Chipotle to close all restaurants for company-wide meeting in February

The Colorado-based chain will close all of its stores in February for one day to hold a company wide meeting to review food safety, as well as other issues, the Oregonian reports.

Chipotle has 2,000 locations, six of them locally in the Town of Tonawanda, Amherst, Niagara Falls, Cheektowaga, Williamsville and Hamburg.

The company said in a regulatory filing that it was asked to produce a broad range of documents tied to a norovirus outbreak this summer at its restaurant in Simi Valley, Calif. Chipotle now faces lawsuits from customers and investors, not to mention a criminal investigation regarding the norovirus outbreak in California.

This video includes images from Getty Images. In December, about 200 were sickened by norovirus after eating at a Chipotle in Boston.

After a dismal 2015 marked by multiple food-borne outbreaks, the Chipotle restaurant chain has announced it plans to temporarily shutter all restaurants to discuss food safety changes with employees. A Chipotle spokesman said that there has not been a case of E. coli reported in the last two months.

The E.Coli outbreak began in Washington State and OR in October and several locations there had to be closed.

Chipotle founder and co-CEO Steve Ells, while at an investment conference in Orlando, Florida, said Chipotle plans to allow customers to see food preparation as they made orders just as it did in the past. That sense of freshly prepared ingredients has been one of Chipotle’s attractions as it has sought to distinguish itself from traditional fast-food chains. “We will always look for ways to have a more robust food safety practice”.

“Implementing all facets of our enhanced food safety program is our highest priority”, Chris Arnold, Chipotle’s communications director, told Mic in an emailed statement. The company has yet to confirm the cause of the outbreak.