Chipotle Will Briefly Close All Its Restaurants Next Month

Every Chipotle in the country will close next month… temporarily.

The company announced Wednesday it will launch a marketing campaign in February to kick off its road to recovery after the food scares. The chain faced a salmonella outbreak linked to tomatoes that sickened dozens of people in Minnesota beginning in August.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 53 people in nine states reported they came down with E. Coli after eating Chipotle cuisine.

Has anyone alerted Cyn Santana about this crisis?

Chipotle has been served with a federal subpoena as part of a criminal investigation tied to the California norovirus outbreak.

After the jarring food health concerns, Chipotle sales dipped 30 percent and its stock price nose dived nearly 40 percent.

Chipotle’s stock has plunged in the meantime, and many customers are taking their business elsewhere.

“I’m confident we’ll recover from this and win back our customers”, Ells said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We know that Chipotle is as safe as it’s ever been before”, he said at a conference in Orlando, Fla.

It will be hard for Chipotle to weather the damage that these cases have done to its brand, especially as a company whose entire reputation has been pinned on serving “food with integrity”. This type of service set Chipotle apart from other fast food Mexican restaurants and gave customers the feeling of having fresh ingredients in their meals. The news put the Mexican Food chain in the national spotlight, and a Reuters poll in December found that 25 percent of Americans who heard news of the E. coli outbreak are eating at Chipotle less frequently.

Authorities have yet to find the source of the outbreak, however, the company has been working with a food-safety consulting firm to help resolve the issues, Bloomberg reports. A second incident of E. coli broke out the same month, affecting five people in three states.