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.
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.” 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.
