Let’s start by saying some nice things about Chipotle. The ordering experience is a choose-your-own adventure and highly customizable. Chipotle has always had a secret sauce: the human element. Someone is right in front of you, making your food before your eyes, and it feels like such a deal. Unlike a sandwich shop like Subway, the crew at Chipotle always seemed to pay no mind to keeping their scoops of corn, salsa, and steak to regulation size. “They’ll add a bit more extra corn, right?” you'd think. And you were mostly right.
But with all that freedom of choice comes…quite a bit of drama.
The party at Chipotle is having its record-scratch moment. The prices have gone up, those formerly heavy-handed scoops of chicken have become smaller, and the quality has yet to rise above “mid.” So, we must ask ourselves, what happened to Chipotle?
The Internet Is Freaking Out Over The Portions
Chipotle is known to pack so much food inside a bowl or burrito that you could make two meals out of it. Because of that, it's set itself up for a raging debate over portion sizes. With the advent of wilder and wilder TikTok hacks (that mostly center around the highly customizable nature of Chipotle), one could say this is precisely why we can’t have nice things.
Once customers noticed their bowls dipped to even slightly less than two meals’ worth, the complaints began to roll in on TikTok. Even famous supporters of Chipotle, such as food critic Keith Lee, have bemoaned the dwindling portions.
Most distressingly, customers have been going so far as to film workers as they make their meals, essentially coercing Chipotle employees to comply or they’ll send the video to Chipotle HQ. Chipotle’s own CEO Brian Niccol has advised customers to essentially—and I’m not even joking here—give an employee a disappointed shrug-nod combo in order to get more rice. No surprise, the parodies of Niccol's video are hardly an exaggeration of how bizarre that clip is.
The Menu Has Yet To Really Change
If Chipotle’s selection of bowl/burrito/salad and bean/steak/chicken/carnitas and toppings were a painter’s paints, each and every permutation would taste…roughly the same. A turn of the fork reduces the sour cream-black-beans-steak-rice combination to a gray mush every damn time. You can get rice, chicken, beans, repeat. Sure, it’s a gains-building gym bro’s dream, but is that really how you want to eat in your one precious life?
Plus, with such a limited menu, each ingredient (and its availability) really matters, especially when you’re ordering online. More often than not, Chipotle has been out of core components of their lunches (such as lettuce, tomatoes, and even steak) due to outbreaks like e.Coli and salmonella or supply chain issues. Some other missing ingredients are missing just from plain negligence, as some online customers have noticed. This only compounds how majorly bleak it is to even be in a brick-and-mortar Chipotle these days. In some locations, customers have to order online while standing inside a Chipotle.
And if you remember, 2015 was the year Chipotle found themselves at the epicenter of a few E.coli and Salmonella outbreaks. Even though Chipotle has long prided itself on many ingredients being organic, locally harvested, and/or humanely raised, their food-safety practices swiftly tanked all of those good intentions (and good PR). In fact, Chipotle sickened over 140 college students at one Boston College location over a weekend in 2006. As of 2020, Chipotle has agreed to pay a $25 million dollar fine as a resolution for the over 1,100 people who were made ill by eating Chipotle between 2015-2018.
Everything Else Got Chipotle’d
In many ways, you could say that the real decline of Chipotle started when everything became Chipotle’d. You can throw a ball and hit any number of fast-casual restaurants that’ll turn all your favorite freshly-made toppings into a bowl, salad, or wrap right before your eyes, like Cava, Sweetgreen, or Chop’t.
The novelty of hitting up Chipotle has lost its luster now that you can go beyond Americanized Mexican food and flirt with a multi-textured, Mediterranean-style bowl at Cava, a celebrity-approved Sweetgreen salad, or a Chop’t salad the size of your head (a.k.a. how big Chipotle portions used to be).
