The Fast Food Revolutionary (about Chipotle)

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WSJ. MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 28, 2011

The Fast Food Revolutionary

This has been a year when the attention of the food world has been drawn
to indie abattoirs and hydrocolloid-obsessed Spaniards, to tomato-farm
slavery and shark-fin pirates, to foie gras trucks and $900 meals where
you can't tell the entrees from the plates, to mad chefs wielding
liquid-nitrogen canisters and gentler souls instructing you on how to
cook and eat your Christmas tree. And yet the most innovative man in the
world of food at the moment is Chipotle founder Steve Ells, whose quiet
insistence on well-raised meat and local and organic produce at his
multibillion-dollar chain is changing the way America eats, one
humongous burrito at a time.

Have you ever had a Chipotle burrito? It's pretty remarkable, a flour
tortilla the size of a bathmat, warmed in a machine that looks like an
old-fashioned pants-presser, and filled in front of you, spoonful by
spoonful, from a series of stews and condiments laid out in immaculate
stainless-steel bins: rice; barbacoa beef, pork carnitas, steak or
chicken; corn relish or hot salsa; black beans or pinto beans; sour
cream or cheese or guacamole or sometimes all three. At the end of the
process, unless you show unusual restraint, you are presented with a log
that has the heft of a small lapdog. And the company's growth is as
muscular as the product�revenues have tripled since 2006, to about $2
billion; there are now 1,200 stores and 25 percent profit margins.

WSJ Magazine's "Innovator of the Year Awards" gives this year's food
prize to chef Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle restaurants.

So Chipotle, which was financed for a crucial part of its development by
McDonald's, is the last corporation you might expect to be praised by
Peter Singer, philosopher-king of the animal-rights movement. And it is
hard to imagine a less-likely ally of the Land Institute's Wes Jackson,
a foe not just of irresponsible agriculture but of the existence of
agriculture itself, whose commitment to sustainability makes Alice
Waters and Michael Pollan seem like dilettantes.

But as Steve Ells slides behind a weathered-plank table in his office in
New York City's Meatpacking District, the slender, bespectacled man, who
more closely resembles a high-school chemistry teacher than he does the
chairman of a major corporation, talks about Jackson with the devotion
of a college-age activist.

"I know Wes very well," Ells says. "I never knew how vital topsoils were
before I went down to Kansas to talk to him. And that knowledge, and his
wisdom, have helped me make a lot of decisions on what to buy for the
restaurants�not just organic beans, for example, but no-till beans,
which are difficult to cultivate, but can be grown without devastating
the soil. Wes has dedicated his lifetime to this. And I always think
about one thing he says: 'If you can realize your goal in your lifetime,
you're not thinking big enough.' "

"Food that's grown closer to home tastes better. If the food tastes
better, people come in more often," Ells adds. "Then you can afford to
spend more on better ingredients. People ask me why I bother to hire
chefs like Nate Appleman [who was a star at San Francisco's A16 and New
York's Pulino's] or Kyle Connaughton [from the Fat Duck] when we never
change our menu. We may never change our menu, but we are always
changing our food."

Ells's goal, beyond selling enough burritos each year to fill the Grand
Canyon, is to make sustainable food both available to everyone and tasty
as hell. When I first started following Chipotle a decade ago, it was
because I'd heard that the chain had replaced commodity pork with
humanely raised pork from Niman Ranch; that customers were cheerfully
paying a higher price for the better meat; and that each of its
restaurants sold enough to support a sustainable family farm in
Iowa�Chipotle is by far the largest purchaser of natural meat in the
United States. All of the chicken it uses is sustainably raised, as is
about 85 percent of its beef. It sources its vegetables locally, at
least as well as it is able. "We're not perfect," Ells says. "In
January, our East Coast restaurants are getting lettuce from California.
But we believe in always getting better. We're proving that you can run
a very profitable company and still do the right thing."

Fast-food entrepreneurs tend to have a background in business. Ells,
uniquely, was a chef, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and
with two years at Jeremiah Tower's famous San Francisco brasserie Stars
before he opened the first Chipotle in Denver in 1993.

"Here's the basic difference between Chipotle and other fast-food
restaurants," Ells says. "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. We have 27,000 employees now, and almost all of them are
cooks, even the people you see on line serving customers. It's not all
done on site�beans, carnitas and barbacoa are slow-cooked in central
facilities and delivered�but cooking is what we do."

"If you know anything about fast-food rules," he adds, "you understand
that you're not allowed to have variability from day to day; not allowed
to taste the guacamole and adjust the flavors. The restaurant in Phoenix
is supposed to taste exactly like the restaurant in St. Louis. At
Chipotle, I can taste the difference from day to day. The limes are
juicier at certain times of the year. No two real chickens are exactly
the same. A lot of our regular customers tend to like one outlet better
than another across town, and I think that's fine."

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