumping from lows to sudden highs. The FAOSTAT table below illustrates the facts:
| Year | Production [tonnes] | Acreage [ha] |
| 2022 | 367,950 | 8,490 |
| 2021 | 407,500 | 8,930 |
| 2020 | 300,150 | 8,890 |
| 2019 | 382,370 | 8,670 |
Fig: potato production and cultivated area in Ireland, 2019-2022
Have potato yields in Ireland been stable over the years?
Unlike production, Ireland’s potato yields have been upping exponentially in the past decade ending 2019. While 2008 managed around 31 tonnes/ha, 2014 had over 40 t/ha while 2018 brought 38.9 t/ha.