The World Dairy Diary tipped me off to a Drovers Alert which has this warning:
Food with integrity?
Chipotle Mexican Grille says the company’s philosophy is “food with integrity.” Famous for its large burritos made with all natural ingredients, the company’s promotions include billboards with unique, funny and often zany messages. But the most recent billboard campaign is seen by many as “over the top.” Chipotle’s newest billboards ask: “Did you want antibiotics with your lunch? We didn’t think so.”Chipotle says “food with integrity” isn’t just a marketing slogan. “The hallmarks of Food With Integrity include things like unprocessed, seasonal, family-farmed, sustainable, nutritious, naturally raised, hormone-free, organic, and artisanal.” The company says it serves more naturally raised meat than any other restaurant in the country, and it has pushed for more sustainable practices in produce farming, as well as worked with dairy suppliers to eliminate the use of added hormones from their operations. All of this must give a lot of consumers the warm fuzzies. But its billboards with the reference to antibiotics is a low-blow to the livestock industries. Chipotle, the company that seeks to offer tasty Mexican fare, stoops to disparage every livestock producer who is not one of the company’s suppliers with a tasteless, misleading message. If you’d like to tell Chipotle to tear down their misleading billboards, visit their website at www.chipolte.com or go straight to the comment page. — G.H.
Now, aside from mis-spelling chipotle as chipolte I don’t know enough about the issue to understand it. Speaking of not knowing much about the industry…
Jim Adams Speaks at IACP Conference
According to Cooking With Amy’s Coverage of the event Jim Adams had a hard time at the IACP conference:
After showing some disturbing footage of factory pig farms, Adams told a most interesting anecdote about his company switching from a conventionally raised pork to Niman Ranch pork, a more “natural” and humanely raised product. The company had to raise the price of the carnitas burrito by a dollar to support the change. The result? A four times increase in sales of carnitas burritos. Later a pig farmer challenged his assertion that pigs were given growth hormones and Adams agreed that he didn’t know anything about it. It was unfortunate that this inaccuracy ended up lessening Adam’s credibility.
Well that’s not great.
It seems that the ranching/farming industry is somewhat upset by the negative publicity that chipotle mexican grill is giving them. By talking about their great products in such a positive way, chipotle implies that all other providers of the food are giving you second rate products.
personally, i’m quite inspired by the fact that sales of carnitas were up by four times after changing to Niman Ranch pork.
read the feed
comments to chipotle about the issue
The folks at Drovers compiled some comments that were sent to chipotle (with a carbon copy to drovers, apparently). Here they are for posterity since the Drovers site seems to remove content frequently…
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