Steve Ells, the CEO and founder of Chipotle Mexican Grill, apologized Thursday to customers sickened in the restaurant chain’s second illness outbreak in as many months.
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Health officials on Wednesday confirmed the presence of norovirus among Boston College students who reported becoming ill after eating at a single Chipotle over the weekend. Ells added that the Boston restaurant, which has since been temporarily shuttered, would be completely sanitized and all of its employees tested for norovirus before re-opening. At last count, 52 people across nine states have also been sickened by a separate Chipotle-connected outbreak of E. coli. A dozen other students, who did not eat at the Chipotle location, also turned up with symptoms of the highly contagious virus, Dunn said.
Regarding the E. coli outbreak, Ells said the US Food and Drug Administration has still not found an exact source for the bacteria, which can cause severe diarrhea and vomiting.
“We know from food safety research and from food production in this country that there are a lot of vulnerable areas where food contamination could occur”, she said.
A Chipotle Mexican Grill in Boston, Massachusettswas closed as of December 8, 2015.
In its annual report, Chipotle has noted it may be at a higher risk for outbreaks of food-borne illnesses because of its “fresh produce and meats rather than frozen, and our reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation”.
Chipotle is not out of the woods yet, but it is trying to reassure customers that its restaurants are safe so it can put a awful year behind it.
Passersby hurried into fast food restaurants on a busy lower Manhattan street Thursday just after noon to join line-ups that already stretched out of doorways and twisted around corners.
Smacked by the E. Coli mayhem, the stock had plummeted by 12.86% over the past one month after the disease outbreak left 50 individuals impacted.
The agency said the most recent illness started on November 13.
Cases of E. coli were also reported in California, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Minnesota. But despite the company’s efforts, it took a long time for Jack in the Box to recoup the ground it had lost during the scandal. The firm now has a $600.00 price target on the stock, down from their prior price target of $675.00.
“I worry that they look at food safety from the organic, non-GMO, sustainability, animal welfare standpoint”, Marler said.
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Moran also said the company would avoid marketing until the CDC has wrapped up its investigation, then run full-page print ads with letters of apology as well as a public information campaign that’s “perhaps more transparent, than any other company has ever been with regard to what happened and what we did”.
