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If newly minted Chipotle Mexican Grill Chief Executive Scott Boatwright could choose where to spend his workday, it wouldn’t be at the company’s high-rise offices overlooking Fashion Island.
“I’d rather spend my on-duty time at Chipotle Mexican Grill either in restaurants with our people and our team members, or at the innovation center talking about how we can make it more easily executable or scalable as a business,” Boatwright told the Business Journal during an interview at the chain’s Newport Beach headquarters.
Boatwright, who joined Chipotle in 2017 from Arby’s Restaurant Group, said what makes this brand the most enjoyable for him comes down to one thing.
“The food is incredible,” he said, noting the company’s mission of making burritos and bowls from scratch using dozens of “real” ingredients. “You don’t have to have hundreds of dollars and go to a chef-driven restaurant and spend a fortune to eat a high quality, hand crafted meal. We can do that for less than 10 bucks at Chipotle.”
But as the chain’s official CEO since November, Boatwright has learned quickly that serving high-quality food is not what excites Wall Street.
“Here’s what they care about: we have the best economic model in the entire industry,” he said.
Running OC’s Most Valuable Company
Boatwright joined Chipotle (NYSE: CMG) as chief operating officer during a pivotal time, as the fast-casual giant worked to recover from a series of food safety incidents that had severely shaken consumer trust. The food poisoning outbreaks—most notably in 2015—triggered a sharp decline in sales and a nosedive in the company’s stock, prompting a leadership shakeup.
“If you remember back in 2017, the brand was not on its front foot, not operationally strong,” Boatwright said. “It was a lot of heavy lifting in the early days, really fixing system standards and procedures and people development — because that’s what the organization lacked, quite frankly — and positioning it as a company that was high growth and could build to 300 restaurants annually, because that’s no easy feat in itself.”
The arrival of former Taco Bell CEO Brian Niccol in 2018 marked a turning point for the company. He’s widely credited with leading one of the industry’s most dramatic brand turnarounds.
Today, Chipotle stands as the third most valuable restaurant company in the nation and the most valuable publicly traded firm in Orange County, with a market cap hovering around $68 billion.
Boatwright said Chipotle was already “in a good place” when Niccol departed last year for Starbucks, adding that his own leadership has been “well received by the organization.”
“It wasn’t a turnaround where you have to go in and start to make wholesale changes to the business,” he said, noting that his focus has been on refining strategy rather than reinventing it.
Boatwright said he and Niccol, who runs Starbucks from Newport Beach, meet weekly for lunch to talk shop.
Facing Consumer Headwinds
Boatwright steps into the top job as both the restaurant industry and broader economy face growing headwinds.
Chipotle, the second-largest restaurant chain based in Orange County by annual systemwide sales, reported first-quarter revenue of $2.9 billion, up 6.4% from a year ago but short of analysts’ expectations of $2.96 billion, or 9.4% growth (see list, page 25).
Same-store sales, a key industry metric, dipped 0.4%, the brand’s first decline since 2020.
“The consumer is in good shape. They’re just not spending as much,” Boatwright said.
“Everyone in the world, and everyone I’ve talked to in the past three months, is trying to figure out, ‘Why is the consumer on the sideline?’
“I think it’s pretty simple. If you look at consumer confidence, it’s down pretty significantly year over year, and fear is at an all-time high with the consumer,” he said.
Chipotle’s last price hike came in December, a 2% increase to help offset inflation and the rising costs of goods and labor.
He said the chain is holding off on further pricing decisions.
“We’re not going to take price until we know for certain which components of the tariffs will be transitory and which ones are permanent,” he said. “And we will only do it at that point when we think the consumer is in the right place.”
And, right now, “I don’t think the consumer is in the right place.”
Broad Appeal—Rice, Beans and Chicken for Thousands of Years
With its recent expansion into the Middle East and plans to open its first restaurant in Mexico in 2026, Chipotle is betting it can succeed on the global stage much like its cross-county rival Taco Bell.
The fast-casual chain operates nearly 3,800 restaurants, including 91 international locations in Paris, London and Germany. The brand has ambitious store growth goals, aiming to reach 7,000 units.
For 2025, Chipotle plans to open between 315 and 345 new restaurants, maintaining an annual growth rate of 8% to 10%.
“If the 7,000 number doesn’t move, you could hit a point of saturation in North America in the next six, seven years,” Boatwright said. “So, the goal is to bring on international partners.”
Those partnerships will vary by region and market dynamics.
“Think equity-owned. That could be partnership or license, or that could be joint venture,” he said. “We will leverage the strength of the brand to drive the most economic value for Chipotle in each one of those regions.”
The chain, which owns most of its restaurants, said it will only bring on partners in markets where Chipotle thinks they might be slow to succeed with a company-owned store, Boatwright said.
Its current partners are Alshaya Group based in Kuwait and operator Alsea in Mexico.
Why does the CEO believe Chipotle will resonate with consumers abroad?
“At the end of the day, it’s rice, beans and chicken,” Boatwright said. “Rice, beans and chicken have been served across this globe for thousands of years, and I think we do rice, beans and chicken better than anyone else.”
Testing Innovations in Irvine
The former operations chief said improving the employee experience remains a top priority.
“You probably have heard me say in the past that the consumer experience will never exceed that of the team member, and so it’s my endeavor to make the job easier to be executed and allow the teams to be more efficient in-restaurant and remove the repetitive, mundane tasks that nobody enjoys doing,” Boatwright said.
Those tasks include “standing over five, six cases of avocados, cutting and coring and scooping” and frying “fresh chips every single morning for five hours.”
Many “collaborative robotics” solutions are being developed at Chipotle’s Cultivate Center, the chain’s innovation hub in Irvine. That includes the Autocado, a robot that cuts and peels avocados. First introduced in 2023, it returned to an Orange County restaurant this year after undergoing more testing and tweaks.
Also in development: a digital makeline for salads and bowls—about 65% of Chipotle’s menu mix—built in partnership with Hyphen. The automated system, which plates lettuce, protein and toppings, will be tested at a new store this summer after being updated for better speed and plating.
One challenge Chipotle hasn’t yet solved: chips. The robotic chipmaker Chippy by Pasadena-based Miso Robotics, unveiled in 2022, was pulled after testing and hasn’t resurfaced.
Less flashy innovation coming to kitchens include a dual-vat fryer, produce slicers (rolling out this summer), and dual-sided planchas—all helping to reduce manual labor and boost kitchen efficiency, Boatwright said.
Throttling Digital Demand
Chipotle has long been a digital standout, thanks to its best-in-class app, loyalty program and AI-powered voice assistants that handle phone orders.
The company’s second food prep lines, dedicated to digital orders, also gives the chain a distinct edge, Boatwright said, allowing restaurants to manage mobile orders without disrupting in-store operations.
“I think it’s a very strong competitive advantage that we invested in heavily back in 2016, ‘17 and ‘18, and set us up for what was to come,” he said, adding that digital sales rose close to 80% during COVID-19.
Digital sales have “settled in today between 35% and 40%.”
Another investment: the Chipotlane, a mobile-order-only drive-thru lane that keeps pickup orders out of the main dining area (see story, this page).
Chipotle has also leaned into AI to boost consumer demand and repeat frequency. Its app includes a decision engine that suggests menu items based on past ordering behavior. It also automates suggestive selling, flagging customers who might forget to add extras like drinks or chips before checkout.
The system also targets lapsed users with timely offers.
Since launching in 2018, Chipotle’s rewards program has grown to over 40 million members.
Still, there’s some restaurant tech that Boatwright hasn’t bought into such as in-store kiosks, commonplace at Taco Bell, McDonald’s and Panera Bread.
Boatwright held up his phone and said simply: “This is the kiosk.”
A Hole in the Wall Sparks Chipotle’s Digital Drive-Thru Revolution
Shortly after joining Chipotle Mexican Grill as chief operating officer in 2017, Scott Boatwright noticed the puzzling look on customers’ faces while observing a busy restaurant in downtown Denver—near the chain’s then-corporate headquarters.
“Consumers would come in and pick up their digital order, and they had no idea where to go,” Boatwright told the Business Journal during an interview at the chain’s Newport Beach-based office near Fashion Island.
Confused customers didn’t know whether to stand in a long line to fetch their pre-ordered food or to “cut the line” and skip ahead to the register, he noted.
So, the operations-minded executive grabbed a metaphorical sledgehammer and came up with an instant, and quite literal, solution.
“I ended up cutting a big hole in the wall of that restaurant into the kitchen,” he said. “I put a sign that said, ‘Pick up digital order here.’”
That scrappy MacGyver-inspired solution turned out to be a game-changer.
“Digital sales went up 20% overnight because we removed that pain point for the consumer,” Boatwright said.
More importantly, it planted the seed for the creation of Chipotlanes, drive-throughs dedicated for the pickup of mobile orders.
“How the Chipotlane came to pass was how do I continue to remove the pain points from the consumer and create access,” Boatwright, who replaced Brian Niccol as CEO last year, said. “And so, we decided, what if the customer didn’t have to get out of the car.”
The first Chipotlane opened in 2018, the same year Niccol, formerly head of Taco Bell, took over as CEO of Chipotle. What began as an operational experiment quickly proved its value, especially in 2020 when COVID-19 restrictions made contactless ordering and pickup critical to a restaurant’s survival.
Now, the Chipotlane is part of the chain’s development blueprint. Of the company’s over 3,800 restaurants, 1,116 have Chipotlanes. This year, Chipotle plans to open 315 to 345 new restaurants, and at least 80% will feature a Chipotlane. The chain opened 48 in the first quarter.
Other chains have since followed Chipotle’s lead. Sweetgreen, Shake Shack, Irvine-based Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A have all developed their own Chipotlane-inspired formats to accommodate growing demand for digital orders.
For years, the credit for the Chipotlane was largely
attributed to Niccol. Boatwright, who still meets with the Starbucks chief executive regularly, didn’t seem bothered.
“When you’re CEO, you get all the credit,” he said with a grin.