Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. is facing another class-action lawsuit by a disgruntled shareholder over its alleged inability to keep its restaurants clean, a new hurdle for a company still trying to regain consumer and investor confidence after a food scare two years ago. The latest complaint follows Tuesday’s revelation (July 18) that one of the burrito chain’s Virginia stores had temporarily closed because of a suspected norovirus outbreak, and Wednesday’s news media reports about Texas customers complaining of rodents dropping from the ceiling.
In March, Chipotle won dismissal of a similar lawsuit brought by investors over stock price drops after several food-borne illness outbreaks in 2015 were traced to its restaurants. A judge concluded that the case was “long on text but it is short on adequately-pleaded claims.” Those plaintiffs are now trying to revive the case in Manhattan federal court.
In the case filed Thursday, shareholder Elizabeth Kelley said the Colorado-based company made misleading statements to bolster confidence that it had resolved the health and safety troubles from 2015, when it was forced to close all of its U.S. stores after hundreds of consumers got sick. Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
I can’t make this shit up: here’s a company with billions invested in it, and Chipotle decides to reach out to the Wu-Tang Clan.
A company that sucks bonding with a band that sucks and hoping that two negatives make a positive?
In April, 2017, Chipotle tapped hey-now Hank Kinsley and some other actors for some spots about how real Chipotle’s food was.
Guess that hasn’t gone so well.
Now, the aptly-named Mark Crumpacker, Chipotle’s chief marketing officer and convicted cokehead, told Bloomberg that Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., has enlisted rapper RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan to unveil a new website that spotlights Chipotle’s ingredients. The company’s so-called clean menu — free of artificial preservatives and other additives — was a major selling point before a 2015 food-safety crisis sickened hundreds of customers and sent its shares plummeting.
Yup, real hardcore reaching out to the Wu-Tang Clan.
RZA, whose real name is Robert Diggs, helped design Chipotle’s new Savor.Wavs site. The rapper created 51 snippets of music, one for each ingredient on the menu, that lets people hear a audio interpretation of their typical Chipotle order. The new site doesn’t let customers order food, but it’s meant to drive home the simplicity of the chain’s menu.
“That might be lost on some, but people who are into the music will appreciate it,” said Crumpacker.
Crumpacker touted Chipotle’s simple menu at a party in Manhattan on Tuesday that featured a performance by RZA. He noted that fast-food hamburgers can have as many as 47 ingredients.
While the company declined to say how much it spent on the RZA campaign, Chipotle indicated it was less than the $5 million that a Super Bowl ad would have cost.
Chipotle’s stock, which hit a closing high of $757.77 in August 2015, has been battered by the food-safety concerns. The shares had been up for the year until Tuesday, when reports surfaced that customers had been sickened after eating a restaurant in Virginia. That location, which was closed on Monday, was slated to be reopened on Wednesday.
The stock is now trading around $368, about half its peak.
I played hockey today, had an early evening nap – my partner is a saint – and then stayed up late so I could be on news radio in San Francisco at 6:20 a.m. their time — KCBS All News 740 and FM 106.9 — trashing Chipotle.
I said I wrote a book 20 years ago – Mad Cows and Mother’s Milk – that concluded no risk messages were really risky.
Yet here’s Chipotle, with their chief-science thingy, saying “Norovirus does not come from our food supply.”
As Chapman noted yesterday, there is on average one outbreak of food-related norovirus every day for all 365 days of the year in the U.S.
And rather than provide supporting statements for their claim, Chipotle took to Twitter to proclaim such insights as, “Why be full of potential when you could be full of burritos?” and “Summertime sadness is when you forget your guac.”
Al Gore had only just invented the Internet for everyone else when Mad Cows and Mother’s Milk was written.
Today, consumers demand data-based assurances, not platitudes.
I miss Phil Hartman (also born in Brantford, Ontario, Canada).
This scene from News Radio reminds me of when Chapman visited Kansas and shit for a couple of days because he had Campylobacter.
According to multiple outlets, a Sterling VA, Chipotle restaurant has closed due to what looks like a foodborne illness outbreak. Folks are speculating that it might be norovirus. And by folks, I mean Chipotle.
After voluntarily closing a restaurant in Sterling, Virginia, after multiple customers reported falling ill, Chipotle said it plans to reopen the burrito spot on Tuesday.
Eight customers who ate at the location between July 14 and 15 filed reports on the food safety crowdsourcing website iwaspoisoned.com, indicating they suffered symptoms like diarrhea, nausea and vomiting.
According to the reports, at least two customers have been hospitalized.
“Norovirus does not come from our food supply, and it is safe to eat at Chipotle,” Jim Marsden, Chipotle’s executive director of food safety, said in an emailed statement. “We plan to reopen the restaurant today.”
“We take every report of illness seriously,” Marsden added. “In accordance with our established protocols, our team is working to ensure the safety of our customers and employees, including voluntarily closing the restaurant yesterday to conduct a complete sanitization.”
Uh, Jim, noro can come from the food supply. Yours and others’. It has even been linked to lettuce distribution. It certainly sounds like this is localized (like most noro is), but seems a bit early for certainty statements like this. Oh, and noro can definitely be foodborne. Sure, there’s likely a lot of person-to-person transmission out there but a couple of years ago my man Aron Hal of CDCl (and colleagues) looked at foodborne noro outbreaks in the U.S. They state that on average, 365 foodborne norovirus outbreaks were reported annually, resulting in an estimated 10,324 illnesses, 1,247 health care provider visits, 156 hospitalizations, and 1 death.
Here are some of the reports from iwaspoisoned.com related to the Sterling restaurant. All the reports were made from Sunday to Monday:
• Friday 7/14: Daughter and friends went to Chipotle Saturday 7/15: stomach pains and nausea started in morning Saturday 7/15: violently sick, puking, diarrhea, severe pain, overnight into Sunday. Friends ill as well with one friend also in ER. Sunday 7/16: Hospital visit for dehydration, nausea, pain Monday 7/17: severe pain, trauma pain This is the worst that I have ever seen. Severe food borne illnesses can cause long-term damage to the gastro-intestinal track. This was BAD!
• I ate a chicken bowl at 6ish and the rest at 11 pm Friday and then woke up Sunday morning with diarrhea and was nauseous
• Wife and I ate chicken bowls Friday night. Puking brains out Saturday night and Sunday.
• Ate salad bowl on Friday at 1230pm, became ill at 3pm on Saturday. Three up multiple times, had fever, dizziness, etc. Salad bowl with chicken, Pico, beans, medium salsa, corn
• My husband and I both had chicken around 7:00 on Friday, July 14th. Over 24 hours later, we both started vomiting. We are still experiencing symptoms as of Monday morning. Chicken bowl – around 6 pm on 7.15.2017
• My husband and I shared a burrito bowl last night for dinner around 6:30 PM. It had rice, chicken, corn, pico, sour cream, cheese, medium salsa. At around midnight my husband woke up vomiting violently. Less than an hour later I began vomiting as well. We have since continued vomiting in addition to having diarrhea, stomach pains, dizziness upon standing, and low grade fevers. Chipotle was the only thing we both ate yesterday.
• My Son and I both had burrito bowls and became violently ill within hours of each other. He was visiting from college. Chipotle was the only food item we both ate that day. Violent stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting. Violently ill. Same exact symptoms Burrito bowl. Steak, rice, green peppers and onions, guacamole, cheese. Violently ill.
Full disclosure, I’ve been collaborating with the iwaspoisoned.com guy, Patrick Quade over the past couple of years through NoroCORE.
The 200th anniversary of Soren Kierkegaard’s birth has brought some stereotypical outpourings about angst and existentialism.
Me, it’s better to play hockey.
I have a soft spot for the Danes. Spending five summers hammering nails with a couple of Danish homebuilders in Ontario (that’s in Canada) taught me the value of being well-read and beer at morning coffee, lunch, and afternoon coffee. My friend John Kierkegaard would say, the beer is nice, but the work, it isn’t really so good.
When I went to Copenhagen in 1998 for a scientific meeting, there was beer at morning coffee.
Gordon Marino wrote in The New York Times that the way we negotiate anxiety plays no small part in shaping our lives and character. And yet, historically speaking, the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have all but repressed thinking about that amorphous feeling that haunts many of us hour by hour, and day by day. The 19th-century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard stands as a striking exception to this rule. It was because of this virtuoso of the inner life that other members of the Socrates guild, such as Heidegger and Sartre, could begin to philosophize about angst.
The adytum of Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety is located in his work “The Concept of Anxiety” — a book at once so profound and byzantine that it seems to aim at evoking the very feeling it dissects.
Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Kierkegaard reflected on the question of how to communicate the truths that we live by — that is the truths about ethics and religion.
“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there.”
Kierkegaard understood that anxiety can ignite all kinds of transgressions and maladaptive behaviors — drinking, carousing, obsessions with work, you name it. We will do most anything to steady ourselves from the dizzying feeling that can take almost anything as its object. However, Kierkegaard also believed that, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
In his “Works of Love,” Kierkegaard remarks that all talk about the spirit has to be metaphorical. Sometimes anxiety is cast as a teacher, and at others, a form of surgery. The prescription in “The Concept of Anxiety” and other texts is that if we can, as the Buddhists say, “stay with the feeling” of anxiety, it will spirit away our finite concerns and educate us as to who we really are, “Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them.” According to Kierkegaard’s analysis, anxiety like nothing else brings home the lesson that I cannot look to others, to the crowd, when I want to measure my progress in becoming a full human being.
But this, of course, is not the counsel you are likely to hear these days at the mental health clinic.
I can attest to that.
So when Tyson launches a no antibiotics ever campaign, it is appealing to crass consumerism, making a buck, and throwing science back to when Kierkegaard was born.
We want our social media and technology, but we want our food produced in some 200-year-old barn.
Tyson President and CEO Tom Hayes said earlier this year that the company would continue to innovate in product development while remaining focused on sustainable production practices. “For us, sustainability isn’t a single issue; it’s about focusing on multiple dimensions in order to advance the whole,” Hayes said during the 2017 Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. “We will use our reach, capabilities and resources to drive positive change at a scale we believe no other company can match.”
Amy and I went to a Phoenix Coyotes hockey game when Wayne was coach, maybe 2006, and this loudmouth behind us was bragging about some cougar he hooked up with in Boca.
That’s your benchmark, Tyson.
I have vague memories of another company, back in 2006, that turned its back on science and proclaimed no antibiotics.
They forgot about food safety, too busy being posers.
How’s that working out, Chipotle?
The language of this presser is full swallow-whole.
The company’s sustainability plans include establishing strategic partnerships to set science-based sustainability goals; continuing third-party audits of farms to certify humane treatment of chickens; improving how chickens are raised through a concept farm, with innovations designed to be better for the birds, the environment and food safety; and increasing transparency across the business, including sustainability efforts.
I’ve know people who can write this stuff.
Not me.
Not Kierkegaard
I’ve got no genius for evil, that makes me common.
The name “Kierkegaard” means “graveyard,” and “Søren” is an affectionate Danish moniker for the Devil.
Sorenne, you know you have some devil in you, and some science.
Yup, food poisoning is always worth a chuckle. Nothing like a public health folk out there laughing at all the people barfing and undergoing organ transplants, if they’re not already dead.
But Chipotle, in its fourth makeover since hundreds got sick dating back to Nov. 2015, has decided that Jeffrey Tambor is best to persuade the gullible public that, once again, Chipotle’s food is made with integrity?
According to Austin Carr of Fast Company, it’s Chipotle’s biggest ad campaign yet. And depending on how you count, it’s also its third or fourth major brand rehabilitation experiment in the year and a half since its food-safety incidents first emerged. That speaks to the sizable challenges Chipotle is still facing as it seeks to recover its once-roaring restaurant sales—all while moving the conversation around its brand away from food safety.
But the conversation should all be about food safety.
Chipotle can’t make food safety the central point of its marketing, but it also knows that any initiative to tout its improvements or resell its brand will be viewed through the lens of its food-safety woes. “It’s a big marketing challenge,” Chipotle’s chief development officer, Mark Crumpacker, told me late last summer. “When you’re excited to go out to lunch, you’re not like, ‘Let’s go to the safest place!’”
The new web and TV spots, rolled out Monday, feature comedians Jillian Bell, John Mulaney, and Sam Richardson, who are shown in separate ads entering a house-size burrito where Tambor’s voice instructs them to “be real” because, well, “everything is real” inside a Chipotle burrito. The comedians proceed to make comical confessions, and the ads each end with a new Chipotle motto, “As Real As It Gets,” an apparent reference to the company’s recent strides in removing artificial flavors and preservatives from its ingredients.
Chipotle, instead, has initiated a significant number of changes to its food-safety program, but it has been more strategic about informing customers about them. “Our food safety is not something that I expect to drive lots of people into the restaurant, but I do think it might erase some people’s doubts and allow future marketing to be met with less objection,” Crumpacker said at the time.
Is Chipotle at the point yet where new efforts will be greeted with less cynicism? It’ll likely take another quarter before we’ll see if the campaign has an impact on sales. For now, Chipotle will have to depend on Jeffrey Tambor and company to convince shareholders that there’s always money in the burrito stand.
l“We have always used high quality ingredients and prepared them using classic cooking techniques,” Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder and CEO, said in a statement.
“We never resorted to using added colors or flavors like many other fast food companies do simply because these industrial additives often interfere with the taste of the food. However, commercially available tortillas, whether they are for us or someone else, use dough conditioners and preservatives.”
Chipotle now says it uses only local and organically grown produce as well as meats from animals raised without hormones or non-therapeutic antibiotics. None of the 51 ingredients in the restaurant’s foods have been genetically modified but the company still sells soft drinks that contain GMO-containing ingredients.
The company has even released a visual ingredient statement – allowing customers to see exactly what’s being used to create their Chipotle dishes.
Good luck with that.
Like many other food safety types, I will continue to avoid. Chipotle’s emphasis on marketing bullshit – 21st century snake-oil — rather than safety shows how much they have jumped the shark.
If Chipotle thinks corn, or any of their other ingredients, isn’t genetically modified, then they’re drinking their own jello.
It’s the super happy holiday version of Food Safety Talk. Don and Ben chat about Christmas movies, gambling as children and other holiday traditions. Making appearances in the guys’ discussion are Twitter and posting great questions of regulators about poor recall notices; cooling and holding cous cous and regulatory interpretations of time as a public health control; norovirus outbreaks at schools; and, Chipotle’s food safety culture.
A shake-up is happening at the at the top of our ever-favorite, Chipotle. Co-chief executive Montgomery Moran is out while the other co-chief Steve Ells, the perfectionist and touch-for-doneness guru remains.
According to the New York Times, the change is food safety-driven.
The food safety crises that have battered the once high-flying Chipotle Mexican Grill over the last year are now taking a toll on its executive suite.
Montgomery F. Moran, a co-chief executive who has long presided over the company’s operations, will step down early next year, the company announced Monday morning. It also said it would be changing the board.
“We all agreed that one C.E.O. will serve the company better,” Steve Ells, Chipotle’s founder and other co-chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “The board decided that one C.E.O. would be me, and I’m looking forward to a continued friendship with Monty.” The company declined to make Mr. Moran available for comment.
Shares have fallen more than 30 percent in the last year. Late Monday morning, after the executive change was announced, shares were up about 3 percent, to about $380 a share.
Chipotle is also dealing with an activist investor in William A. Ackman, whose Pershing Square Capital Management disclosed in September that it owned a 9.9 percent stake in Chipotle. Chipotle and Pershing Square have described their interactions as “cordial” and productive. Pershing Square declined to comment on Monday.
Mr. Ells said Mr. Moran’s departure was not at Pershing Square’s behest. But other investors have been clamoring for change.
Last week, Chipotle executives said that in part because of an extensive new food safety program the company had instituted over the last year, the amount of time it took customers to get through the assembly line as their meal was made had increased. Spot checks by executives and the company’s auditing team found used napkins left on tables, smudged windows and doors, and messy condiment stations. Some customers using the Chipotle app to order were told their meal would not be ready for 45 minutes to an hour.
Such issues largely fell under Mr. Moran’s supervision, but will now fall to Mr. Ells, a self-described perfectionist who founded the company in 1993 with a loan from his father.
