Chipotle Food Scare: Sales Drop Due To E. Coli Outbreak; Company Changes Cooking Methods To Address Issue

Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. saw its sales drop for the last quarter of 2015. The main reason for the decline is the food scare that occurred late last year.

According to BBC News, the fast food restaurant popular for its burritos, salads and tacos suffered a 44 percent decline compared to the same quarter of 2014 or a total of $67.9 million drop. "The fourth quarter of 2015 was the most challenging period in Chipotle's history," Chipotle's chairman and founder Steve Ells told BBC.

Ells believes that the new year of 2016 is also going to be difficult for the company as its image has been compromised by the E. Coli and norovirus scandal. Chipotle is going to focus on completely eliminating food risks in their restaurants.

The company has announced that it is going to make some changes in their cooking methods such as dipping onions in boiling water before getting chopped, shredding the cheese before delivering it to the restaurants, macerating certain ingredients like onions with lemon to kill microbes, and testing samples of beef and chicken before giving them to the outlets, according to Fox News.

Other changes in Chipotle's cooking methods include chopping some of the ingredients such as tomatoes and cilantro in separate locations from the stores for proper testing, replacing bowls with re-sealable plastic bags when marinating their raw chicken, and adding cilantro to hot rice to eliminate the bacteria.

The temporary closing of 43 Chipotle restaurants located in Washington and Oregon was also done to protect the public and allow the health authorities to investigate. The company is also facing several lawsuits from their customers who acquired E. Coli after eating in their restaurants. An analyst told Fox News that Chipotle's road to full recovery will take a long time because of the food scare and the panic spread through the use of social media.