We actually asked the composers of Frozen about this very moment!
“It was an unconscious callback to Arrested Development,” Lopez says with a laugh when asked if he meant to recall Michael and Lindsay Bluth. “I think we had seen [that] episode once, and we did the joke, and realized that we had kind of made an homage. And then we tried to rewrite it, but we kept it because we couldn’t come up with anything better. Because Arrested Development is amazing.”
His wife remembers things slightly differently. “I will say that I think I wrote that line and I hadn’t seen the show — but that sandwiches are a very big part of our writing experience…We were always eating bagels when I was writing these lyrics.” In fact, Anderson-Lopez jokes, “if I could have put more sandwiches in, I would have.”