Why does Chipotle think it’s reinventing the future?
CEO Steve Ells said Tuesday during a visit to Seattle Chipotle will not raise prices to cover the cost of new food safety procedures put in place after an E. coli outbreak sickened more than 50 people.
“This is a cost that we will bear,” Ells told The Associated Press at the beginning of a day stopping by Seattle restaurants to talk to employees about new food safety rules.
Suppliers who are unwilling to meet the new “high resolution testing” requirements, which Ells said are years ahead of testing procedures at other restaurant chains, will no longer do business with Chipotle.
Um, McDonald’s has been imposing such food safety metrics on its suppliers since the mid-1980s.
Ells said the company’s approach to food safety is similar to its focus on food quality and none of the new procedures are impossible or very difficult to follow. It’s easier at some other chains to meet the highest food safety standards because everything is cooked, processed or frozen, which Ells said is not the Chipotle way.
Ells doesn’t understand food safety.
Chipotle is now focused on getting the chance of foodborne illness as close to zero percent as possible, Ells said. But, he added, “it is impossible to insure that there is a zero percent chance of any kind of foodborne illness anytime anyone eats anywhere.”
Um, I wrote a book in 1996 that said zero-risk was a food safety fallacy, echoing the work of many before me.
It would be better to say, this is how we’re reducing the risk, Mr.-5-outbreaks-in-6-months Ells, explain it, and then when ready, market it.
Henry I. Miller wrote in Forbes yesterday — The long defeat of doing nothing well — inspired by a line from poet John Masefield, seems apt: Chipotle, the once-popular Mexican restaurant chain, is experiencing a well-deserved downward spiral.
The company found it could pass off a fast-food menu stacked with high-calorie, sodium-rich options as higher quality and more nutritious because the meals were made with locally grown, genetic engineering-free ingredients. And to set the tone for the kind of New Age-y image the company wanted, Chipotle adopted slogans like, “We source from farms rather than factories” and, “With every burrito we roll or bowl we fill, we’re working to cultivate a better world.”
Outbreaks of food poisoning have become something of a Chipotle trademark; the recent ones are the fourth and fifth this year, one of which was not disclosed to the public. A particularly worrisome aspect of the company’s serial deficiencies is that there have been at least three unrelated pathogens in the outbreaks–Salmonella and E. coli bacteria and norovirus. In other words, there has been more than a single glitch; suppliers and employees have found a variety of ways to contaminate what Chipotle cavalierly sells (at premium prices) to its customers.