Chipotle to Briefly Close All Restaurants for Safety Meeting

The meeting will discuss food-safety changes, allow employees to ask questions and thank them for their “hard work during this difficult time”, Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said in an email.

Chipotle subsequently closed 43 restaurants in the two states after health officials discovered most of the people sickened by the E. coli outbreak had eaten at the chain’s restaurants.

The WSJ also reported that executives said no customers have reported sickness since last November and that Chipotle founder and co-Chief Executive Steve Ells said he’s confident the chain will win back its customers.

The popular Mexican fast food restaurant has stated that a companywide meeting has been set for February 8. In August, about 100 people were sickened by norovirus after consuming food at an outlet in Simi Valley, California, and over 60 fell ill in Minnesota in September.

Since the outbreaks, Chipotle has hired a food safety expert, changed its food handling practices and now test produce before shipping it to stores. The meeting is to mark a new start for the company’s new food safety program created to prevent the problems that plagued the company past year.

The company announced Wednesday it will launch a marketing campaign in February to kick off its road to recovery after the food scares, Fox News reported.

Nevertheless, Chipotle has not seen the last of the barrage of lawsuits against the company.

Executives eager to declare an end to the slide in stock prices met with officials from the Centers for Disease Control, who have been looking into the outbreaks.

For the fourth quarter, Chipotle Mexican Grill recorded 14.6 percent decline in comparable restaurant sales, reflecting the bacterial outbreak.

Ells and others admitted the company’s earnings this year will be “messy”. Roughly 140 students at Boston college were infected with norovirus and a second new incidence of E. coli broke out affecting five people in three states.