Dear Chipotle Mexican Grill,
I love your food, and by that, I mean I LOVE your food. To illustrate the severity of that fact, I ate chipotle every day for an entire year. Two orders of three hard shell tacos, and before that when you gave four tacos in a hard-shell order. I had every story memorized when you gave personal stories on your cups about your philosophies, customers or partner companies. Even today I attend Chipotle twice a week.
That being said you have problems. In 2015 during your first food outbreak, your stock price substantially dropped. At that time, I began considering buying. However, before I did, you had a second food safety outbreak. The problem was not the second food safety outbreak though. The problem rather was you did not learn your lesson and the same thing happened again. This is when it became clear you have a problem in upper management.
To counter the food safety outbreak, you should have focused on your supply chains with more stringent food safety standards, management then should place regulatory systems in those chains to guarantee standards are being met. Additionally, systems to guarantee food safety be implemented at the retail level was necessary. Company-wide educational retraining for every employee is not beyond the scope of problem mitigation here. Your PR teams were not ahead of this either which was a mistake. Your PR teams needed to engage the issue, ignoring it only to let it happen again is such a grievous offense that it is almost unforgivable.
Next on the list of your sins is rolling out the Chorizo only to abandon the protein months later. Your sourcing chain is local, you pride yourself on high-quality ingredients, finding and building these connections is expensive. Not to mention the costs of the product. However, you rolled it out nationally without having tested the product locally. Creating ‘local laboratories’ allows you to bring food to test markets to determine their viability before rolling the product out nationwide for substantial losses. Going with local retail strategies with specific food items compliments perfectly with your local sourcing strategies, embrace it to build profitability or at least minimize poor decisions.
Finally, let’s talk about your latest offense. You Queso is horrible, people do not like it. Your sales are dismal driven largely by the fact that people do not appreciate the flavor. Rather than react to customer demand you have attempted to justify the taste based on the fact that it is natural making consumers feel as though they must weigh natural food against great tasting food when this does not have to be the case. Rather than following what has been successful for other Tex-Mex chains, feel free to be yourselves, get rid of the queso and stick with guac. We appreciate it better.
But more importantly, fire your teams that came up with the Idea queso pricing. Queso does not compliment guacamole, they are mutually exclusive flavor profiles, and both a la carte items which would be fine, except you priced your queso under the price of your guacamole. The effect means you do not raise your store sales, likely you reduce your store sales since your queso largely canalizes your guacamole sales.
In conclusion, get your shit together. You are a major player in the fast-casual industry, act like it and stop making rookie mistakes. You cannot afford it, and your heavy consumers will not keep giving you second chances.