Secrets Chipotle Doesn't Want You To Know

At a glance, it seems like Chipotle checks all the boxes. It's fresh, it's made to order, customers get to pick exactly what they want from a wide range of delicious ingredients, and as far as quick and affordable lunches, it's a lot healthier than most other options (as long as you choose wisely). It's no wonder the chain is such a hit!

But do some digging, and you'll find that Chipotle has some skeletons in their closet. Like... a lot of skeletons. From shady business practices, to lawsuits, to the large-scale impacts of some of your favorite products, Chipotle doesn't entirely live up to the ultra-healthy, super-friendly image that they're trying to project. Oh, and even if you only keep one eye on the social media news cycle, you've undoubtedly heard mumblings about their food poisoning outbreaks. Spoiler alert: it's way, way worse than you thought.

If you're the type that wants to have all the information on the chains your hard-earned dollars are going to support, you should know about all of these secrets that Chipotle hopes you don't find out about.

The interior design might be impressing design critics, but you can bet they all have full use of their legs. Because for those people who have to order while sitting in a chair, the perspective might be just a little different. At least it was for San Diego man Maurizio Antoninetti, who sued Chipotle for violating the rights of the disabled. 

Mr Antoninetti was unhappy that when he ordered his food from his wheelchair, the wall in front of the counter was too high for him to see over and he was unable to choose ingredients for his order or see his food being made. Bizarrely, although Chipotle spent thousands of dollars fighting the accusations in court, and in the process forced Mr. Antoninetti to tally up $550,000 in legal fees, the restaurant nevertheless went ahead and quietly retrofitted the offending restaurants with lower walls. And that was years before the verdict even came back. 

No one likes to admit when they're wrong, but fighting an unnecessary lawsuit for five years to avoid it has to be a record of some sort.

In order to turn a profit, a company has to make more money than it spends. One of the biggest expenses for companies like Chipotle is the wage bill, but thanks to minimum wage laws there isn't much that can be done to reduce that ... you would think. 

Not so for Chipotle, according to almost 10,000 employees across the USA, who have joined a lawsuit that is claiming Chipotle is guilty of wage theft. The accusation states that managers at Chipotle restaurants would require workers who were working the closing shift to clock out at a certain time, but then continue working unpaid until they were given permission to leave. In fact at many of the company's restaurants, the process is automated, with workers being automatically clocked out at a set time whether or not they're finished working. 

Chipotle denies the allegations, claiming the problem lies with a few managers who don't follow policy. No matter what Chipotle might claim its policy to be, with this many complaints surfacing it's a good time to remember that actions speak louder than words.

Chipotle has always made a big deal about their guac, and that makes it even more noticeable when it suddenly becomes less-than-appetizing. It was the end of 2019 when customers started complaining: the guac they were getting served was brown, stringy, and pretty nasty — the kind of nasty that made people wonder why Chipotle locations were still serving up the stuff.

According to Vice, some locations did stop serving it, and the problem was even bigger than originally thought. Social media was filled with images of people pulling entire sections of unripe avocado out of their bowls and burritos. The worst thing is, Chipotle said (via Business Insider) that it was pretty much normal.

What happened, they said, was an annual switch in avocado suppliers. With Mexican avocados being in season between November and April, it's Peruvian avocados that fill in those summer months. Chipotle's chief communications officer, Laurie Schalow, said, "Due to the seasonal transition from Peruvian to Mexican supplies that happens every year at this time, we are experiencing normal variabilities in our avocados [...]"

Normal? Every year? Customers didn't think so, but if you were one who got brown guac, now you know when to give Chipotle a miss.

Hordes of vomiting customers and the value of the company's stock are not the only victims of the foodborne illness scandal that first hit Chipotle in 2015. The collection of small-scale "local" producers the company has made so much advertising mileage on can now be added to that list. 

By buying a portion of its ingredients from local sources, Chipotle sought to gain from the growing "locavore" movement that espoused locally sourced food over well-traveled food. Unfortunately that decision was a double-edged sword for Chipotle given that smaller producers have a harder time meeting the company's new food safety requirements and may have been a contributing factor in the various outbreaks that plagued Chipotle locations across the country. 

In an attempt to get a better grip on food safety, Chipotle ditched a bunch of its smaller suppliers in late 2015 and moved to centralize some of its food preparation activities to gain more control. However by creating a very public stain on the face of the local food movement, Chipotle hasn't just damaged the suppliers it's dumped. Because other chains will now think twice before going local, they have also thrown a huge tortilla-wrapped wrench into the future of the whole industry.

Working in foodservice is not an uncommon first step on the career ladder for young people, and it can often provide useful experiences and training that will impact the rest of their working lives. Unfortunately for one 16-year-old in Houston, her on-the-job-training contained extra things she definitely didn't need. Just weeks after starting her new job, a 26-year-old supervisor started making moves, bumping into her frequently, and making comments about her body. Pretty soon, that led to the supervisor having unprotected intercourse with the underage teenager on a regular basis, including behind the restaurant dumpster, in the restroom, and in a nearby park.

The victim's mother reportedly tried to intervene by going to the restaurant manager, but instead of jumping to the defense of a vulnerable employee, he did nothing and is even accused of trying to cover it up and discouraging the mother from going to the police. And when it came to the trial, Chipotle did no better. Instead of accepting the guilt of its employee, Chipotle tried to frame the criminal activity as a consensual relationship. But since a 16-year-old cannot legally consent to sex in Texas, it only took the jury a few hours to decide in the victim's favor and award her a payout from Chipotle of nearly $8 million. The actual perpetrator was not present for the court case, having long since fled to Mexico to avoid trial.

In the face of constant corporate self-promotion and sales hype, it can be hard to distinguish accepted reality from convenient untruths. Restaurants will say whatever they can get away with if it helps them sell more food, and Chipotle is as guilty of this as any of them, according to the Washington Post. 

In late April 2015, Chipotle announced that its entire menu would be GMO-free. This might seem like an insignificant declaration, but when GMOs are a scientifically supported path toward sustainably feeding a growing world population, casually throwing a wrench in the works is an ethically questionable act, to put it mildly. As the Post points out, Chipotle was engaging in baseless negative propaganda against GMOs in the pursuit of profit. 

With all the misinformation about GMOs flying around, Chipotle can neatly attach its fearmongering marketing ploy onto the back of its standard (and oft-repeated) elevator pitch about food ethics and sustainability. But the truth is that without the continued use and development of GMOs, there's no sustainable way to prevent a lot of people dying from hunger in the not-very-distant future. But millions of deaths from hunger don't count as a loss in the end-of-year financial figures, so there's really no reason for Chipotle to care.

Chipotle founder Steve Ells has quite the cuisine credentials. When he graduated from a pretty impressive food school (the Culinary Institute of America) he looked all set to carve new roads in the American fine dining scene — but that's an expensive road to go down. Then he opens a fast food ... sorry, a "fast casual" restaurant, that serves burritos to hungry students and hipsters. So what went wrong? Nothing actually. It was all part of the plan. Except the part Chipotle was supposed to play was taking money off hungry students and funneling it into Ells' next project, a fine dining restaurant. 

The fine dining part never happened, but the money part is working beautifully. Ells no longer has any interest in opening a fine dining restaurant, and you can't really blame him. When the cheap nag you bought to get from A to B turns out to be a cash cow instead, why would you keep riding?

In early 2020, Chipotle agreed to pay out $1.3 million after being accused of "'routinely' violating child labor laws," says CNN. The accusations were centered around Chipotle locations in Massachusetts, and the chain was accused of forcing teenage employees under the age of 18 to work late nights, and more hours per day and week than is legally allowed.

The investigation into the chain's child labor practices took three years, and was kicked off by one 2016 complaint from a parent who called the state's attorney general's office after the child was kept at work until after midnight. The investigation confirmed that it was far from the only instance of labor abuses happening, and along with the announcement of the fine, Attorney General Maura Healey noted: "We hope these citations send a message to other fast food chains and restaurants that they cannot violate our child labor laws and put young people at risk."

The penalty was the largest child labor-related fine in state history, and in addition to the fine, Chipotle also paid out $500,000 for youth programs designed to teach minors about the labor laws in place to protect them.

Do you think twice about getting that guac at Chipotle? They're hoping you don't, because the big picture is kind of terrifying.

According to USA Today, Chipotle serves around 50 million pounds of guac every year. Each day, they use more than 450,000 avocados, and that's hard to wrap your head around — especially when you consider that avocados are pretty terrible, not for us, but for the planet.

Vice looked at the problem of avocados, and there's a lot to unpack here. For starters, many of the places avocados grow — like Mexico, Peru, California, and Chile, where Chipotle gets their avocados — are regions that constantly labor under water shortages. Given that avocados require about twice the amount of water as a crop like oranges, and that's a huge strain.

Skyrocketing demand for avocados has also been linked to deforestation and environmental degradation. According to You Matter, the vast acreage devoted to avocados are called monoculture plantations. That means they're constantly growing just one crop, and without crop rotations, that means greater need for fertilizers and pesticides... which bring a whole new host of problems with them.

And one more thing: large-scale avocado production has attracted the attention of Mexican cartels, who have gotten in on the avocado industry by demanding part of the profits as "protection money." Chipotle probably hopes you don't know that's where some of your money is ending up.