Chipotle Mexican Grill Incident Analysis

As many food service businesses should know, it is nearly impossible to avoid an outbreak of some sort forever. Unfortunately, Chipotle Mexican Grill is no exception. Since its founding, Chipotle’s claim to fame has been “food with integrity,” meaning you not only wanted to know where the food you were serving was coming from, you wanted to know how it was raised. This gesture sets such high expectations with yourself and with consumers. Although, high expectations are not necessarily a negative thing, when set exceedingly high and continually raised, the smallest unfortunate event, even an accident, can cause harm if handled incorrectly like the incident in October. As you know in October of 2015, Chipotle Mexican Grill had an incident involving E. coli that lasted until November and sickened 60 people. The sickened people ranged over 12 different states, California, Oregon, Washington, North Dakota, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York. The source of Chipotle’s outbreak was never determined, and regardless of how common it is for there to be “significant lag time,” if the source …show more content…
coli in early November just after Chipotle made the news. Nineteen people were sickened across seven states: Montana, California, Virginia, Colorado, Washington, Missouri, and Utah. Of the nineteen people five were hospitalized and two developed a type of kidney failure because of the specific strain of E. coli. Costco’s problem with E. coli was concluded to be a contaminated ingredient, celery and onion mix from Taylor Farms Pacific Inc., in the rotisserie chicken salad. Customers who purchased the rotisserie chicken salad were advised to throw the product away. Taylor Farms recalled more than 154,000 products from various stores including, Costco, Starbucks Corp, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and Target Corp. Costco’s E. coli epidemic was unmatched in news coverage compared to