Chipotle Eats Itself
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
I'd feel far more comfortable with Chipotle if they could definitively say, "It appears uncooked cilantro in our rice was harboring E. coli; we've changed how we prepare that item and believe the problem is fixed." Instead, we now have a nebulous "central kitchens work for other companies, so now we're doing it" solution. As little as I cared about their feel-good "local food" drumbeat, it bothers me that they turned away from that stance.
At the same time, I've not seen a slowing of the constant level of decline in cleanliness at the stores near me. When they were opened, they were shiny a new. Now, though, they've begun to attract a noticeable level of crud in the corners and other hard-to-clean areas like the perforated wooden wall boards. The kitchen areas look to have received a good once-over, but the stores show the abuse they've suffered under high-volume visits.
What if people aren't sick from bacteria in the food, but from a nasty colony on the underside of a table or chair or even wall leaned against while waiting to order food that is often eaten in handheld form? Does the food safety program encompass those areas too? If so, why doesn't it clearly show?
Well, yeah. I'm sure they do grasp that. They also grasp that there's no way of knowing what caused it, and that lying would be immoral and unwise.
> I'd feel far more comfortable with Chipotle if they could definitively say, "It appears uncooked cilantro in our rice was harboring E. coli; we've changed how we prepare that item and believe the problem is fixed."
The reality is that it was some bit of fresh produce, it could have happened to anyone, it does happen to everyone (McDs, Burger King, KFC, etc have all had E. coli outbreaks, and will again), and they've made some changes to reduce the risk, but not to zero because no kitchen in the world, private or corporate, has a zero risk of food-borne illnesses.
> What if people aren't sick from bacteria in the food
Then you'd see a radically different pattern of infections.
Heh, I was wondering about it once waiting in line there. All those unpainted pipes, wood panels and corrugated galvanized steel must be fun to keep clean.
I guess that's the downside of wanting to look the opposite of McDonalds and White Castles with tiles everywhere. There is usually a reason why those places look like they do -- they easier to keep clean. Believe it or not White Castle despite its popular reputation for slimy burgers is one of the cleanest food chains (knew someone working for the insurance company which provides insurance for it).
From the article, quoting a Chipotle worker:
"Why do we earn almost the same as McDonald’s workers when the care we put in is 20 times what they do?"
Uncertainty has a strong influence on human behavior.
Their e-coli problems started soon after pledging to go GMO-free... The GMO-railroad might not have appreciated a little business taking a nail out of their tracks.
That's the key. It lost at its supposed top mission to - provide wholesome food with healthy ingredients, not like those other cheap / dirty fast food places.
Yes Tesla had an issue, Dole did. Tesla is new, its mission is to make really cool cars. Dole's is selling food, but its mission is to provide bulks processed foods, which a large majority of people wouldn't honestly claim is healthy or wholesome.
I can't explain but, yes, I lost the desire to eat there. I know rationally it doesn't make sense. But we have walked too many times past a Chipotle we used to go to and said "meh maybe next time". Next time never comes somehow.
I wonder if that's part of the company's problem, that the E-Coli incident just gave people a reason to rethink their habits? I used to eat a lot at a similar burrito restaurant in Australia, but something happened to make me realize I was paying twice as much for a meal there than I would at Subway, and for all the burrito restaurant's "healthy food" claims I was starting to put on weight, so I stopped eating there.
Why wait in a slow line, pay a premium price, and spend twice as long to chow on a burrito or bowl as it would take you to eat a burger or taco? Sure the food is good, but the hassle is just a bit much. If I wanted to put up with all of that I prefer to just spend a few bucks more and go to a proper restaurant.
I never noticed how good chipotles ingredients were until I started eating bowls instead of burritos. Those massive burritos are a sloppy tube of undifferentiated food matter that totally obscures the quality of the food.
Personally I think they should institute a "small size" burrito, for a lower price. Moe's does this.
I'd like that, but I can see why they don't. I doubt the savings on ingredients would be adequate for them to preserve their margins yet offer a price point that would seem reasonable to the consumer. Very few would be interested if it were only (say) 15 cents cheaper.
My favorite fast-burger chain used to be Carl's Jr. Then, one day, I noticed an employee dip her hands into a bucket oddly situated on the counter behind the registers. Over time, I realized that the same bucket was always there, and employees would dip their hands in there when coming in from outside, the restroom, etc.
I then realized that they were doing this in lieu of washing their hands with running water.
I never went back.
The other two Carl's Jr. in the area are gone now, after decades of operation in their locations.
Last year I bought Harold Mcgee's "Keys to good cooking" but couldn't go through it as all he talks about isn't "cooking" but telling you all the manners in which food is going to kill you.
(Ironically, in the parts I did read he explains that his own father spent his whole life eating raw meat and never suffered from it.)
Maybe the problem with the US is the number of people who buy meals from restaurants, as opposed to cooking at home. If there's a problem in your own kitchen the only people who are going to get sick are members of your family; if there's a problem in a restaurant, or a restaurant chain, you have an outbreak.
The one exception is eggs. The US obsession with food safety has led to a law requiring eggs to be washed; ironically this removes a protective coating that protects eggs. In non-US countries you are vastly more likely to find a bit of dirt adhering to the shell of the egg, but you're a lot less likely to get salmonella. Whups.
> If there's a problem in your own kitchen
For E. coli, the problem originates on the farm, not the kitchen. The current best guess is that somehow human feces contaminated the manure an organic farm in Lower Saxony was using to grow bean sprouts, and boom, 4000 people sick and 51 dead.
It's not really about restaurant meals, or industrial farms, or globalization; it's about food safety being really hard.
This problem persists regardless of whether you're talking about restaurant meals or eating at home. There have been numerous food safety related recalls not just of packaged and processed foods (ranging from pre-made meals to peanut butter) but also of produce (ranging from spinach to sprouts to zucchini). The problem is an overly centralized system with many faults in regard to the prevention side of things and an over reliance on chemical cleansers to prevent the spread of pathogens.
In short, in the US we have breeding grounds for these high impact pathogenic bacteria coupled with systems that could hardly be more suited to spreading disease rapidly and broadly while at the same time our protections are not nearly up to the task.
The problems come from contaminated ingredients. Modern, industrialized food supply chains are long, whether they terminate in a commercial kitchen or a residential one.
I would imagine this sort of issue is one where it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. I was never really a fan of Chipotle to begin with, but wasn't bugged when I heard about the outbreak; it just seemed like a tradeoff in my mind for less processed meats - you naturally expose yourself to dangers like this. I wasn't aware that the fans of Chipotle thought differently, but apparently they did and I guess the chain mishandled the PR on the event?
One of the things that Chipotle used to (and still, to some extent) do differently was that they turned raw meat into cooked meat onsite, rather than taking precooked frozen meat from central facilities and reheating it.
(They also purportedly have very stringent guidelines about what they permit to be done to the animals the meat comes from; I don't know what those requirements are, so I can't say how strict they are.)
The tradeoff with that, combined with their local sourcing guidelines, is that they'd have far more distinct pipelines and places that they needed to ensure a lack of contamination in.
The article covers them having now switched to an approach which opponents refer to as "precooking" the meat in large central facilities, to kill pathogens effectively, while also maintaining as much of their "fresh food prepared right in the restaurant" ethos as they can muster.
(Not being a chef, it seems like they basically cook the meat to something like medium-rare, slowly, but at sufficient temperature to kill pathogens, and then cool it and cook it the rest of the way at restaurants.)
It's all about discretionary, discerning, conscious customers who would think to themselves "Chipotle is fresh, wholesome, and healthy, and they have integrity" or something of the like; now there's fewer people who associate this with Chipotle in particular. Some of the beneficiaries of this development are Panera and Qdoba, who still evoke a similar thought.
It may still be the case that Chipotle draws decent crowds, but they are drawing those crowds for different reasons -- promotions, people in a forgiving or adventurous mood, or people who simply don't care about the ethos very much and just want some tasty fast casual food.
Ones that were super duper line-out-the-door popular almost never have the line out the door anymore it seems.
I don't really eat here hardly ever, but walk by 2 almost every day.
Still having said that they are still routinely busier than some other options near them.
I go rarely due to price really. Once I started fixing food at home, I realized I could make the same stuff to bring to work for a reasonably better price. Salsas are really the only thing I need to learn to try my hand at.
Oh, and by the way, anecdotes are not data.
We don't eat there because:
(1) It's at an awkward price-point and inconvenient food nature. Sure it's good food, but if I'm in the market for fast-food stuff I'm likely not in the mood to wait in a slow line, pay that premium price, and spend twice or three times as much time to eat a burrito or bowl as it would to eat a burger or taco. If I'm going to go through all of that, I might as well pay just a couple of dollars more and go to a proper restaurant.
(2) We stopped hearing about Chipotle, and often forget it even exists. It's been probably a year since I've seen or heard any advertising from them aside from a "student discount 5% off Thursdays from 5pm-7pm only" banner tied to their awning when I drive by.
Anecdotally, I definitely heard the outbreak discussed frequently here in NY -- probably because I regularly eat there, and so did my friends (up until the outbreak anyway). Maybe you didn't since your friend circle stopped eating there before the outbreak?
While failing at the fundamentals of food safety.
So 500 confirmed cases of E. Coli linked to Chipotle over the course of a year is actually better than the national average?
266k don't get E. Coli out of thin air, clustering and timing is also important as well as the specific culture of the bacterium.
You can't just take some random statistics and another one and extrapolate a relationship from it.
If you have data that suggest otherwise, I'd love to see it.
How does the chorizo survive that?
i'm not sure if i'm even interested in reopening the tab and reading the article now.
"When a listeria outbreak caused by Dole’s packaged salads was linked to four deaths last year, the public outcry was not nearly as intense or sustained (despite an ongoing federal investigation). When Tesla reported its first driver fatality while using its Autopilot feature last June, it didn’t affect the company’s stock price at all. Why were these deaths only blips for Dole’s and Tesla’s reputations? By contrast, Chipotle spent a year in hell even though no one died—and more than 265,000 Americans get sick annually from illnesses linked to E. coli."
...it just doesn't seem like real news to me because it isn't.
What are the cliff notes?
The Cliff Notes version is that sales at Chipotle are down 30% - but if you're looking for "news" or "Cliff Notes", this isn't the kind of article you would be interested in.
2) It looks like mgmt. did not want to do a public information campaign because then you're telling people, who may not all know yet, that there's a problem. In other words, 1960's-style crisis mgmt. to "protect" their brand.
3) Also, the executives of Chipotle simply refuse to make top mgmt. changes and in fact are among the highest-paid executives in human history (according to the article.)
4) One store had serious "HR issues" with managers preying on underage part-time staff, resulting in a multi-million dollar payout. I'll leave it at that.