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Elevation
At Chipotle, elevation happens through attention
to detail. Founder Steve Ells explains. By Lea Davis
How do you pass along your excitement about
Food With Integrity to your front-line employees?
Certainly there's an education process. We have
visited farms with the leadership teams, restaurant managers, and
area managers. It's a matter of getting out there and sharing the
stories about Food With Integrity and why it's important, not only
for the Chipotle brand, but also for animal husbandry, the environment,
and, ultimately, for great-tasting food.
Why has Chipotle stuck with its simple menu?
When you keep the menu simple, you can really focus
on just doing a few things really well. The more things you have,
the more distracted you can become. That said, there are a lot of
combinations people can make from the ingredients on the line.
In fact, that was one of the early criticisms
people [had when] looking at Chipotle—that there were not enough
choices. In fact, just the opposite has happened. People come several
times a week. They change their choice of salsa, or they have a
bowl rather than a burrito. They change it up a bit.
You've made atmosphere a key part of the Chipotle
experience. How did you craft the interior?
The atmosphere says something about the brand beyond
just decoration. It's architectural in nature. In our case, it uses
very simple materials like plywood, concrete, and steel. Through
architecture and good design, you elevate these materials to something
extraordinary.
It's the same for the food at Chipotle. We
use basic building blocks, such as rice, beans, and meat, but it's
the use of great cooking techniques and fresh herbs and citrus that
elevates those ingredients to something extraordinary.
How does the service component play in?
The menu is basically burritos, tacos, and bowls,
and now salads. But the customer can get any combination he or she
wants. There are a lot of tastes and diets out there, and our focus
on customization allows people to get exactly what they need.
This is all set against the backdrop of the
open kitchen, where people get to see fresh herbs being chopped,
meats being grilled, fresh avocado being mashed. It's like when
you have a dinner party at your house, and everyone wants to be
in the kitchen.
Do you put an equal amount of thought into
the exterior visibility of Chipotle restaurants?
We've certainly gotten a lot better at it, as we
have with everything. The sites that we're choosing now have better
visibility. They tend to be in better trade areas, and that's evidenced
by very strong openings—we open at volumes much higher than we used
to. That can be attributed to many factors, but among them are better
buildings, signage, and architectural details that say something
about the brand. All that, along with a national buzz now about
Chipotle.
Say I've been eating at a Chipotle location
since the mid-'90s. What changes would I have seen at that location?
Let's take the [original] East Evans location [in
Denver] as an example. It's a tiny spot, just 850 square feet. Because
it is a very high-traffic restaurant, it has been remodeled twice,
but it basically looks the same as far as the signage and the exterior.
The differences you would see would be the addition of two menu
items—the Burrito Bol and the salad.
While I say there are few visible changes,
there have been some substantial changes. The raw ingredients that
we purchase today are better than the ones we purchased just a few
years ago, [according to the] whole Food With Integrity philosophy.
We have Niman Ranch free-range pork, Bell and Evans chicken, naturally
raised without antibiotics, beef raised without antibiotics or hormones,
a percentage of our beans are organic.
Perhaps it's because we've stayed focused
on this simple operations system that we've been able to continually
refine and improve details along the way. There are no radical changes
apparent to the customer in the way Chipotle looks, but our dedication
to making the small details better—and some of the not-so-small
details like where the food comes from—have contributed to Chipotle's
success.
