Chipotle Mexican Grill Case Study

Green Marketing: Chipotle Mexican Grill

Taylor Codomo

Communication 105

Chipotle Mexican Grill first opened its doors in Denver, Colorado in 1993, but CEO Steve Ells had been dreaming of opening his restaurant long before then. Ells began as a chef who studied French cuisine in culinary school. While observing customers at the local Mexican grill and after borrowing $85,000 from his father, Ells established Chipotle. The Mexican Grill now has over 1,300 restaurants including international locations in London, Paris, and Toronto.

The declining American economy of the last decade lead to value and time conscious consumers that held health and environment concerns about the food they eat. Every Halloween, Chipotle’s “Boorito” donates up to $1,000,000

But, if a company does not promote their ethical behaviors to the customers, it shows to have little impact on the customer’s willingness to pay more for a product. If a customer learned that the products they were consuming were produced unethically, the amount the customer is willing to pay lowers significantly. Chipotle has to communicate their sustainability activities in order to be rewarded for their ethical behavior, but only if their product is actually produced ethically. The likelihood that Chipotle actually went all-natural in sourcing their meat in the short amount of time they claimed to seems very impossible. Instead, they could have followed the same strategy Chick-fil-A did 14 years later by extending the allotted time to five years or maybe even longer. Chipotle set an unreasonable and unbelievable goal by changing the sourcing for their meat, which lead many people to become skeptical of their ethical behavior and could quite possibly have lead to the downfall of Chipotle in 2015 with their food safety incidents when people began to question how high of a priority the integrity of their food was to the