Chipotle

“Chipotle's innovation was he let you make the taco you wanted, right? ... Extreme customization, right? That was one of the big reasons why they succeeded.”

“The founder was a fine dining chef in Denver, right? He wanted to open a fine dining restaurant, and so he opened Chipotle as a stepping stone saying, I'll open this thing, I'll make some money here, and then I can open my fine dining restaurant. So actually w…”

“In the early days of Chipotle, when I presented the offerings, people said, well, Steve, you just, you're not offering enough to people. They want more variety. And I said, no, no, no, people can make all different kinds of combinations of the base ingredients…”

“By the time I retired, 27 years later, I think we had well over a million customers a day.”

“Maybe it could have been even bigger had I been more balanced.”

“Chefs and users, right? Like, which wasn't common back then and still isn't common today, right? Like the majority are vertical integrated business. Like Chipotle is a vertical integrated business.”

“Chipotle's bot can reverse a linked list. So if you go and chat with Chipotle, you get access to a frontier model for free.”

“Zipline works with amazing global brands like Walmart, Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Mendocino Farms, Wendy's, Buffalo Wild Wings, many, many others. We all also this year are launching our healthcare business in the US. We're partnered with folks like Cleveland Clini…”

“We make all the nachos for Chipotle and dog food and cat food and laundry detergent.”

“Our first customer is Walmart. We're, you know, we've already announced a number of other Partners like Chipotle and Sweetgreen Mendocino Farms and a lot of the biggest health systems in the US who are all relying on this technology to automate and accelerate …”

“I think that like to meet Chipotle is one of the most amazing operational machines I've ever seen. Like you walk in there and you have, you know, like you have an unbelievable burrito bowl in 30 seconds and it's like, you know, there's no wasted movement in, i…”

“There's more airports than Chipotle's in the United States.”

“We actually had a term sheet with Chipotle, This was nine years ago to actually put this into Chipotle stores.”

“And the more senior you are, Lenny, the longer it is. If you're a CEO, it's going to take you a long time, unless you happen to be the CEO of Chipotle, who just became the CEO of Starbucks.”

“Best in class brands, Chipotle and Cava and others are in the mid twenties.”

“So it was going to take out basically these businesses today are running a call at 30% EBITDA margins at peak performance. That's like Chipotle's best class. By taking out labor, you could probably take out another 20 points of cost, which could translate into…”

“And I think it's like, look, do you want to chop wood in your backyard or do you want to own a sawmill? Do you want to be Jiro from Jiro dreams of sushi or Steve Ells from Chipotle? I think that is the ultimate question of like, what is your happy place and ho…”

“We went and stood outside the other restaurants in the area. We went to the subway, we went to the Chipotle, we went to the Buoymongers, all these places with a clicker, and we literally counted, like, ok, like, they got 300 people in a day. How many people do…”

“No, I was speaking with Chipotle. Of course I have a non-compete in, in place, but I asked them, I said, well, what do you think if I started a plant-based restaurant, have nothing to do with Chipotle or the fast casual format that Certainly something complete…”

“If anybody, if you're a manager at Chipotle and anyone you manage becomes a manager of a restaurant, you get 10,000 dollars, whether you work at that company or not”

“Whatever mistakes we made, whatever collateral damage, if you will, there comes from going too fast would be more than made up for by winning in this category and having All the advantages that come from being that market share leader over time, being the Star…”

“I think that the pendulum starts to swing in the other direction where we say, okay, you know what? I'll eat out at Chipotle one night a week less. And instead I'm going to reallocate that money to making sure that I have, you know, some amount of privacy.”

“Chipotle puts like, you know, billions of dollars into picking the right location. Why don't we just go right next to where every Chipotle is? And we're, and that's actually the strategy that's that Quiznos and a whole bunch of other brands had used. Noodles a…”

“Chipotle put out the following guidance, which is they said they are increasing the minimum wage to 15 dollars, and that within three years, you can make a 100,000 dollars a year at Chipotle.”

“Well, Chipotle, I think Steve and Chipotle really deserve an enormous amount of credit for really being the first national chain to break the barrier that fast food could not be It's gastronomic. There's real cooking that takes place in real time”

“Using Foursquare data that can predict that Chipotle sales are going down just due to the foot traffic alone.”

“On the eve of the millennium, the company had just a bit more than 20 stores. And today, Chipotle has nearly 2300 locations across the U.S. And in four other countries.”

“Well, the idea for Chipotle is a sort of a combination of food borrowed from stars and sort of a technique and a service format borrowed from the taquerias.”

“These burrito shops, these taquerias were small the investment would be low the rent certainly was low, and there were lines out the door, and I thought that, that I could make enough money to fund my full-scale restaurant.”

“This was the first site we saw near the university of Denver campus. It was 850 square feet. It was in terrible condition. It needed a lot of work. I think the rent was 800 dollars a month or something like this.”

“Every time you have a dinner party, people are in the kitchen. People want to be in the kitchen. And so, so Chipotle was designed to invite people in, to bring them close to where the action is.”

“The menu was developed the day before I opened.”

“Probably when we opened, I can't imagine there was another fast food restaurant Where the crew actually taste the food. I just don't think they did that, right?”

“Oh, I was profitable in the first few months.”

“So I think maybe he put in a little bit more money, but it was mostly cash flow that opened the second restaurant, and that opened about a year and a half later, and it opened up much busier than the first one.”

“With Chipotle, we were going into strip malls. Often in the inexpensive center units, not the more desirable end caps. This was early on. So the investment was very, very modest. And our production system or that our service format really was an assembly line.…”

“Over a seven-year period, I think they put in three hundred and sixty million dollars or so, but the majority of that was in the last couple of years.”

“So, you know, I remember when I put Naiman ranch pork on the menu, I had to increase the price of the carnitas burrito, and I think it increased by about a dollar or something. And so in the world of fast food, that was just not understood. I mean, gotta remem…”

“Well, so McDonald's has a very strong franchise system, and their franchisees obviously wanted, wanted a part of Chipotle. And, you know, certainly they would have been capable of operating Chipotle. There are a lot of good operators in the McDonald's system. …”

“Over, over a one month period from basically mid October to mid November 52 people got sick with E. Coli.”

“And so what we do with this avocado now is after we wash it, we plunge it into boiling water for five seconds. This is called blanching. And it's not long enough to cook the avocado. But just long enough to bring the temperature of the skin and the area under …”

“Yeah, 21, twenty-one billion, I think, was the highest.”

“I was lucky to have a father who could invest 85,000 dollars in my first restaurant because I couldn't have raised that money myself.”

“Chipotle stores sell close to 200,000 of them every single hour.”

“We went on CNBC a couple weeks before Chipotle's Q-one earnings, and I said in two weeks they're gonna report their earnings, and you're gonna see same store sales down 30% in the United States post the E. Coli scale. And they were like, why should we trust yo…”

“Which is something Chipotle can't do because their supply chain is not sufficiently instrumented.”

“Burritos actually, speaking of Chipotle, do super well because burritos actually, the wrap protects the food on the inside from oxygen. And by protecting food from oxygen, you actually reduce the chances that that food will degrade over time since oxygen, oxyg…”