Chipotle’s is making further efforts to move on from its recent embarrassing and potentially ruinous experiences with food poisoning incidents. The chain’s CFO told MSNBC this week that – in spite of a series of false starts on revamping its food safety policies – the resto is, “back on its front foot”…
A typical Chipotle’s Burrito assembly line. One comment: The guy in the foreground
(the manager, jumping in to help out in a rush?) really should be wearing
gloves, like the other employees who are touching food…
Chipotle’s Chief Financial Officer Jack Hartung told MSNBC that it’s all been ‘onward and upward’ since former Taco Bell CEO Brian Niccol came in to helm the chain a few months ago.
“We got knocked on our heels a little bit, so we stopped talking about the things that made Chipotle special,” Hartung admitted. “The great thing now, […] since Brian joined and we brought a new team together, is we’re back on our front foot. We’re talking about our food.”
Niccol was particularly positive about Chipotle’s new commitment to food safety: “What we definitely are committed to doing is real ingredients, truly fresh, and that does require different food safety standards to be in place.”
Using fresh ingredients – what Hartung calls, “real food, real ingredients, real cooking” – requires what Niccol admits are higher food safety standards than are necessary in other Fast Food joints that prepare much of their food from frozen.
“These wellness checks that we do and other protocols that we execute – you’re not going to find that in a lot of other restaurants because we are handling fresh food and we’re truly cooking every day in our restaurants,” Niccol pointed out. “So it just demands that we have a higher level of commitment to food safety and we’ll always have to be passionate about being a leader in that space.”
Food safety head to step down…
Meanwhile, Chipoptle’s head of food safety, former Kansas State University Professor James Marsden, has announced he will step down sometime next year. Management is calling it ‘retirement’. I think it’s more a case of, “Tonto, our work here is done!”, as the Lone Ranger used to say at the end of every episode.
SInce the change of CEO and the specific attentions Marsden gave to improving food handling and safety procedures, Chipotle’s has begun to regain some of the stock price losses it suffered during the food poisoning crisis and fans have started to come back to the Burrito slinger in cautious numbers.
We’ll keep an eye on Chipotle’s and provide an update on their situation in another month or so…
~ Maggie J.