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About the Author: Brian Nicole
Brian Nicole is the CEO of Chipotle, a Mexican grill restaurant chain in the United States
A person rarely finds his next job thanks to news that pops up in a news site app – but that’s exactly how my journey as CEO of Chipotle began. And salmonella in some of the branches. Two years later, in 2017, the network announced that it was looking for a new manager.
In the six years before that I worked for the fast food chain Taco Bell, as Chief Marketing and Innovation Manager, as President and then as CEO. It has a great brand with a loyal customer base. It was just a matter of getting the business back on track quickly. Following the news in the Wall Street Journal that they were looking for a new manager, I contacted the recruiting firm that was looking for the CEO.
Three years later, in late 2021, with the help of an amazing team that preceded me along with those who came after me, we joined the Fortune 500 list, increased digital sales, launched a rewards program that now has 24 million members, raised the minimum wage and opened 200 new restaurants. We also promised that the business would not only survive the corona plague, but emerge stronger from it.
Field research
When I first started the dialogue with Chipotle’s recruiter, I wanted to learn more about what’s going on inside the company’s restaurants. Every time I traveled, I would stop at a Chipotle branch. I started to get the feeling that things were not going as smoothly as they should. I ended up asking the company’s founder and CEO at the time, Steve Els, to do some of these surprise visits with me.
The first thing we noticed was a positive: the customers stood in line. However, the queues did not progress quickly. When we got to the counter, where they put together our food, it was clear that the staff could benefit from further training and instruction. In truth the restaurant managers looked stunned, which is a big problem: when a manager is unsure of himself, it passes to the staff and manifests itself in poor performance. This is not surprising, because Chipotle has always had a more complicated strategy than other players. Chain restaurants compete in four dimensions: quality, value, speed and customization. Most focus on one or two dimensions, but Chipotle focuses on all four.
An additional burden on Chipotle’s operational and cultural capabilities was the speed with which it grew in the years before I arrived – an addition of about 200 restaurants a year. This rate of expansion was commendable, but the company’s ability to hire and train employees did not keep pace. Customer service was further hampered by a new mobile app that allowed people to order online, but did not give them a way to skip the long wait in line that Steve and I encountered during our visits to branches. Finally, I noticed that although Chipotle spends $ 150 million a year on marketing, her messages were not very prominent. In my mind, and in the conversations I had with the managers of Chipotle, a plan had already begun to formulate.
Change the focus
Our first goal was to focus even more on maintaining an excellent culinary culture. As part of a marketing campaign dubbed “On Truth”, we have transparently presented our full list of ingredients on our website, restaurants, social media channels and advertising.
At the same time we opened an educational training program and told principals to encourage their staff members to start thinking more like chefs. We provided all employees with a pocket guide regarding our ingredients and our expectations for achieving our goal and our promise of “food with integrity”. We asked to return the focus to our customers. Managers reminded their staffs to ask guests what they think of the food and then really listen to the feedback.
I also recognized that Chipotle would benefit greatly if she could use the power of digital. Our mobile app will only benefit customers if we redefine our restaurants to allow for quick pick-up. So we created “pay and take” shelves near the checkouts at each restaurant, and explained to customers how to find their food.
We also solved another problem that hurt our reputation: Those waiting in line could see when employees stopped serving them to put together an online order, and that annoyed them. So we created a second kitchen at the back of the restaurant that focused solely on online orders. These may sound like simple solutions, but implementing them in 2,400 restaurants was not easy at all.
The rewards plan was another important part of the strategy. We have more than 22 million members in our database, and we gather information to better understand what motivates them to enter a restaurant, and how we can encourage them to do so more often.
One area where we have not made many changes is food. I give my predecessor, Steve, a lot of credit: he created a menu that really works. When I got to the company, some people asked if we should expand to breakfast or switch to frozen food. We knew not to do any of these things. We just had to get better at things that people have already loved us for.
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