Higher Prices & Smaller Portions: Inside Chipotle’s PR Disaster (2024)

But with all that freedom of choice comes…quite a bit of drama.

The party at Chipotle is having its record-scratch moment. The prices have gone up, those formerly heavy-handed scoops of

, and the quality has yet to rise above “mid.” So, we must ask ourselves, what happened to Chipotle?

Chipotle is known to pack so much food inside a bowl or burrito that you could make two meals out of it. Because of that, it's set itself up for a raging debate over portion sizes. With the advent of wilder and wilder

(that mostly center around the highly customizable nature of Chipotle), one could say this is precisely why we can’t have nice things.

Once customers noticed their bowls dipped to even slightly less than two meals’ worth, the complaints began to roll in on TikTok. Even famous supporters of Chipotle, such

, have bemoaned the

Most distressingly, customers have been going so far as to

, essentially coercing Chipotle employees to comply or they’ll send the video to Chipotle HQ. Chipotle’s own CEO Brian Niccol has advised customers to essentially—and I’m not even joking here—

in order to get more rice. No surprise, the

are hardly an exaggeration of how bizarre that clip is.

If Chipotle’s selection of bowl/burrito/salad and bean/steak/chicken/carnitas and toppings were a painter’s paints, each and every permutation would taste…roughly the same. A turn of the fork reduces the sour cream-black-beans-steak-rice combination to a gray mush every damn time. You can get rice, chicken, beans, repeat. Sure, it’s a gains-building gym bro’s dream, but is that really how you want to eat in your one precious life?

Plus, with such a limited menu, each ingredient (and its availability) really matters, especially when you’re ordering online. More often than not, Chipotle has been out of core components of their lunches (such as lettuce, tomatoes, and even steak) due to outbreaks like e.Coli and salmonella or supply chain issues. Some other missing ingredients are missing just from plain negligence,

. This only compounds how majorly bleak it is to even be in a brick-and-mortar Chipotle these days. In some locations,

.

And if you remember, 2015 was the year Chipotle found themselves at the

. Even though Chipotle has long prided itself on many ingredients being organic, locally harvested, and/or humanely raised, their food-safety practices swiftly tanked all of those good intentions (and good PR). In fact,

at one Boston College location over a weekend in 2006. As of 2020,

as a resolution for the over 1,100 people who were made ill by eating Chipotle between 2015-2018.

In many ways, you could say that the real decline of Chipotle started when everything became Chipotle’d. You can throw a ball and hit any number of fast-casual restaurants that’ll turn all your favorite freshly-made toppings into a bowl, salad, or wrap right before your eyes, like Cava, Sweetgreen, or Chop’t.

The novelty of hitting up Chipotle has lost its luster now that you can go beyond Americanized Mexican food and flirt with a multi-textured, Mediterranean-style bowl at Cava, a

, or a Chop’t salad the size of your head (a.k.a. how big Chipotle portions used to be).