If you’ve ever eaten at a Firehouse Subs, you’ve probably assumed the whole thing — the helmet on the sign, the fire-engine red, the hose-and-ladder decor — was a marketing gimmick picked out of a branding deck. It wasn’t. The man who co-founded the place was a real Jacksonville firefighter, and that turned out to be only one of three careers he was quietly running at once.
Chris Sorensen started at the Brevard County Fire Department and the Jacksonville International Airport Fire and Rescue Department, then spent ten years as an engineer and EMT with Jacksonville Fire and Rescue, according to Action News Jax. The restaurant’s name was never a costume. It was his résumé.
Sorensen was also a professional guitarist — not a guy with a Strat in the garage, but a player good enough that touring acts let him on stage. Over the years he sat in with Huey Lewis and the News, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Foreigner, and Earth, Wind & Fire. Four bands, four completely different styles — bar-band rock, Southern rock, arena rock, horn-driven funk — and he could hang with all of them.
In 1994, Chris and his brother Robin — himself a firefighter too — opened the first Firehouse Subs in Jacksonville. It grew from one storefront into a national chain, and in 2021 the brothers sold the company for $1 billion.
In 2005, the Sorensen brothers established the Firehouse Subs Public Safety Foundation. It has since granted more than $110 million to fire departments, police departments, EMS crews, and public safety agencies for equipment, vehicles, and training they couldn’t otherwise afford.
Chris Sorensen died on October 11, 2026, at his home near Jacksonville. He was 65. For about two weeks, almost nothing happened nationally — local coverage ran, but the story didn’t surface broadly until around October 25–26, when outlets including Complex picked it up. He wasn’t a public figure in the way a musician or a CEO usually is — he was all three of those things, and famous for none of them. He is survived by his brother and co-founder, Robin.
Three careers, one man, and a logo millions of people walked past every day without ever knowing it was real.