Chipotle Mexican Grill is planning to close all its restaurants for a day to curb the E. coli bacterial outbreak that has been annoying the chain since last October.
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The meeting will take place on February 8 and will include all staff at its more than 1,900 locations, said Danielle Moore, public relations and communications manager for Chipotle.
After the health scares at Chipotle restaurants in late 2015, execs announced all employees would join a companywide discussion about food safety.
Chipotle co-CEO Monty Moran added, “The morale in our stores is actually very, very high”. It has since plummeted to as low as $428 a share – a 42% drop. In August, almost 100 were sickened by norovirus after eating at an outlet in Simi Valley, California, and in September more than 60 became sick in Minnesota. The chain had expected comparable restaurant sales (those at restaurants that have been open for at least 13 months) to fall by as much as 11 percent for the quarter ending December 31, but revised the outlook, saying they are now slated to tumble by nearly 15 percent.
In December, 141 students were sickened by norovirus after eating at a Chipotle near Boston College in MA.
The trouble didn’t end with the outbreaks however.
Ells and others admitted the company’s earnings this year will be “messy”. At an investor conference on January 13, NBC reports, Chipotle founder Steve Ells said that the company needs to “reassure our customers that this can’t happen again, and that we are going to reduce the risk of this kind of an outbreak from occurring again to near zero”.
“I’m hopeful that the CDC will call this over soon”, he said, according to E! Besides this, federal health officials also investigated five E. coli poisoning cases in Kansas, Oklahoma and North Dakota.
Chipotle says the company will launch a new marketing campaign in February to reach out to any lost customers.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Chipotle stores.
