Chipotle CEO ‘deeply sorry’ about customers who fell sick, vows safety standards

The exterior of Chipotle Mexican Grill seen at 1924 Beacon St. on December 8, 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Boston Public Health Commission said lab testing has confirmed the presence of the gastrointestinal illness, which causes nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, at the Chipotle restaurant in the city’s Cleveland Circle neighborhood, near the Boston College campus.

News such as the E. coli and norovirus outbreaks can have a lingering effect on a restaurant.

Asked whether the company could recover financially, Ells said “certainly”.

The fact that Chipotle has a larger Instagram following than chains like Panera, Wendy’s and Subway could backfire as even the loyal fans share their concerns.

In Brookline this year, inspection of the Chipotle on Commonwealth Avenue found a serious violation – failure to have a manager certified in food safety – which was not resolved until recently, said Alan Balsam, town director of public health and human services.

“But it looks like Chipotle is having more problems than other companies put together”, he said.

“We seem as a culture to like when people prepare food in front of us”. In the wake of the outbreaks, though, the sheer visibility of the food-preparation process could make it hard for customers not to wonder about what the person building their burrito might be transmitting.

On top of these challenges, history suggests that the impact of these kinds of crises is not short-lived.

Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania now join California, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington in reporting cases linked to the outbreak. Although there is no vaccine or medication a person can take to protect him- or herself from contracting E coli-based illness, there are a number of ways to reduce infection risk. In the meantime, Chipotle will be taking the brunt of the blame for this new outbreak.

“We’ve had teams looking at this”, he said, and “tested all the ingredients, surfaces, thousands and thousands of tests, and they all came back negative”. It revamped its food-preparation system, as well. And sales did not begin to rise again until late 1995.

Here’s a sampling of social media posts about Chipotle this week. There are now myriad good fast-casual alternatives in much of the country. The ingredient was likely gone long before customers started showing symptoms, and that makes it hard for the company to convey a message that whatever was wrong has been fixed.

In a statement issued Friday, Chipotle said they have “taken aggressive actions to implement industry-leading food safety and food handling practices in all of its restaurants and throughout its supply chain”.

“It’s unfortunate, because Chipotle has been trying to do the right thing in terms of getting antibiotics out of their food, getting [genetically modified organisms] out of their food – and so it just shows how complicated things can get when you’re trying to do the right thing”, she said.