Why all Chipotle restaurants are closing on Feb. 8
Chipotle Mexican Grill confirmed to multiple news outlets this week that it would be closing all of its stores next month in conjunction with a company-wide meeting to discuss company practices regarding food safety. Chipotle locations will be while the company鈥檚 staff discusses a range of issues, Chris Arnold, the company's spokesman, wrote in a Thursday e-mail to the Chicago Tribune.
"We want to thank our teams for all of their hard work, to discuss some of the changes we are making to enhance food safety, to talk about the [restaurant鈥檚] role in all of that and to answer questions from employees," he said.
Last year, Chipotle all of its Seattle and Portland restaurants in order to sanitize and inspect their ingredient stores after what health officials said was an outbreak of E.coli there. In December, a Boston-area location was shut down temporarily after health officials reported that nearly 200 Boston College students came down with a food-borne illness.
The company's rash of聽聽began in August of 2015 when health officials and the company reported that 64 customers in Minnesota were sickened with salmonella, and 100 Chipotle customers in southern California were reported with norovirus.
It will be difficult 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 鈥�.鈥� Many of the affected customers have either already sued or are . Chipotle is also the subject of a criminal investigation examining whether there was any wrongdoing in how the company chose to handle its food safety problems.
Chipotle says it has chosen to not begin a marketing campaign to restore customer trust until its ongoing safety problems are officially resolved, which may聽 on its ability to restore its image in the short term. In the interim, the company has made several announcements on the changes it has made in handling food safety.
In December, Steve Ells, Chipotle鈥檚 founder and co-chief executive, , saying that Chipotle was introducing new safety measures including having some foods prepared in a central kitchen before they are sent to individual locations.
鈥淲e鈥檙e doing a lot to rectify this and to make sure this doesn鈥檛 happen again,鈥� he said.聽
Earlier this month, Ells .聽"We know that Chipotle is as safe as it's ever been before," he said at a conference in Orlando, Fla. He outlined steps the company is taking with suppliers to check the quality of ingredients, but noted that 聽because Chipotle sources its 64 different ingredients from more than 100 local producers.
Still, Ells said, 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think we鈥檒l . We will always look for ways to have a more robust food safety practice.鈥澛�
