Harvard picked an easy target, offering its management insight to Chipotle, but I’ve yet to see a paper about how the venerable Haaarvaaard Faculty Club managed to sicken patrons not once, but twice with Norovirus in 2010.

According to PR from Haaarvaaard, Chipotle has seen its shares tumble and recently reported its first-ever quarterly loss after the incident, which began in October when more than 50 people in 11 states were sickened by an initial E. coli outbreak.

The chain restaurant, which uses the tagline “Food with Integrity,” has prided itself on avoiding artificial ingredients, opting instead to use a relatively short supply chain of local growers for many of its ingredients.

That strategy just might have been part of its problem, says John A. Quelch, the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Professor in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Quelch, who teaches a course to Harvard business and public health students called Consumers, Corporations and Public Health, says food safety is more challenging than ever for three reasons:

• the globalization of the food business;
• global food safety standards are lacking; and,
• food safety problems can be quite costly.

Thanks for the insight. Back to hockey.