Coli Up, Chipotle’s Stock Price Down

Neither of the Pennsylvania people who became ill reported eating at Chipotle, the reports said, but both had the same strain of E. coli that investigators believe is linked to the restaurant chain. The company’s shares, which have lost a third of their value since mid-October, were down another 4% on Tuesday. These latest cases started between November 18 and November 26.

“The new news flow shows the impact continuing and more importantly a management team that seems to be scrambling for answers”, Ivankoe writes.

Chipotle has been under scrutiny since November, when health officials first linked it to an E. coli outbreak, the company’s third food safety incident since August.

As of Friday, there were 53 people infected with the Escherichia coli O26 (STEC O26) strain.

Federal health officials said Tuesday that an outbreak of deadly E. coli bacteria linked to Costco rotisserie chicken that sickened 19 people in seven states, mostly in the west, appears to be over.

Shares of the restaurant chain’s stock hit a 52-week low Monday after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced five new suspected E. coli cases infecting people in Kansas, North Dakota and Oklahoma, according to media reports. It is still unclear which food is responsible for the latest outbreak.

The Chipotle spokesperson said that “we have completed a comprehensive reassessment of our food safety programs with an eye to finding best practices for each of the ingredients we use”.

“While it is never possible to completely eliminate all risk, this program eliminates or mitigates risk to a level near zero, ” he said earlier this month.

Chipotle said it was implementing new measures to improve food safety.

“We have indicated before that we expected that we may see additional cases stemming from this, and CDC is now reporting some additional cases”, Arnold wrote. That was followed by a norovirus contagion at a Boston location that sickened more than 140 college students.

“None of the ingredients in our restaurants today were present at the time of these illnesses”, Chipotle said in a statement on Monday.

Chipotle’s sales are tanking in the midst of the illness scares. But the company warned earlier this month that it now expects sales to fall sharply in the fourth quarter because of the E. coli concerns.