Dive Brief:
- Chipotle is set up for a year built around the idea of “the total guest experience,” CEO Scott Boatwright said during a Q4 2024 earnings call Tuesday. Employee experience and order throughput will be essential ingredients of the strategy in 2025.
- The restaurant chain will roll out four pieces of kitchen equipment that can simplify order fulfillment for workers and get customers their food faster at new locations, according to Boatwright.
- Chipotle is also expanding Chipotlanes, dedicated drive-thru lanes for mobile customers. Four in 5 new locations opened in 2025 will have a Chipotlane to speed up mobile orders, according to Boatwright. The dedicated drive-thru lanes allow for mobile customers to pick up their orders in less than 30 seconds on average.
Dive Insight:
Chipotle plans to maintain strong growth momentum by putting an operational focus on customer experience.
“I want to make sure that as we continue to scale Chipotle, everything we do is in service of our guests or those who serve our guests,” Boatwright said during the call. “This will require an understanding and a focus on how each role in the organization matters up to making the experience in our restaurants better every day.”
Chipotle’s comparable restaurant sales were up 5.4% year over year in the fourth quarter, with total revenue reaching $2.8 billion, according to a company earnings release. Comparable restaurant sales for the entire year rose 7.4%, driving total revenue of $11.3 billion.
In the coming year, the restaurant chain will provide tools that not only improve its workers’ capabilities but also their experience.
“When we improve the experience for our restaurant teams, it ladders to a better guest experience,” Boatwright said. “Exceptional in-restaurant and digital experiences coupled with our powerful marketing strategy to make the brand more visible, more relevant, and more loved, builds the brand momentum and results in year after year of transaction growth.”
Plans include introducing produce slicers, which reduce the time it takes to chop produce, to all restaurants by the summer. The chain is rolling out other tools on a more limited basis, including dual-sided planchas for cooking chicken and steak, three-pan rice cookers that streamline rice making, and dual-vat fryers that double the capacity for frying chips.
“The end goal is to improve the experience for our teams by making tasks easier to execute, more efficient, faster and more consistent while maintaining our high culinary standards,” Boatwright said.
Chipotle’s emphasis on speed and employee experience is reminiscent of Starbucks’ turnaround plan. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, formerly CEO of Chipotle, is investing in employee benefits and cutting down order fulfillment times to win back customers.
Starbucks is paying particularly close attention to how it handles mobile order fulfillment. Mobile ordering is popular enough to interfere with in-person order fulfillment, and the company is rethinking where mobile customers fit in the order fulfillment process.
Chipotle likewise receives a large volume of online orders — digital accounted for 35% of sales in 2024, according to Boatwright. The company is experimenting with ways to keep mobile customers moving.
In addition to using Chipotlanes for speedy pickup, Chipotle is testing augmented production lines that can automate the creation of bowls and salads, which account for nearly two-thirds of digital orders, according to a September 2024 press release.