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Chipotle Meeting Outlines Food Safety to Workers and Message for Public

At lunchtime, people peered into a Chipotle in the Georgetown area of Washington, one of more than 2,000 stores that closed for four hours on Monday.Credit...Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Chipotle Mexican Grill closed its more than 2,000 restaurants for four hours on Monday to hold a “virtual” town hall meeting with its employees about steps it said it was taking to improve food safety and regain consumers’ trust.

“People will come back,” Steve Ells, the company’s founder and co-chief executive, told more than 50,000 employees, who were connected to Chipotle’s Denver headquarters via video.

Emphasizing his faith in that statement, he said the company had no intention of slowing its growth this year.

The company allowed a wire-service reporter and a reporter from Fast Company into the hourlong meeting, and it tweeted some statements made by its executives and photos of them and employees.

It also posted a video clip on Periscope of Mr. Ells announcing a $10 million program to help small farmers who are Chipotle suppliers shoulder the costs of putting in place the company’s new food safety system, which will require them to do more rigorous testing.

“That means even the ingredients they sell to other companies will be safe — and that’s good for everybody, not just Chipotle,” Mr. Ells said.

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Credit...Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Marketing experts applauded the company for its transparency about the meeting, but said the company would need to do a lot more to win back the trust of consumers. Chipotle has experienced six food safety failures involving norovirus, salmonella and E. coli since July, with more than 500 customers reporting that they fell ill afterward. Most of those illnesses were associated with two outbreaks of norovirus.

“Whether that’s sufficient to persuade consumers to come back in a significant way is questionable,” said Allen Adamson, founder of BrandSimple, a marketing consultancy. “It’s going to take significant meaningful action that goes beyond telling employees to be more careful and, unfortunately, some time before consumers start to believe it.”

Mr. Adamson said the best example of a company regaining consumer trust was of Tylenol in 1982 after seven people died after taking medicine that had been tampered with. Johnson & Johnson, the maker of the painkiller, moved quickly to recall the product and establish ties with the police, the Food and Drug Administration and other authorities so that the company would have accurate information on the investigations.

Tylenol’s market share crashed, but Johnson & Johnson introduced new tamper-proof packaging and heavily promoted the brand. Today, Tylenol is a best-selling over-the-counter analgesic. “Johnson & Johnson bent over backwards and made meaningful changes to the way the product was sold,” Mr. Adamson said. “To rebuild trust, actions speak louder than words.”

Consumers are clearly still concerned about eating at Chipotle. Stores in places like Seattle, New York City and Boston have been far less busy since the outbreaks became big news, driving Chipotle’s sales in stores open at least a year down by 14.6 percent in the last quarter of last year.

Patrick Quade, the founder of Iwaspoisoned.com, a website that allows people to report when they get sick after eating something, said he had detected a potential problem in Chipotle’s Simi Valley, Calif., store long before news of the norovirus issue was reported because an unusually high number of people had been reporting illnesses after eating there. Now, some 35 state, county and city health departments have signed up for services from the site, which are free.

When asked about the illnesses on Iwaspoisoned.com, a Chipotle spokesman, Chris Arnold, said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “estimates that roughly one in six Americans get some form of food-borne illness every year.” “Absent a medical diagnosis and epidemiological analysis,” he added, “it’s very difficult to actually determine what caused someone to become ill.”

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Credit...Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Chipotle has a loyal customer base, and many company tweets during the town hall meeting were in response to consumers who had asked when the stores would reopen on Monday.

But consumers were also tweeting about food illnesses. For instance, someone tweeting from Washington, D.C., as @Obi Bron Ginobi wrote: “you guys gave me food poisoning back in November. Can’t believe it’s taking this long to try and rectify the problem.”

Chipotle responded to the messages with apologies and requests for more information.

Chipotle gave more insight into what it believes caused some of its woes. The norovirus contaminations that caused the greatest number of illnesses occurred in two stores, one in Simi Valley, Calif., and one in Boston, and were introduced to the restaurants by sick employees, said Monty Moran, the company’s co-chief executive.

Since the outbreaks, the company has instituted paid sick leave for employees in an effort to encourage them to stay home and has told employees they should report their colleagues who come to work when they are sick.

Mr. Moran said that a salmonella outbreak in Minnesota and Wisconsin that sickened more than 60 people was linked to chopped tomatoes. The company now washes, dices and tests tomatoes in its central kitchens and then ships them in sealed bags to restaurants, Mr. Moran said.

As for the most serious contamination, two different types of E. coli that sickened 60 people after they ate in Chipotle restaurants in 14 states, Mr. Moran said neither Chipotle nor the C.D.C. had been able to determine the exact cause. The C.D.C. closed its investigation last week.

Chipotle has started its most expensive marketing and promotion campaign ever and plans to spend some $50 million to try to lure existing customers back into its restaurants and communicate the steps it has taken to improve its food safety practices. Signs in store windows on Monday, for instance, invited customers to text the company for a free burrito.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Chipotle Outlines Food Safety to Workers and Message for Public. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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