Inside Chipotle’s Contamination Crisis
Smugness and happy talk about sustainability aren’t working anymore.
Fewer people associate Chipotle with “healthy” now. Three months before Collins was infected with E. coli, five people fell ill eating at a Seattle-area restaurant. By the time local health officials had confirmed a link, the outbreak was over, so no one said anything. In August, 234 customers and employees contracted norovirus at a Chipotle in Simi Valley, Calif., where another worker was infected. Salmonella-tainted tomatoes at 22 outlets in Minnesota sickened 64 people in August and September; nine had to be hospitalized.
Norovirus struck again in late November: More than 140 Boston College students picked up the highly contagious virus from a nearby Chipotle, including half of the men’s basketball team. An additional 16 students and three health-care staff picked it up from the victims. The source? A sick worker who wasn’t sent home although Chipotle began offering paid sick leave in June. In the second week of December, when Chipotle should have been on highest alert, a Seattle restaurant had to be briefly shut down after a health inspection found that cooked meat on the takeout line wasn’t being kept at a high enough temperature.
And in the most recent case, on Dec. 21, the CDC announced it was investigating an outbreak of what seems to be a different and rare version of E. coli 026 that’s sickened five people in two states who ate at Chipotle in mid-November. The company says it had expected to see additional cases. It still doesn’t know which ingredients made people ill.
Almost 500 people around the country have become sick from Chipotle food since July, according to public-health officials. And those are just the ones who went to a doctor, gave a stool sample, and were properly diagnosed. Food-safety experts say they believe with any outbreak the total number of people affected is at least 10 times the reported number. The CDC estimates that 48 million Americans get sick from contaminated food every year.
At Chipotle, three different pathogens caused the five known outbreaks. That wasn’t inevitable or coincidental. “There’s a problem within the company,” says Michael Doyle, the director of the center for food safety at the University of Georgia. Chipotle has gotten big selling food that’s unprocessed, free of antibiotics and GMOs, sometimes organic, sometimes local. “Blah, blah, blah,” says Doug Powell, a retired food-safety professor and the publisher of barfblog.com.
“They were paying attention to all that stuff, but they weren’t paying attention to microbial safety.” Whatever its provenance, if food is contaminated it can still make us sick—or even kill. Millennials may discriminate when they eat, but bacteria are agnostic.
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-chipotle-food-safety-crisis/
Anyone have thoughts on this? Is this chain actually unsafe to eat at? That's an awful lot of outbreaks and sick people.
Funny thing is I've been craving some chipotle burritos lately.. but.. *that is a lot of sick people* yikes.. and the article says it's a problem with the company. Article says they source to local and all organic and all that, but aren't paying attention to microbial safety.
So what do you guys think is going on, is it BECAUSE it's all antibiotic free? Maybe "all organic, not 'the man', no processing" isn't such a good idea?
I have no idea, but I am craving chipotle except I don't want to get sick.
The bottom line is this is a business story, they've got a supply chain problem, they don't know where the contamination came from. To know more about the issue, one would have to dig into who their suppliers are. To stay in business as a national chain then they've got to get control of their supplies.
