Chipotle won’t raise prices to cover costs for new food safety measures

Additionally, we are rolling out new sanitation procedures in our restaurants and implementing additional food safety training for all of our restaurant employees.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize on behalf of all of us at Chipotle, and to thank our loyal customers who have stood by us through this hard time”, Ells said in the advertisement, addressing specifically the recent norovirus outbreak in Boston.

A famous U.S. chain of restaurants, Chipotle, recently withdrew its 2016 comp guidance and offered a bleak Q4 earnings’ view due to E. coli outbreak.

Read the full Globe story here. From the beginning, all of our food safety programs have met or exceeded industry standards.

Escherichia coli (E. Coli) bacteria image from National Institutes of Health, which is part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

“You could bring fresh cilantro right out of the field into the restaurant and wash it there”.

In addition, the company said its restaurant teams are putting many fresh produce items in boiling water for 3 to 5 seconds to sanitize them before they are used in food preparation.

While Wall Street is watching the ticker, food safety scientists are watching to see how effective Chipotle’s new protocols will be.

“This is a cost that we will bear”, Ells told the AP.

At a meeting with business analysts last week, company executives said they would consider raising prices to invest in food safety, but they did not expect to do so before 2017. According to Chipotle, local suppliers might not be able to meet the company’s food safety requirements.

An E. coli outbreak linked to the Chipotle restaurant chain has already led to major changes in the company’s food production as it works to regain customers’ trust.

Chipotle’s YouGov “buzz score”, which measures whether survey respondents have heard something positive or negative about a brand, has dropped 48 points since reports of an E. coli outbreak first emerged.

Before rescinding its outlook Friday, the company had expected sales for 2016 to rise in the low-single digit percentages. In total, the once- high-flying, Denver-based fast-casual restaurant chain is off $157.42 per share, down 21.49 percent since shortly before announcing that it was closing 43 stores in OR and Washington state following an E. coli outbreak. It has not yet identified the ingredient that made people sick. The CDC had said in late November that additional cases could be reported for illnesses that started after October 31.