Can Chipotle Recover from Food Poisoning?

Over the past decade, Chipotle has been arguably the country’s single most successful restaurant chain. So when the company temporarily shut down forty-three restaurants in the Pacific Northwest last month because of an E. coli outbreak, the assumption was that the storm would quickly pass. But over the weeks that followed, consumers in seven different states contracted food-borne illnesses from eating at Chipotle, and the company said that it expected same-store sales in the current quarter to drop as much as eleven per cent, nationally, as a result. Now, a hundred and twenty Boston College students have reported getting sick after eating at a Chipotle there. The cause of this outbreak was a garden-variety norovirus, rather than E. coli, but that’s hardly likely to bolster consumer confidence in the chain. Chipotle’s stock has now fallen twenty-five per cent in the past two months, and while bargain-hunters are starting to snap up its shares in expectation of a quick recovery, there’s good reason to think the effects of this crisis won’t soon go away. The real problem for Chipotle is that the very things that made it so successful are now going to make it hard for the company to bounce back quickly.