Former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle has agreed to plead guilty to allegations that he paid for sex acts with minors and received child pornography.

NEW YORK — Subway benefited hugely from Jared Fogle’s weight loss story. Now the sandwich chain needs to figure out how to prevent him from overshadowing its future.

It’s not clear how customers will react to Fogle’s plans to plead guilty to allegations that he paid for sex acts with minors and received child pornography, since it doesn’t have anything to do with Subway’s food. But the association of the company’s name with crimes that evoke such universal disgust come at a rough juncture for Subway.

Subway is facing intense competition and concerns that it’s overgrown. The company’s co-founder and CEO is fighting cancer. And at a time when attitudes about the definition of healthy are changing, Subway is trying to convince people about the quality of its food by removing artificial ingredients from its menu.

“For a while, when you see a Subway ad, you’re going to think about that child pornography charge,” said Allen Adamson of the brand consulting firm Landor Associates.

Companies like having famous representatives because it’s a way to make people feel like that they could somehow be more like those individuals — which in the case of Fogle meant losing weight and being able to keep it off. But such relationships also can backfire when celebrities run into trouble.

The charges against Fogle also are tough because he wasn’t just a one-time endorser; he is famous solely for dropping more than 200 pounds with his “Subway diet.”

Subway leaned on Fogle’s story for more than 15 years as it more than doubled its locations in the U.S. The pitchman appeared in Subway TV ads as recently as last month, on the day his home was raided by state and federal investigators, according to iSpot.tv, which measures national TV ads. That ad recapped how Fogle lost weight, and the latest chapter in his life as a family man with two children.

It was one of three Subway ads featuring Fogle up to that point in the year, out of a total of 40 different Subway ads, according to iSpot.tv.

Julie Carlton, a 28-year-old graduate student who was at a Subway in New York City Wednesday, said she doesn’t plan to stop going to the chain because she doesn’t think the company is to blame for Fogle’s actions.

She said she was much more upset with Chick-fil-A after the fried chicken chain’s president publicly reaffirmed his support of what he called the “biblical definition of the family unit” that did not include same-sex marriage. The move provoked an outcry from gay rights supporters.

“There’s a big difference between with what happed with Jared and what happened with Chick-fil-A,” said Carlton, who noted that Subway cut ties with Fogle.