Chipotle’s Tex-Mex restaurant chain has struggled for a decade under the negative PR burden of repeated food poisoning outbreaks – especially at its eastern U.S. outlets. More than 1,000 have become sick. Now, folks are asking why the company can’t seem to cure its food-borne illness blues…
A typical Chipotle’s order assembly line…
The latest Chipotle’s food poisoning outbreak surfaced just this past week, when it was revealed that more than 700 people had become ill after eating at a Powell, Ohio, outlet since July 26. That’s the worst outbreak, yet, easily topping the previous worst incident, in 2008 near Kent State University, also in Ohio, where more than 400 diners became ill.
The most recent outbreak remains under investigation and the pathogen involved has not yet been isolated, but common suspects such as norovirus, Shigella, Salmonella and E. coli have been ruled out. Symptoms included diarrhea, vomiting, and nausea.
What has Chipotle’s been doing all this time?
Not only did the chain get new food handling and kitchen safety protocols back in 2016, it got a new CEO with a bold new vision for the chain earlier this year.
The new leadership immediately instituted changes to the resto’s menu and has been blasting out new ideas in test-marketing programs every few months since. The idea was to lean-down Chioptle’s menu and operating costs to help bring the stumbling chain back to its feet. The P.R. bumpf was, the chain was returning to it’s Tex-Mex burger-bar roots, bringing it’s brand image back into sharp focus.
The new food-handling rules and procedures were intended to make food safety in Chipotle’s preparation and service operations as close to perfect as possible. But this latest mega-outbreak seems to indicate that the effort was all for naught.
What they did in response to the latest outbreak…
The Chipotle’s in question was closed as soon as the reports of illness started to come in. Per the new food safety protocols, all the food in the place was dumped, except for samples that were saved for lab testing to try to identify the cause. Then, the whole place was deep-cleaned before new food supplies were brought in. As a food service pro, I can tell you, there’s very little more the operator of the affected location could have done to ensure that the problem had been licked.
The resto re-opened a few days after it closed for remediation and no further incidents of food-borne illness have been reported.
My take…
Chipotle’s food poisoning incidents have not been confined to Powell or to Ohio. They’ve popped up all over the place. If outlet operators and staff are following the new food safety protocols, it has to be something else that’s common to all Chipotle’s outlets, such as some aspect of its head-office-mandated infrastructure or equipment.
Failing that, I’d look next at the suppliers who provide the chain’s ingredients. Like the geographic coordination between the Texas-grown Lettuce that caused food poisoning outbreaks in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest recently, it should be fairly easy to trace all food products Chipotle’s uses back to their sources, and test there for contamination.
If the ingredients the chain uses come up clean, I’d be wondering if there isn’t some human agent at work, outside the normal safety protocols Chioptle’s has mandated. In the restaurant business, as with airplane crashes, when the cause at first appears mysterious, it often comes down to human error, in the end.
We’ll see.
~ Maggie J.