Words matter. These are the best Steve Ells Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We want to make the old fast food model irrelevant. We want to make great ingredients and classic cooking techniques accessible to everybody.
Chipotle was going to incorporate all the things I had learned at the Culinary Institute and Stars and really elevate typical fast food.
I was so terrified that the business would not do well and that there would be no way that I would be in a position to pay my dad back this $80,000. At Stars, as a line cook, I think that I was making $10 or $12 an hour. So $80,000 – to have to pay that back was incomprehensible.
After operating in three diverse markets, we have determined ShopHouse hasn’t demonstrated an attractive unit economic model.
So much of today’s food is based on the exploitation of animals and the environment. Yes, it’s cheap, but at what cost?
The traditional fast food model is built on buying the cheapest ingredients – and that usually means poor-quality, heavily processed foods. But you can use quality ingredients, cook food using classic cooking techniques, and still serve something that’s fast and inexpensive.
The economic model was formed by the constraints that I had: a small space, relatively inexpensive building materials, relatively inexpensive investment, a very efficient service line or assembly line.
We can teach people how to run a Chipotle.
We have a terrific team, and our managers are terrific managers, but we have made it too complicated for them and too complicated in a way that they just can’t do an excellent job in many cases when it comes to the customer experience.
The first Chipotle was intended to be my source of funding for a full-scale restaurant, a means to an end. But it turned out to be more successful than I ever imagined.
To eat chicken that was raised with antibiotics is safe, right? But long-term, relying on antibiotics as part of our livestock production is probably not the right thing to do. To not serve chicken means that there’s not an economic engine that’s making it possible to build up a supply of antibiotic-free meat.
When I started on the very first day with just one restaurant, we used to pick oregano off the stems and chop them. We still do that.
I started Chipotle with the idea to create an experience that’s fast – and not fast food.
It is impossible to insure that there is a zero percent chance of any kind of foodborne illness anytime anyone eats anywhere.
I’m very much looking forward to relentlessly focusing on ensuring an excellent guest experience, removing unnecessary complexity from our operations, championing innovation, and pursuing our mission of making better food accessible to more people.
Stars was really good training. You know, we would come in at noon, and, you know, we would learn at that time what we were going to cook that evening. And, you know, there wasn’t a set menu per se.
If I had taken money from, say, venture capital, they would have wanted a certain return in a certain time period. McDonald’s, on the other hand, seemed very interested in my passion about creating this brand. I trusted them, and they did not really interfere with the brand.
I remember feeling a little guilty every time I opened a Chipotle. I felt guilty because I wasn’t following my true passion. But that eventually went away. And I realized that this is my calling.
The idea for Chipotle is a sort of combination of food borrowed from Stars and sort of a technique and a service format borrowed from the taquerias.
The bottom line – customers want delicious food served quickly in an interactive format, and they are increasingly unwilling to compromise.
The earliest recollection I have of being in the kitchen and cooking was in the third grade, and we lived in Germany. And I remember cooking scrambled eggs.
Our commitment to serving produce from local farms and other sustainable sources is one of the ways we are changing the way people think about and eat fast food.
You cannot take shortcuts. We’ve shown that we can spend more on ingredients, not less, and charge a fair price.
When I started Chipotle, I didn’t know the fast-food rules. People told us the food was too expensive and the menu was too limited. Neither turned out to be true.
When I told my friends and family that I was leaving Stars to open a burrito shop in Denver, they thought I was crazy, but not long after the success of the first Chipotle, I knew I had to open just one more, so I opened a second one on Colorado Boulevard, which turned out to be even busier than the first.
We keep the menu of burritos, tacos, and salads simple so we can make it using high quality fresh ingredients that are actually prepared and cooked on site rather than re-heated.
When our employees walk in in the morning, they see food. They have to cook. At the restaurants, we chop cilantro, onions, and limes two or three times a day. We make guacamole from fresh avocados.
Chipotle is really showing that there’s a better way to do fast food.
I thought we were going to get customers excited by telling them there were no antibiotics in our meat or no growth hormones used to raise the animals or no RBGH in our cheese or sour cream. Well, that’s not a very appetizing message.
I remember looking to McDonald’s, and, my God, they have 13,000 restaurants in the United States. Well, we have almost a couple thousand Chipotles. What if Pizzeria Locale is a few thousand, and Shod. All of a sudden, we’re bigger than McDonald’s in the U.S. I mean, that’s not an unreasonable way to think about this.
Certainly, in college, I had no idea what I wanted to do, I studied art history and had a great time, but I didn’t have any sort of career aspirations.
We want to show all of our customers that the industry standards that we had been employing before – which are considered great standards – were not good enough.
Despite offering dollar menus and frequent discounts, many of these chains also scored poorly in terms of value.
