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degenerate

Step 1: Reduce food quality to cut costs

Step 2: Come out with stupid names of rehashed food ideas

Step 3: Spend all new profits from low-quality food ideas on HEAVY MARKETING of newer, lower-quality food ideas

Step 4: If (Chipotle != Taco Bell) Go to 2

Step 5: Exit

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Revisit this post in a year, and I'd not be surprised to see that it was correct. Turn Chipotle into an upscale version of Taco Bell and market the pants off of crappy food and sit back and watch profits grow.

Chipotle can't really compete with restaurants that actually serve good food, so why not fill the giant divide between them and Taco Bell?

Step 1 already happened, but for food safety consistency reasons. The meats are prepared off-site and shipped now, and more ingredients are frozen. The reduction in flavor quality was obvious.

Though neither freezing nor preparing off-site means flavour has to deteriorate. Frozen food can be preferable to chilled ingredients (whenever you can't get them really fresh). And much prep can be done half a day or a day in advance (as basically all restaurants do it), doing so in a centralised location shouldn't have any negative effect on flavour.

But in Chipotle's case, switching ingredients and preparation methods as a quick response to the outbreak probably led to sub-par standards and lower quality ingredients. It's not that easy changing the whole supply chain in a matter of months.

That divide is already occupied by authentic Mexican restaurants. At least in California, there's no air available. The only thing Chipotle has to leverage is scale enough to push into markets, but the competition is already there.

I'm sad to say I find it to already be that.

Every Saturday during college I would go to Chipotle. It was amazing--especially for the price. I've tried recently in the past, but ever since the e-coli issues, the food has greatly gone down in quality.

>Turn Chipotle into an upscale version of Taco Bell

Taco Bell tried this in the 90s near where I lived at the time (it was called Border Bell) and it never really caught on and closed not too long after it opened.

I wouldn't expect the brand that is most associated with "cheap, filling, and usually not terrible" to be able to pull off a higher price transformation. When you build a brand that strongly based on being cheap, you have to own it...there's just no way to take Taco Bell up-scale (McDonald's is finding this out, too). I'm surprised anybody savvy enough to be in a leadership role at Taco Bell would make that kind of mistake. I don't know much about branding or managing a food business, but I know that can't work (and, I can't think of a single successful example of it).

Chipotle has the brand that is already pretty strong there in that tier of the market just above fast food and below sit-down casual dining.

Taco Bell has managed to break out of this though. Anecdotally, I spend more at Taco Bell per check now than I did 5 years ago. They have so many more small options now, fancier menu items, $1–2 desserts, etc.

They’re coming back now. Some of the remodels look really nice too.

http://www.businessinsider.com/taco-bell-cantina-restaurants...

Don't forget the cross promotion with popular video game franchises and soda brands.

Step 4.5: Add Doritos

You’re getting destroyed, but it seems accurate to me. Taco Bell famously repackages the same low quality, low cost ingredients in myriad forms, with intense marketing. Chipotle does something similar, but with higher cost and quality ingredients. Still, the list of what you can work with in a Chipotle is short, very short, and your basic point seems to hold.

>> Taco Bell famously repackages

>> list of what you can work with in a Chipotle is short, very short

That's not specific to Taco Bell or Chipotle. That's called Mexican food.

> That's not specific to Taco Bell or Chipotle. That's called Mexican food

This is my neighbourhood's high-end Mexican restaurant's dinner menu [1]. Good rule of thumb: if you think of the food of any G20 country [2] as being cheap or simple, you're probably wrong.

[1] http://www.cosmenyc.com/menu/menu.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G20

It really isn’t.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_cuisine

Reminds me of an old friend. We invited him and his wife out for a nice Italian dinner, and he said "Sorry, I just don't like Italian food. It's nothing but cheese and red sauce!"

someone didn't drink their koolaid this morning....

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