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“We’re not going to be doing breakfast anytime soon,” CEO Brian Niccol told CNN’s Chief Business Correspondent Christine Romans at a private event in Los Angeles.
Chipotle has a clear way into the meal: It already sells breakfast burritos at a single location, in Dulles International Airport outside Washington D.C.— but only because it is required to.
“In order for us to continue to run Chipotle there, part of the deal is we have to serve breakfast,” Niccol said. That location serves an egg and cheese breakfast burrito and one with egg and chorizo. That latter item, Niccol said, is the reason he won’t rule breakfast out completely.
“Our chorizo is fabulous,” he said.”You put chorizo with eggs in a burrito, that’s pretty good. Right? So down the road maybe, but not right now.”
“People right now are dialed in to Chipotle because they love the chicken, the steak, the carnitas, the barbacoa,” said Niccol, noting that the company’s chicken burrito makes up the bulk of its sales.
Digital orders also are going through the roof. In the second quarter, they grew 99% and accounted for 18% of sales. Niccol thinks that one day, digital orders could make up half of Chipotle’s sales.
Chipotle’s “digital transformation” is about “giving people more access and driving even further into this idea of a frictionless experience,” Niccol said. The company plans to continue leaning into tech, he added, noting that the “Chipotlanes” will likely “be a significant piece of our business.”
Together, the changes have made it easier for groups to order, Niccol explained, which means more dinner orders.
“If you come in with a group of friends, to move down our line, it can be a bit cumbersome,” he explained. When ordering online or through the app, “you can share the payment, you can order ahead, you have everybody’s order, you just show up, you sit down or you can grab and go.”
It’ll be especially hard to recruit so many employees in such a tight labor market. Chipotle, for its part, is trying to attract workers by encouraging mobility within the company, offering quarterly bonuses and, among other things, teaching unique skills.
“The first week on the job we teach you knife skills on how to actually cut vegetables, how to cut lettuce, how to cut avocados, how to mash guacamole,” Niccol said. “These are all skills that transfer then to other opportunities in the restaurant industry.”
Today, Chipotle has roughly 2,500 restaurants. At the end of 2014, there were about 1,800 Chipotle locations. Niccol thinks that figure could grow to about 6,000, he told Romans, without specifying a timeline. “We’re just getting started.”
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