Don't try to make a difficult conversation less difficult—but don't avoid having it, either.
One day you're crushing it. Delivering projects, sharing big ideas in meetings, making things happen.
Next thing you know, you're crushed. You feel lost, confused, and unable to find your way out. You've completely lost your focus, and you're just so exhausted.
Burnout generally happens after a prolonged spell of working as hard as you possibly can—either without being invested or engaged in the work (i.e., you're just calling it in) or because you intend to deliver above and beyond expectations. Both of these situations are problematic.
Feeling like you're personally contributing, connecting with others, leveraging your creativity—or whatever your role means to you—is an anchor for the work you do. It's why you do what you do. Without personal meaning, you'll start to wear down from relentlessly throwing yourself into the churn and pulse of things. You can't sustain this kind of disconnected, meaningless work for very long.
If you've made it your mission to work as hard as you can to exceed the expectations of your role and your organization, you're bound to fall into the habit of doing your work to please everyone around you and tick off all of their boxes. Always focusing on proving yourself and delivering in line with expectations will leave you struggling to keep up. It's exhausting.
There are different strategies to deal with and move through burnout, but the healing process (because this does require healing) often starts with one thing—telling your boss. Yes, I know that's a scary prospect, but here are some ways to get yourself ready for the conversation and prepare you to take positive steps forward to get past this tumultuous time.
Before talking with your boss, a great first step is to confide in a friend or speak with your partner or a family member about where you are and what you're feeling. The act of verbalizing what's happening, while difficult, is essential in starting to get the support you need.
Without the care of people close to you, you'll feel alone or anxious about dealing with it on your own. Just as I'm sure you'd want to help a friend or loved one, know that they want to be there for you, too. Be brave, swallow any pride that's holding you back, and open up about your breakdown.
Going into the meeting with your manager expecting it to be comfortable is unrealistic. You're in an unfamiliar, unwanted place, but rather than taking your discomfort and using it as a reason not to discuss your struggles, you should look at it as the exact reason why you do have to discuss it.
You can set things up by framing it as a necessary conversation: "I hope you know I wouldn't be bringing this to your attention unless it was necessary." Moreover, mentioning how hard the conversation is can be a useful way to call out the elephant in the room: "This is really hard for me, but . . ." or "It feels really hard to even bring this up, but . . ."
You may be used to going to your boss with updates that prove your problem-solving skills, but this isn't that kind of issue. You don't have to have the fix. You don't have to find a way to cover your workload if you're going to be out of the office, and you don't even need to try and explain how you got to this point.
Resist the temptation to offer a solution because you think it'll make you look good to your manager. The only important thing right now is that you start the healing process. That begins when you allow yourself to be vulnerable when you approach your boss without all the answers.
If you're a high achiever with inflexible personal standards, it'll be hard for you to put your work responsibilities to one side and prioritize your mental health and well-being. But that's what you need to do to start moving through this.
Go into the conversation knowing that, while your team will want to do what they can to support you, your boss will likely need to prioritize the work to keep everything moving along. That means you can expect some difficult conversations where you're pulled between doing the right thing for you and the right thing for the work. So let me be clear once again—your primary responsibility is to know what you need to start healing, then make the decision to follow through.
Listening to your body and hearing that voice inside that knows what you need means not sticking to your regular working hours out of a sense of duty if your boss seems reluctant to let you take a break from all work to recover. If time off isn't offered, be direct and ask for what you need—a regular work-from-home day, two days off, maybe even an entire week out of the office. It may be tempting to offer up compromises until you're ready to be back in the office full swing, but that's only putting yourself at risk and delaying the healing. So if you truly need a full two days off with no email—make sure you're making that clear.
In other words, trust yourself to make decisions that serve you well. And know this: If you've been a hard worker and a diligent, productive employee and your company cares about your growth and success, they will find a way to understand—no matter how busy things are.
Burnout can create a bubbling stew of emotion—feelings of not being good enough, like you should have been able to avoid it happening, that you'll lose all the hard work you've put in or that people will judge you—and it's sometimes hard to know which way is up. Your emotions can become unpredictable or erupt suddenly, especially when you start talking about where you are.
But these emotions are a real part of what you're going through; They aren't your enemy. You might find tears welling up or your breath sticking in your chest as you try to find the right words. That's okay. Emotion might not be a "normal" part of the workplace, but in this case, it's to be expected. You don't need to stifle them or push them away in the interests of "being professional."
So take all the time that you need to breathe and steady yourself. If it helps to diffuse the drama, even call it out by saying, "This is an emotional thing for me," or, "The emotion catches up with me sometimes."
It's not your fault this happened, and it can be a great learning experience (believe me, I know), but you won't learn any lessons overnight. For now, all you have to do is take the best care of yourself that you can, and trust that this isn't how it's going to be forever.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
One of the biggest obstacles in a depressingly drawn-out job search can be your own morale.
You've been applying to jobs for months, and while you've gotten an interview or two, nothing has panned out. What's worse—your annoyance with your current position has reached an all-time high. That, or maybe you're in between jobs and bills are looming.
Whatever the reason, you need an actual offer—ASAP.
Lengthy job searches can test even the heartiest of souls, but when you mix a tight internal timeline with slow external results, it's an even greater challenge. You have all the typical highs and lows of applying (waiting to hear back, facing rejection, dusting yourself off and trying again), and the added pressure to land that new role yesterday.
Here are two powerful perspective shifts to help you make it through.
Have you ever said something like: "I'll have a new job before the end of the month?" It's sounds helpful, but it's actually not.
That's because you're linking your goal to someone else's behavior (which is outside of your control). When you tie a deadline to something that's not within your power, you set yourself up to feel defeated if it falls through.
Instead, choose a goal based around something you do control. For example, "I will send out 10 applications by month's end." By connecting the deadline to your personal efforts, you give yourself the opportunity to feel successful just by meeting it—and that confidence boost can mean a lot during a tough search.
So, ask yourself, "What measurable action can I take that'll move me closer to landing a position at my dream company?" Whatever your answer is—stepping up your networking, reaching out to a career coach—tie it to a reasonable deadline. This way, your goals will bring you results and peace of mind.
Our brains have something called a "built-in negativity bias", which means our first impression of events is likely to skew negatively. For example, if you face one of the following (common) disappointments, your initial reaction might be to get down on yourself:
Situation: You send out several resumes and don't get any bites. Thought: "I'm clearly a terrible candidate because no one's responding."
Situation: You come in as the second choice candidate for two jobs in a row. Thought: This is too hard. I'm never going to get picked. I'm going to be stuck here forever.
Situation: Despite leaving early for an interview, you hit mega traffic and wind up arriving five minutes late. Thought: "I blew this already."
When you buy into these knee-jerk interpretations, it's easy to feel down about the way things are going. So take a beat, and recognize that with a little focused attention you can come up with a more helpful perspective.
Here's how those same situations could look after an effort to find the silver lining.
Situation: You send out several resumes over the course of a few weeks and don't get any bites. Thought: "The more 'at-bats' I take, the more likely I am to hit something."
Situation: You come in as the second-choice candidate for two job prospects in a row. Thought: "I must be doing something right to make it so far in the interview process."
Situation: Despite leaving early for an interview, you hit mega traffic and wind up arriving five minutes late. Thought: "Not the best start, but I can still make a great impression."
Yes, this is very Pollyanna, and you'll also want to make time to analyze what you could be doing differently to make sure you aren't getting in your own way; e.g., Are you blowing your final interview by bringing up salary too soon?.
But don't skip this pep talk and space to focus on the positive: That's what'll keep you motivated to keep trying. Can't find a sunnier angle? You can always ask a supportive friend, family member, or professional for help. Or, at the very least, be aware when you're jumping to negative conclusions. Just calling yourself out for that habit is a good reminder that often times, you're choosing to be pessimistic.
I hated my first job. And I remember vividly how I worried I be stuck there for eternity. In reality, I changed things up to a much better work situation in just a few years.
Things will change, both because of your own efforts and because change is a constant in this world. Maybe the change you want isn't coming as fast as you like, but it'll come. Keep your focus on the things you can most influence—your actions and your thoughts. You'll get a new job eventually. For now you just have to stay strong.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
Some companies are swapping the live format with one-way, recorded interviews. Can that give job seekers a leg up?
Imagine a job interview with no interviewer—it's just you, a computer, and a webcam, getting to know each other. Sound a little too futuristic to be true?
Well, for some companies, the future is here.
Take this as an example of what's to come: Last summer, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. did away with its traditional on-campus recruiting methods in favor of structured video interviewing. Instead of meeting with a recruiter in person, students interested in one of the firm's 2,500 summer and full-time analyst positions now had to complete the first round of interviews via video platform, HireVue, using their computer, tablet, or smartphone. Candidates answered a series of automated, preloaded questions, and their video responses were scored by recruiters.
After reviewing its hiring practices for the first time in over a decade, the company saw this change as an opportunity to reach more applicants.
Other companies see this automated interview step as a way to make the hiring process more efficient. "Scheduling interviews and going back and forth about availability takes up a lot of time," says Rick Jordan, head of talent acquisition at Zappos, which also uses this method. "Video interviewing is extremely flexible and convenient for the candidate. In fact, most responses came after 5 p.m. or on the weekends."
We also spoke with Matt Doucette, head of global talent acquisition at Monster—who uses video tools to vet hires for our company—to find out how you should prepare for these one-way video interviews.
Nobody wants to go through the agonizing process of completing an interview only to have all your thoughtful responses go to waste.
While you might think it's a given, double check that your microphone and webcam on your computer are functioning correctly. If you have the option to complete a practice run in advance, take advantage of that opportunity.
"Video interviewing is a modern, tech-savvy way to screen folks, but we receive many responses where we cannot see or hear the candidate, and sometimes both," says Jordan. "It sounds silly, but take a few minutes to ensure all your technology is working properly."
Once everything is in place, Doucette suggests propping your laptop up or sitting farther back from the camera to avoid giving your interviewer the "under-chin" view. Sit up, be attentive, and check your lighting.
And while you may not be traveling to the office for your interview, that's no excuse to not look your best, or at least your best from the waist up.
"The whole point of the video interview is to see you," says Doucette. "Be mindful of how you present yourself. Consider how you will not only sound but also look. I tender the same advice as for an on-site interview: Always wear a suit."
Also, your mom says you should clean your room—no seriously, you do not want to turn on your video interview and have the pile of laundry crumpled up on the bed behind you. Just because there's no one actually sitting in front of you, someone will be later (even if they're only viewing the video you) so act "as if."
Of course, the content of your interview should matter even more than your cleanliness. So, "know your material, have a list of highlights you want to cover on your background, don't over-elaborate, and allow time between points to give the interviewer a chance to respond," says Doucette.
Remember to still take a breath in between your sentences and show your excitement for the position you're applying for. Smiling every now and then doesn't hurt either.
"We want to see enthusiasm in your eyes and a real passion for the work you're interested in," says Jordan. "The interview is almost a snapshot preview of what it would be like to work with you, so command a presence you feel is an accurate representation and that you're proud of."
While you may be given two minutes to craft your response, don't feel as though you have to talk for that entire window—especially if longer will just mean you rattling off more achievements.
"To a certain extent, we want to use the video to understand how you deal with people and what you think your strengths are," says Doucette, "but don't use this video interview as a platform to talk about how great you are."
Instead, be concise and back up anything you say with concrete examples. Share what you've learned and gained from your accomplishments, rather than only sharing your accomplishments.
Even in a live interview, there will be some questions that you answer better than others, so don't fret if you feel you didn't nail every single response.
That said, if you feel that you aren't satisfied with how one of your answers is going, stop yourself, scrap it, and start over—most of the programs in this space let you do a take two. (If only you had that same option in the in-person interview!)
Not lucky enough to get a trial run? It's still okay if you screw up. Just own it.
"We want to review your best honest answers, so if you mess up, take a moment and say, 'Hey, I really screwed that up. Let me start over,'" says Jordan. "While being well spoken is important, if you mess up, you mess up. Admit it and move on."
This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.
Nate Regier grew up the son of Mennonite missionaries over the border from apartheid South Africa. Here's his take on productive conflict.
Conflict has a bad rap. Just think of the word. Ask people the first things that come mind when they hear it, and they'll often say things like, "run away," "somebody gets hurt," "I hate it," "fighting," or "war." Most peoples' negative associations with conflict come from personal experience.
Mine do, too. I grew up the son of Mennonite missionary parents. Mennonites are a Protestant denomination known for nonviolent conflict resolution. The early messages I heard growing up were, "Turn the other cheek" or "Find a way to solve your problem without resorting to violence." My parents dedicated their lives to building more peaceful and uplifting relationships with others.
So maybe I was fated to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology, a certification as a conflict mediator, and advanced training in communication methods to reduce conflict. I grew up in Botswana, which borders South Africa, during the latter's apartheid period, and later I worked in addiction treatment and marital counseling. For the past 12 years, I've drawn on that experience to help leaders rethink their attitudes toward conflict, which are often based around these four persistent misconceptions.
Don't confuse peace with tranquility. Don't confuse lack of shouting with the absence of conflict. I've known many families, churches, and other organizations that claim to be peaceful just because they don't raise their voices and "agree to disagree." Yet there's still a staggering amount of violence in these communities. Passive-aggressive gossip, manipulation, avoidance, withholding information, and power plays still rule the day.
Peace is an active, dynamic, and generative process that demands healthy conflict. If peace means we're getting along, cooperating, and not hurting each other, then we can't get there without addressing our differences and disagreements first. Diversity is a basic fact of human society—it always has been, from the very beginning. Embracing and working with it is the only way toward peace, and this involves a certain degree of conflict.
Conflict can be destructive, but it by no means has to be. Mythologist, poet, and psychologist Michael J. Meade believes that the purpose of conflict is to create. If we define conflict simply as a gap between what we want and what we are experiencing, then the real question becomes, "How are we going to close the gap?"
Conflict creates energy that can be either constructive or destructive—either it helps close that gap or opens it wider. Ford Motor Company used the energy of conflict amid the 2008 financial crisis to reinvent itself without taking bailout funds (though it did benefit from federal aid in other ways). For Wells Fargo, some of the energy caused by the gap between what the bank was earning and what shareholders wanted may have led to the latest scandal, with the company illegally signing up thousands of customers for services they didn't ask for.
Have you ever wanted something that you didn't have? You probably felt a real energy behind that discomfort, right? That's one way your mind motivates you to pursue goals. Have you ever solved a big problem or achieved a significant goal, and then felt a little let down afterward? It's because the energy of conflict was gone. The solution at that point is to set a new goal—create another gap, generate more conflict, and use it to achieve something new.
The problem with conflict reduction, mediation, and management philosophies is that they make conflict out to be the culprit. It isn't. Conflict is the source of energy. The real problem is the casualties caused by misusing that energy—by failing to channel it into something productive. But try and remove the conflict itself and you're likely to reduce your creative potential.
Many people believe compassion is all about empathy, sympathy, caring, support, and doing good for others. But the Latin root of the word means "to struggle (or even suffer) with." So sure, compassion definitely includes a heartfelt care for others, but that caring is translated into co-suffering. "Compassion" really means to get in the trenches with someone, suffering together, and sharing the difficult task of creating something amazing through conflict—not by resolving it. Compassion doesn't mean doing that work for somebody, rescuing them, or avoiding accountability.
Instead, compassion can be used to create mutual accountability with dignity and respect. In other words, being truly compassionate means caring enough to engage in creative conflict with someone. That's a powerful opportunity—why try to avoid it?
Dr. Nate Regier is the cofounding owner and CEO of Next Element, a global advisory firm specializing in building cultures of compassionate accountability. His book Conflict Without Casualties is due out next year.
Dozens of brands rely on Chef'd to run their meal kit businesses. Next, it wants to turn grocery shopping into something more like Netflix.
Meal kits are the Ikea furniture of cooking. They arrive in boxes as disassembled meals, with pre-portioned ingredients, step-by-step instructions, and some assembly required. And, recently, there's a version for absolutely everybody:
The New York Times cooking section launched its meal kit in July, for the crowd that wants to gently simmer a Beef Bourguignon to perfection and master other sometimes intimidating recipes pulled from the paper's cooking section without shopping for their ingredients. Around the same time, the American Diabetes Association (ADA) created a meal kit with recipes that meet nutritional guidelines for people living with diabetes.
Women's Health's meal kits, which arrived last year, promise "an emphasis on fresh produce, lean protein, tummy-flattening fiber, and whole grains" that "will satisfy your cravings without weighing you down," while Men's Health assures its meal kit customers that its recipes will make "meals that satisfy your gut without expanding it."
Weight Watchers makes a "point friendly" meal kit, and rather than dwelling on the absence of berries, dairy, legumes, fruits, and whole grains in phase one of its diet, Atkins encourages its disciples to order the ingredients for its Baked Meatballs and Green Beans, or its Herbed Mahi-Mahi Fish En Papillote.
But if you follow all of these meal kit boxes back to the warehouse that shipped them (or in many cases, read the box), you'll find just one company: Chef'd.
Like brands that popularized the meal kit idea—Blue Apron, Plated, and HelloFresh—Chef'd, based in El Segundo, California, believes that meal kits can be a big business. One food consulting firm estimated that category will account for $3 billion to $5 billion of the online food shopping business in ten years But unlike these other startups, Chef'd isn't trying to build an identity solely around its brand. Instead, it wants to build an Amazon-like store that houses meal kits for every lifestyle. Its website tagline is "The First And Only Meal Store."
"I call it the Denny's," says Chef'd CEO Kyle Ransford. "You're drunk at 2 a.m. and you go to Denny's so you can point at the picture and say, 'I want that.'"
Ransford, 44, and his team have built not a cooking club but a fulfillment company that turns anyone's recipes into a meal kit. It aims to be the grocery store of the future—one where recipes, whether posted by Atkins or Hershey or your personal trainer, serve as ordering slips, and all of the products come in just the size you need.
"Make sure she wears a hairnet," someone yells from across the street to the man who opens the door for me at the Chef'd's Brooklyn fulfillment facility. Since Chef'd took over the facility seven months ago from a now defunct "virtual farmer's market" startup called Good Eggs, it's painted the exterior to match the company's bright orange logo and paid to have it tagged with graffiti. "We're in Brooklyn," explains Ransford, who wears two hairnets. One, in blue, matches mine. The second, in white, covers his scruff of a beard.
Scrums of workers are busy portioning ingredients into tiny bags for Chef'd meals. One group of women scoop a red powder by the teaspoon into tiny plastic bags, gather the spice at the bottom with a shake, and then fold and seal with a yellow sticker. The air smells like Curry.
Kyle Ransford
Before starting Chef'd in February 2014, Ransford had founded a bank and a real estate company. He and his co-founder, Jesse Langley, were shopping for their next business idea and looked into starting a meal kit service like Blue Apron or Plated. Initially they thought they could outsource the actual packing and shipping to someone else. But when they searched for a company that could fill orders on their behalf, they didn't find one.
"Nobody had a grocery store in the sky, in essence, where you had all these individual items you could pick from in a way that was in pre-portioned, like you would need to make a specific meal," Langley says. "That supply chain hadn't been created, and there wasn't a formula out there." This seemed like the real opportunity. Ransford and a friend, Chris Grauny, provided 90% of Chef'd's initial funding themselves (online grocer FreshDirect has invested in Chef'd's first round of funding, which so far totals $21 million).
It was, and remains, an ambitious project. ""It's not so hard to put up a website and send people an email that says buy this," Ransford says, "When you need to get 60 pieces of food, make sure it's the right size, make sure the tomato is perfect, put it in a box—than it gets harder."
Most meal kit companies meet this challenge by selling subscriptions: customers sign up to receive a set number of meals each week, which they can choose from a limited weekly menu. This allows fulfillment facilities to plan ahead, ordering just the ingredients they will use in a week's recipes. Rather than scheduled shipments, what Chef'd has in mind is to allow anyone to order any recipe at any time, which requires inventory of virtually every ingredient that you'd find in a grocery store, pre-packed in the tiny size you'd need to make a single meal.
Back in 2014, Ransford, Langley and Chef'd's third cofounder, Jason Triail, ran a pilot with 30 recipes that they fulfilled on-demand from a test kitchen in Manhattan Beach. After they moved into a 40,000 square-foot warehouse near Los Angeles in March 2015, they ran a pilot for Indiegogo backers with 35 recipes from 15 brands. Then they began to expand their repertoire. Every time they added a new meal, they began stocking a new ingredient in their warehouse, which they would have on hand for new recipes that called for it. Today, Chef'd offers on-demand meal kits for more than 300 recipes. It ships "hundreds of thousands" of servings per month.
Some of its partner brands, like the New York Times and vegan meal kit company Purple Carrot, sell subscriptions via Chef'd that lend themselves to an assembly line packing procedure. But most recipes it fulfills on-demand, which involves a process that looks more like Amazon's fulfillment warehouses, with workers retrieving the ingredients for each order from various shelves and bins.
At the Brooklyn facility, Ransford gives me a tour of these various shelves and bins. He stops in front of buckets filled with fast food-style packets of ketchup and honey.
"If you go to the store, the honey bear you buy is this big," he says, miming a giant pot of honey with his hands. "It's like, how old is that honey in there before you get to the end of it?" (Perhaps this wasn't the best example—honey never spoils—but you get the point.)
Typical grocery store sizes, like a honey bear, he says, "were made for when families cooked 20 out of every 21 meals at home." His theory is that buying ingredients in the size needed for cooking just one meal fits better with today's variety of fast casual restaurants and endless delivery services, options that have made it easier to avoid cooking. Millennials eat out more often than older generations, and Americans now spend more money at restaurants than at the grocery store (though part of this is due to falling grocery store prices - restaurant growth has slowed since 2007).
Next to the tiny honey packets are little bags of white sugar that look like a movie prop version of cocaine, and sample-sized pots of jam. If a new recipe involves sweets, Chef'd doesn't need to find a supplier before it can offer it on its site—it already has the ingredient on its shelves. "We will go from stocking the ingredients in recipes from the New York Times' [weekly subscription] recipes," he says, "to stocking 10,000 ingredients that will make any recipe in the New York Times."
When I go shopping on the Chef'd website for the first time, I choose a Men's Health Steak Au Poivre recipe that serves two and costs $34. I find it by choosing a "gourmet" option from the website's menu. At the time, I am feeling fancy. I could have also chosen "quick and easy," which would have led me to options like Mongolian beef (two servings for $35) and Shrimp Fettuchine Pasta (two servings for $36). At checkout, Chef'd adds on a $10 delivery fee, bringing my two portions of steak up to $44 (Chef'd comps delivery on orders over $40).
Blue Apron, which offers free shipping, charges $9.99 per serving for its two-person plan; Plated charges $12 per serving; and HelloFresh charges between $8.75 and $9.90 per meal. Chef'd meals don't have a consistent price, but dinners for two range from $7.50 per serving (Kid's Mac and Cheese) to as high as $24.50 (NYT Cooking's Braised Halibut with Asparagus). The median and mean prices are both around $15 per serving.
That's not cheap. One reason so many of Chef'd meals cost more than competitors' meals may be its smaller scale. Blue Apron, a company with 4,000 employees, already delivers more than 8 million meals per month while Chef'd delivers less than 1 million. When I visited Chef'd, the company had 108 employees and 160 temp workers (it says it has "150 full-time equivalents"). Scaling isn't always a graceful process: A Buzzfeed article recently detailed violent, unsafe, and high-pressure working conditions at Blue Apron's Richmond, California facility. Ransford says that his brand partners send auditors to the Chef'd facility, and the company does not appear in the OSHA violation database.
Ramsford says his model will ultimately be more waste-efficient than the subscription model because it can use ingredients in multiple recipes rather than ordering food for one scheduled shipment and throwing away the extras. But his prices don't yet tell that story, and it's just as easy to imagine the other scenario: "If you buy inventory and hold on to it and hope that someone shows up to buy it from you before it goes bad, there's a lot of waste," says Blue Apron's CEO, Matt Salzberg about the Chef'd model. (Neither Chef'd nor Blue Apron brings up the waste problem they have in common: the enormous amount of packaging required to deliver their products).
"They have to stock so much inventory," says Sucharita Mulpuru, the Chief Retail Strategist at the retail and e-commerce event organizer Shoptalk about Chef'd. "They have different kinds of chicken. Different cuts of beef. Lamb. Shrimp. Different fish. That's a nightmare from a storage standpoint, purchasing standpoint, shipment standpoint. That makes it difficult to get consistency in size of boxes you're going to send, how much packaging you need."
It's too soon to say which model is a better business. Ransford says Chef'd customers want unlimited choice rather than the set menu options offered by companies like Blue Apron ("That is fun for a while," he says. "Then it's like, why are you picking the there things that I'm eating? And why do I have to learn how to cook something new three nights per week?"), while Blue Apron's Salzberg argues that customers enjoy trying new things ("customers like curation," he says.) Similarly, Ransford argues that people don't stick with subscriptions ("You are not building a brand, but making something people quit."); Salzberg denies to comment on how many people stick with their subscriptions ("Our customers who stick with us adapt Blue Apron to their lifestyles. They order week after week after week, and it becomes the way they cook dinner for their families.")
Mulpuru also doubts that either Blue Apron or Chef'd can ever compete with grocery stores. "These guys are using the most expensive method possible to get food to a consumer's home, she says "To put it in a box and put ice packs in it and send it to someone's house, which is so much more expensive. It's adding costs for the customers, and customers have told us time and time again that most of them value money over the time. They would rather do the shopping themselves to save money."
Though it might never be able to compete with grocery stores on price (unless you do the math like Ransford does, by assuming you'd throw away a lot of what you bought at the store), Chef'd has achieved at least one advantage over its subscription-oriented peers. When partners outsource their meal kits to Chef'd, Chef'd effectively outsources its marketing and customer acquisition to them.
Many brands see meal kits as a branding opportunity. In Atkins' case, the company wants to help people stick to its diet, not only because its executives believe the diet to be good for people (a constantly debated claim), but because Atkins' business revolves around selling shakes, bars, and frozen meals to people who are following the diet—and it has a harder time selling them to people who have fallen off the wagon. The company has created free digital trackers; meal plans and shopping lists; and more than 1,600 recipes in an effort to help customers stick with its diet. Meal kits are another tool in its arsenal.
When the brand's kit launched earlier this month, it advertised it to its more than 600,000 Facebook fan and its internal database of people who have signed up to learn about the Atkins diet. Chef'd pays every recipe creator a $.50 per serving royalty fee when a customer chooses one of their recipes, but in exchange they get advertising worth many times that.
When New York Times it launched its subscription meal service with Chef'd this summer, it devoted the back page of the paper to an ad. "They probably spent half a million dollars in media in the last three, four weeks," Ransford says.
Chef'd meanwhile, makes about $20 on an average order of $70, while collecting its partners' customers at a relatively low cost of about $10 per person (it does not include the $.50 royalty fee it pays to brands in this number). And once they're in the Chef'd system, customers don't necessarily continue to buy from the same brand that brought them there. Ransford says that 40% of people who bought a Weight Watchers subscription from Chef'd also bought an a la carte item, for instance. "Once you've gotten the box and tried something," he says, "it's less about the brand. When someone comes back, it's more, I want chicken teriyaki tonight."
"We of course don't spend a lot of time mentioning to brands that their brands don't matter," he adds. "but they probably matter less than they think."
As Chef'd pays some brands a royalty fee in exchange for free advertising, it charges other a fee for sample distribution. Food companies have long used recipes to market their products (i.e., Nestle's famous Toll House cookies recipe). Providing a use case encourages customers to try a product. But this strategy has a fatal flaw: There's nothing to stop someone from using Ghirideli chocolate in a Nestle cookie recipe. Chef'd solves this problem by sending product samples to its customers with not just a recipe, but all of the ingredients, right in the box. Companies are willing to not only provide free products toward this effort, but actually pay Chef'd $5,000 per recipe to do it. Thus, Chef'd now offers Hershey's S'more's Cookies (8 servings for $20) and No-Bake Toffee Fudge Bars (8 servings for $27) alongside its meals. It's a new way of turning food into a marketing tool. Next year, Chef'd will be selling a widget to brands that allows customers to order their meal kits directly from their sites.
But Chef'd has no intention of becoming a sample distribution center. It wants to build the capability to fulfill any recipe's ingredients, anywhere online. The startup began its branded meal kits by partnering with celebrity chefs that wanted to extend their brand into home kitchens. Then it partnered with food and health brands, like the New York Times Cooking and Atkins. But eventually, it wants to partner with you.
"You can put in grandma's meatball recipe," Ransford says. "The trainer at the gym will put up his recipes." Langley, who no longer works on Chef'd day to day, tends to be more whimsical about its mission. He imagines it like Pinterest, "where you can share your food with a community and establish a network around food" and "spread the flavor and love of Sarah's Great Grandma's Meatball Recipe."
In the Chef'd vision, as customers buy more and more of their food from Chef'd, the company will be able to send them to recipes that better fit their lifestyles, similar to the way that Netflix recommends movies or Amazon recommends books. Do you have kids? Do they need lunches? Do you like to eat healthy? Does your family eat pork? Chef'd will know, and it will provide recipes accordingly.
"You're probably not buying one serving of peanut and jelly and bread," Ransford says, "but if you're only cooking two or three nights at home and then you're getting delivery or take out meals a couple of times per week, and you're going out a couple of times per week, it's just a more efficient way to shop for those meals [that you make at home]."
In 12 to 18 months, Chef'd plans to have an inventory of 25,000 ingredients—basil portioned into eight different sizes, pre-cut single servings of chicken and beef, tiny bottles of fish sauce—at which point, it will be able to fulfill hundreds of thousands of recipes. When you navigate to Chef'd, it will have already picked out what you might want for dinner. And while you're browsing your favorite cooking site or your personal trainer's blog, you won't have to wonder where to find black garlic or plan a trip to a grocery store. You'll just click "buy now" and the ingredients will come to you. Heck, maybe they'll be delivered by drone. "We become the button that is the impulse buy," Ramsford says.
My $44 bright orange box filled with steak arrives on a Wednesday—or at least, that's what the note on the door tells me when I get home from work. The next day I work from home so I can receive the package on FedEx's second delivery attempt. The doorbell doesn't ring. The steak delivery gets rescheduled for the next Monday, before which a Chef'd customer service agent will call me to offer a new box. In the meantime, I go to the grocery store to buy a chicken breast and a bagged salad.
You probably shouldn't be the employer everyone wants to work for.
To keep their edge in an intensely competitive hiring climate, some companies are trying to make themselves more attractive employers. In many ways, that's understandable. Building an employer brand can create the sizzle that brings as many candidates as possible through your door. This is a mistake.
There's no doubt that attracting talent is important. If you can't do it, positions will remain unfilled, and the top people in your field will go to your competitor. But attracting the right talent is what really matters. Most companies already agree with this in principle, but many still overlook the fact that the goal of recruiting isn't more candidates—it's more of the right candidates. And their recruiting practices are still geared more toward the former than the latter.
Effective employer branding both attracts and repels. Do it right, and you may actually have fewer candidates applying to open positions, not more. But they'll be making more informed decisions about your organization, so they'll be likelier to go through the full interview process and ultimately accept an offer. In this case, less really is more.
A traditional recruiting funnel has a narrower top—you rope in applicants through job boards, recruiting agencies, and the like. Employer branding tries to widen it by adding more vehicles for influencing would-be candidates' awareness and sentiments toward your company. Because most employer branding efforts are designed to influence positive sentiment, this means your entire recruiting funnel gets much bigger.
And that puts pressure on your recruiting team. It clogs the system with candidates that may not have opted in if they knew more about the work environment, warts and all. These candidates will likely connect the dots as they go through the interview process and withdraw (bad), or they'll connect them after they've joined and then leave (terrible).
Those are bad enough, but over time, the strain of dealing with undesirable job applicants—and the risk of making bad hires as a result—can damage the very reputation you worked so hard to build in order to attract them in the first place. Candidates can leave feeling misled, and they'll happily share their bad experience with their peers—which can lose you talent and customers in one fell swoop.
The goal instead should be to appeal to more informed candidates. Accurately convey the culture, job responsibilities, and growth paths you can offer new hires. Share the work styles that are the most effective in your organization. This increased awareness creates a narrower yet better entry to your hiring funnel. Potential candidates who don't connect with those things can opt out before applying.
There's no utopian employer out there with a culture that's perfect for everyone. We all have different drivers and motivators when it comes to our work—what we like to do and how we like to do it. One person's dream job is another's nightmare.
While Amazon felt the Times story was unfair, the company didn't pretend it was a laid-back, low-key workplace, either. The company launched a pilot program in September offering certain teams 30-hour workweeks and more flexible schedules, but Amazon was careful not to frame that as any kind of amends making. Embracing a work environment some might consider undesirable was brilliant employer branding.
In other words, Amazon knows perfectly well that Amazon isn't right for everyone, but that the right person can thrive there. Candidates who don't want that culture for themselves can opt out, while those who do can opt in.
Embracing and sharing who you are as an employer and what you provide employees is key to creating "sticky hires"—people who take the offers you make. If you've been forthcoming in your employer branding and recruiting process, by the time you reach the offer stage, your acceptance rates should be stellar.
Why? You've already talked openly about things like compensation, career path, company growth and ambitions, internal conflicts, work-life balance, and so on. There are no surprises. A candidate is making their decision with eyes wide open.
The details and information you share with this approach are likely all things a new employee will soon learn on the job. If you've sold them something that doesn't exist—or artfully buried that little internal conflict that's going to make it tough for them to succeed in the role—they're going to leave, and you're going to have to recruit all over again. You're creating a vicious cycle that will cause your recruiting engine to break down and your reputation to suffer.
Be open and honest. Let the best candidates for you find you, and let the others seek jobs elsewhere—you won't be missing out.
Lars Schmidt is the founder of Amplify Talent, a recruiting and branding agency that helps companies like Hootsuite, NPR, and SpaceX reimagine the intersection of culture, talent, and brand. He's also the cofounder of the HR Open Source initiative. Connect with Lars on Twitter at @thisislars
Here's how this Buffer engineer quickly faced her fears about managing people she felt were better developers than she was.
It feels ridiculous for me to write about being an engineering manager. It's a job I've done for not even 30 days yet. But that's what I want to know from others—how did you start? How did you make it through your first month?
No two first rodeos are ever alike. But they're all rodeos, and falling off is falling off. There's some kind of pattern. So here I am, writing the post that I want to read. And in my first month in a new management role, I've found these to be the three things I've had to sort out above all else.
I had a rough idea what I was getting into from the internal job description, but there's a chasm between "Help build deep fulfillment and ensure the personal growth of team members" and, well, doing that.
So I went on something of a crusade to understand what exactly I should do. I asked engineers at Buffer, "What do you think makes a great engineering manager (EM)? Where do you think I fall short?" I am so grateful for the honest answers of my peers—it allowed me to develop a clear sense of how I need to grow. I stalked people on Twitter and LinkedIn, cold emailed them, and asked them how they survived the switch. "What was your rookie error?" became my pickup line.
I'm continually astonished at how helpful the world generally is. I've met up with incredible people whom I'd thought wouldn't give me the time of day. I've found this awesome Slack community where I can see, in real time, a smorgasbord of management scenarios unfolding and people of experience, the very kind of people I want to become, give their advice. There is such treasure, if you care to dig.
From my own experience, I certainly remember times when I knew what I wanted from a manager, but didn't feel I could speak up and ask for it. So I've decided to ask a very simple question: "What is something that I can do for you over the next week to make your work life better?"
I quickly learned that this is a solved problem—the help is there. I just had to ask.
This is tough. When an engineer switches to management, the team loses an engineer. That puts a damper on team velocity and morale, but doing two jobs at once is infeasible. Having a handover and transition plan was my first task. It's a real challenge to figure out who can take over the work you do in a team that's already lean. And let's face it, there's never an "extra engineer" twiddling her thumbs.
I got really lucky here: Half my team (non-engineers) took a vacation as I made the switch, so there was a natural lull while I Googled "how to be an engineering manager." Then I got another break: A product team happened to be disbanding, and there was someone ready and excited to take over. I dodged a very difficult quarter.
Think about your old responsibilities—don't just walk out. If there's really no one to step up, then schedules will slip. Realize this, and make sure others realize it, too.
This was the scariest thing I had to do. Before jumping into a first meeting with an engineer whom I admire greatly, I was decidedly fretful, and definitely anxious throughout. What did he think of me? Was this a huge waste of time? I shudder at the opportunity cost.
After that first video call, it hit me that although I thought he was awesome, I'd given zero recognition. Realizing why I held back calling out good work was a key moment for me: I didn't feel qualified to praise this engineer. I felt that my opinion didn't matter; that he'd think I was an idiot for praising something he'd done that was no big deal. It would be like praising Dan Abramov for writing a todo app in React.
Once I understood and named that fear, it went away. If I was better at coding than the engineers I managed, then I'd be writing that code. But I'm not. That's exactly why I'm managing!
I'm better at encouraging and unblocking. I think that's when the idea of "servant leader" started to click.
I am there to sort out all the stuff that stops engineers from focusing. Make the processes smooth. Make sure they find their work interesting and challenging. Make sure they are having the biggest impact that they can. Understand who they are and what drives them, and line that up with what the team needs. Tell them when I think they did something great. Ask them why they did something that falls short of our quality bar—maybe there was a good reason. Maybe I can help. I don't have to be able to do their jobs better than them. They're the experts, and they should be.
I still don't know what my biggest rookie error is, though. I guess that'll be a subject for another post.
An earlier version of this article originally appeared on Buffer. It is reprinted with permission.
Embrace, which makes baby incubators, was down to a week's worth of cash before finally cracking the "one-for-one" model.
Two years ago, Jane Chen, whose nonprofit had saved thousands of children's lives, almost went bankrupt.
Her organization, Embrace Innovations, had designed a breakthrough product: a high-tech sleeping bag that keeps premature infants alive, for 1% of the cost of a traditional hospital incubator. With 20 million newborns born underweight every year in poor villages in South Asia and Africa, Embrace's low-cost incubator quickly won praise from everyone from the White House to TED.
To make and ship its baby warmer, Embrace had done what all nonprofits do for funds: Plead for donations from foundations and philanthropists. But with 1,097,689 public charities in the U.S. competing for cash, and only 8% of donations going to health-related nonprofits—a field the Red Cross dominates—this wasn't easy for the fledgling Embrace team.
Many nonprofits spend the vast majority of their donations on administrative costs like executive salaries and fundraising. The Cancer Survivors' Fund, for instance, spent 89.6% of its funding last year on trying to get more funding. And small nonprofits notoriously have a harder time raising money as efficiently as big, well-known organizations like the Humane Society or the Red Cross.
Despite Embrace's accolades, chasing donations was yielding mixed results. So Chen decided to try an alternate funding path: a business model popularized by companies like TOMS Shoes and Warby Parker, called "one for one." Instead of seeking donations, she would form a for-profit company to sell Embrace's baby warmers to governments and hospitals around the world, and then use the profits to fund the company's nonprofit arm. For every incubator a village or hospital purchased, Embrace would give one to a community that couldn't afford one for free.
"One-for-one" advocates promote the model because it puts the amount of funding—and the good that an organization can do—in an organization's own hands. For example, VisionSpring, a nonprofit that gives prescription eyeglasses to needy people around the world, has quadrupled its output since it started working with Warby Parker, the for-profit eyeglass company that uses "one for one" to put glasses on people who need them.
However, as Embrace soon discovered, the model also has flaws. Indeed, the list of dead companies once heralded as shining examples of "one for one" is much longer than the list of those that still exist. In fact, none of the model's advocates I interviewed for this story could name anyone other than Warby or TOMS as examples of its success.
Embrace warmer[Photos: courtesy of Little Lotus]
"The 'one-for-one' model is a mixed bag," says VisionSpring founder Jordan Kassalow. Those organizations "can be very impactful and important . . . [but] they often tend to be shortsighted."
That became the case for Embrace by 2014. Most of the company's paid contracts at the time were with government agencies in India, and a rash of executive changes by India's newly elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, caused Embrace's contracts to evaporate overnight. The for-profit suddenly found itself with a week's worth of cash left, putting the nonprofit in jeopardy as well.
Shivamadamma with baby wearing the Embrace warmer.
Then a miracle happened. Nine months prior, Chen had bumped into a man at a meditation retreat who enthusiastically congratulated her on Embrace, telling her that his own child had been born prematurely in California. The man turned out to be Marc Benioff, the billionaire CEO of Salesforce.
With seven days of cash left, Chen sent him a desperate email, explaining the situation and asking if he had any connections that could help them. Benioff was on a family vacation in Hawaii. He replied with a one-line email: "Jane, I will fund your company. Aloha."
Little Lotus Swaddle
Benioff invested some personal money into Embrace's for-proft business, and the company pivoted again. This time, Chen realized the secret to Warby Parker's and TOMS's success where other "one-for-one" companies had failed. Instead of selling and donating baby warmers to the same communities worldwide, Embrace created a new product for a different market.
Chen used her warming technology to develop a "swaddle" for newborns in developed countries. The product, Little Lotus, claims to help babies—healthy and sick alike—sleep an average of four extra hours per night. Little Lotus sales began to fund the creation and distribution of Embrace warmers in India and elsewhere.
Looking back, Chen says Embrace's original "one-for-one" attempt created a "huge conflict of interest." How could a for-profit and nonprofit peddling the same product to the same types of people not cannibalize itself? The new approach, she says, "is much easier because it's a completely different product. Totally different market. Everything is different."
Chen found Little Lotus to be a more universally needed—and therefore marketable—product than the incubator for preemies had proven to be. And because the for-profit didn't sell the same thing it was donating, it eliminated the inherent conflict of interest that hurts many "one-for-one" companies.
Unlike standard corporate philanthropy (U.S. companies give some $18 billion a year to charity, though only 10% of them give more than a nominal amount), purpose-driven companies like Embrace have doing good built into their operating economics. (Coincidentally, Salesforce itself did this from the beginning. In 2000, Benioff declared that a fixed percentage of the company's equity, profit, and employee time would go toward "making the world a better place." The charity budget doesn't get cut if the company has a bad quarter.)
In an era where consumers want to do business with values-driven companies, baked-in philanthropy pays off. By one measure, some 85% of millennial consumers say their buying decisions are influenced by whether or not a brand does good. More and more these days, that's likely true of all consumers.
Chen thinks that the baked-in charity model is something that can work for a lot more businesses. Right now, only a small fraction of all charitable donations come from for-profit companies. But they may be in a better position to do a lot more than they may think—and it might make good business sense, Chen believes. "If we could create a movement where customers are demanding it," Chen says, "that's what is really going to change the game."
Expressing dissent doesn't mean risking your job—unless you go about it the wrong way.
You don't have to accept every assignment your boss adds to your plate, nor do you have to hold back your dissenting opinions. Many employees worry that challenging a supervisor might damage their work relationships or even threaten their jobs. And in some cases, rightly or wrongly, those fears are justified.
More often than not, though, companies benefit from assertive employees (including junior ones) who offer fresh ideas, and good managers understand that. To do their own jobs well, many supervisors depend on their direct reports' valuable feedback—just as long as it's delivered respectfully and for the right reasons. Here's a quick guide to disagreeing with your boss productively.
The best way to make sure your views come across tactfully is to deliver them on a basis of shared respect. If you're new to your team, that means putting in the work to establish strong relationships before speaking up. Workplace disagreements can be very constructive if everyone involved trusts one another.
That's true of employee-supervisor relationships, too, and the things you should do to build that trust are pretty obvious: Strive to always meet your deadlines and deliver high-quality work. Be reliable and present, showing up to work on time and putting in the extra effort when it really matters. Perhaps most importantly, do all of this with a positive attitude. This way, when it comes time to differ, you'll already have laid the foundation to do it constructively.
Don't just voice your disagreement right out of the gate—preface it with a positive remark. You can start with a compliment or observation about something that's working really well. Then acknowledge that you have some concerns, too, and offer suggestions on how you think those concerns might be best addressed. It's also okay to raise those concerns and then offer to brainstorm some solutions together. That will indicate that you're committed to thinking through this problem collaboratively, rather than just nitpicking or pointing out a fault for your boss to go about correcting alone.
No matter what you say, it's crucial to watch how you say it. Because you and your boss probably both care about the work you're both doing, it's natural to expect your boss to have some strong beliefs about the right way of doing something. This can lead to disagreements escalating into heated arguments.
So when you do have a disagreement to voice, think before you speak, then speak calmly when you do. Avoid using tones that communicate anger or annoyance, or rude body language like an eye roll or crossed arms. This is basically common sense, but in the heat of the moment, when you're anxious to apply the brakes on something you see differently, it's easy to forget. You don't want to offend your colleagues or supervisor—you want to win them over.
Your supervisor is much more likely to consider your objection valuable if you have data to back it up. Disagreements based on opinion may hold some value, but you won't "win" that argument every time. So before you enter a meeting or begin a big project, familiarize yourself with any relevant history, metrics, or stakes that may have an impact. If you find that you need to gather research before you can confidently share your views, make that clear rather than resorting to speculation.
If you approach a disagreement firmly set in your beliefs, you won't show your boss that you can be adaptable and think critically. Genuinely listen to any counterpoints, and try to put yourself in his or her shoes if the situation calls for some extra perspective. Then allow yourself to change your opinions or ideas based on new information. This flexibility isn't just a key to heading off a potential argument, it's essential to problem solving—which is ultimately the whole point of speaking up in the first place.
Inevitably, you'll need to concede some disagreements to your boss now and then, even if you sincerely believe their approach isn't the best. It's important to know when to back down in these situations and be able to move forward.
Should the ideas lead to a project failure, never resort to "I told you so." Remember: A constructive, forward-thinking outlook is the basis for you being able to express differing opinions in the first place, and you don't want to undermine it in the future. You're all on the same team, and you want to support each other's goals.
Despite your best efforts, disagreements can sometimes get away from you. Before you know it, the situation has deteriorated and one or both parties come out upset. If this happens, it's not the end of the world (or your job!). But it's important to handle the aftermath appropriately. Reflect on the conversation and determine if there was room for improvement on your behalf. Then make a thoughtful apology to anyone you want to clear the air with—your boss, especially.
Tess Pajaron has a background in business administration and management. She currently works at Open Colleges, Australia's leading online educator, and writes frequently about careers, marketing, and leadership.
You have an idea or objection you want to raise, but that might be risky. Should you speak up or bite your tongue?
We all know that person: The one who can never seem to bite his tongue. He feels an overwhelming urge to speak up with a correction, no matter how unimportant or minuscule it might be.
You could say, "Wow, the sky sure is blue today," and he would immediately clear his throat and respond with, "Actually, I think the right word for that would be teal." It really doesn't matter what exactly you say—that person is going to chime in with his or her two cents regardless.
You know that guy, right? And, chances are, you find him completely obnoxious. So, understandably, you'd like to do everything you possibly can to avoid being just like him.
Typically, that's pretty simple. But then those circumstances arise that make things just a little bit trickier. Perhaps your boss keeps referencing a wrong statistic during a team meeting. Or maybe one of your coworkers is misunderstanding a guideline for a project she's working on.
You don't want to interrupt, cut that person off, and seem like a condescending know-it-all. But is that worse than letting someone move forward with incorrect information?
Knowing when to voice a correction and when to keep your lips zipped can be a challenge. So, in those moments when you're deciding between the two, consider these four questions. They should help you choose your best course of action—and help you avoid coming off like "that guy."
There's more than one way to do anything. And, just because someone isn't doing something the exact same way you would do it doesn't give you a free pass to speak up and attempt to right the ship.
So before chiming in, ask yourself if you're planning on sharing an actual fact or just your opinion on a certain matter. If you're attempting to set the record straight on an incorrect number or the proper pronunciation of your name, for example, you're definitely justified in offering a correction.
But, if you're only going to step up on your soapbox and enlighten everybody with your personal insights and judgments, you're usually better off biting your tongue.
Riddle me this: Do you want your plumber passing along advice to a brain surgeon? Probably not. Now, if you needed to fix a leaky sink or a toilet that won't stop running, the plumber would likely be the first person you look to for advice and guidance. But, that doesn't mean you're going to trust her wisdom on absolutely everything—particularly things that are outside her area of expertise.
It's human nature: We're much more inclined to listen to advice and criticism (not to mention respect it) from people who seem to have some authority and credibility in that particular area.
So, press pause to go ahead and ask yourself whether or not you have some real valuable insight to offer. In those cases, it's usually worth voicing your thoughts. But, if you're only speaking up to hear the sound of your own voice and appear involved, well, you already know it's in your best interest to stay mum.
In a similar vein, you'll want to give some thought to whether or not a situation actually concerns you. Does it directly relate to your job or your work? Or is it something way out on the periphery that actually has very little to do with you?
Of course, there will be those instances when you need to speak up about issues that aren't immediately tied to you. However, in most cases, you're better off reserving your criticisms and directions for things that directly concern you or your department.
After all, it's important to remember that if an issue doesn't immediately involve you, you might be out of the loop on a lot of the important details—making you all too likely to voice an irrelevant correction without having all of the necessary background information. That approach just makes you look like the nosy coworker who's sticking his nose where it doesn't belong.
Finally, here's the biggest—and perhaps most important—question you'll want to ask yourself when choosing between speaking up and shutting up with your correction: What's the worst-case scenario if you keep your mouth shut?
If it's something small that ultimately has little to no effect, there's really no problem with keeping your correction to yourself. Believe it or not, nobody else will likely care that Suzanne used Heading Two when she should've used the Heading Three style for the subheads in that monthly report.
But, if it's something major—such as a big miscommunication about a client's needs or the fact that Jason's about to burn down the entire break room because he left the coffee pot on—it's probably best that you do what you need to do to raise awareness and resolve the issue. When in doubt, weigh the outcomes. That should give you a pretty clear idea of your best course of action.
Nobody wants to be that obnoxious know-it-all who's always ready and waiting to jump in with his unprompted two cents. But at the same time, you don't want to be the person who allows big problems and errors to just slip by under the radar.
Knowing when to offer a correction and when to bite your tongue isn't always easy. However, asking yourself these four questions should take some stress out of the decision—and help you hang on to your suggestions for those situations when they'll really carry some weight.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
After a series of food-safety incidents that began in the latter half of 2015, customers have their doubts about the safety of Chipotle's food.
Is it now safe to eat at Chipotle? After a series of food-safety incidents that began in the latter half of 2015, including outbreaks related to E. coli, norovirus, and salmonella, once loyal customers of the Mexican-inspired restaurant chain still have their doubts.
Throughout my research for our new feature on Chipotle, which charts the company's internal struggles as it attempts to revive sales and consumer trust, I encountered countless numbers of people who wondered whether they could return to eating the restaurant's food without worry of getting sick. This lingering concern can be seen in the company's financial performance: Chipotle lost nearly a third of its sales after the food-safety crisis. Morgan Stanley surveyed customers in January 2016, in the immediate aftermath of Chipotle's E. coli outbreaks and before the CDC closed its investigation, and found that just 41% of customers considered the chain a safe place to eat. That percentage ticked up in a subsequent study in June but not enough to resemble anything close to a full recovery. "When 50-some-odd people contract E. coli, and you realize that you were responsible for that, it really—shooooooo," says Chipotle co-CEO Steve Ells, deeply exhaling. "Justifiably, people really question our trust. You lose that trust. For how long? We're working really, really hard to get that trust back."
Multiple industry experts tell me that Chipotle did not take food safety seriously enough or invest sufficient resources into quality assurance (QA). "When this [outbreak] first broke, the leadership at Chipotle, and I include Steve and [co-CEO] Monty [Moran], were completely sideswiped and didn't know what the hell they were doing," says one source familiar with Chipotle's food-safety measures. "They had not really considered food safety at the level that they should have."
Before its E. coli incidents, a slew of sources tell me that the food safety and QA team overseeing the company's entire supply chain included just four people, a low number for a chain of Chipotle's scale and complexity. The company also split its safety teams, which some suggest created arbitrary divisions of responsibility within the organization. Heidi Wederquist, then Chipotle's director of QA and food safety, oversaw supply-chain issues, but had little visibility into restaurant operations. Conversely, Tim Spong, who knew Moran in college and served as outside counsel for Chipotle before joining the company, managed safety, security, and risk at the restaurant level. "There is no way a team that small could properly manage all the food coming into that system," says one former analyst at the company, who now works for a chain much smaller than Chipotle but with a QA team that's twice its size. Chipotle spokesperson Chris Arnold disputes the visibility claims but confirms the rest, adding that the team was "strengthened" with additional hires after February 2016 and that the two groups have now been merged under Spong's leadership. (Additionally, Jason Von Rohr, Chipotle's executive director of supply chain, who was responsible for sourcing all of Chipotle's ingredients, departed shortly after the E. coli outbreaks. Multiple sources indicate he had been planning to leave Chipotle and his departure was not a result of the outbreaks. He has since joined Amazon.)
Originally, Chipotle followed the guidance of food-safety scientist Mansour Samadpour, who runs the Seattle-based consultancy IEH Laboratories. He'd initially focused the company's food-safety program on a mix of supply-chain testing and what are called "interventions" or "kill steps," which work to eliminate pathogens from ingredients. For example, he introduced blanching produce to Chipotle, a kill step whereby Chipotle workers put lemons, limes, onions, avocados, and jalapeños into 185-degree water for five seconds before preparing them for customers.
When Chipotle hired James Marsden in February 2016 to be its director of food safety, he shifted the company to adopt more of these interventions, while winding down Samadpour's testing system. He expanded the company's blanching system, for example, to include bell peppers.
One of Marsden's first acts was to create an ordered list of the riskiest ingredients on the restaurant's menu. At the top of his list? Chipotle's beef. Though there likely wasn't one smoking gun that caused the outbreaks, in terms of particular ingredients, sources indicate Chipotle had narrowed its investigation to a select few items, including onions, cilantro, and beef. Cross-contamination was likely, but because the company's E. coli outbreaks were limited to around 60 infected people, some food-safety sources suggest it was more than likely Chipotle's beef was the original culprit that carried the E. coli, since it is a cooked item (unlike, say, cilantro), which may have reduced how widespread the outbreak could have been.
Whatever the case, Marsden decided to move the preparation of beef off-site to the company's central kitchens, where workers precook or precut certain ingredients and sanitize them before shipping them off to individual restaurants. For steak, this involves cooking the meat by heating it in a sealed bag in a water bath at 133 degrees for around seven hours, so it becomes rare or medium rare. Once it is shipped to individual restaurants, crew workers sear the steak and reheat it to 145 degrees.
Similarly, for Chipotle's newest menu item, chorizo, Marsden added a new pasteurization method called "high-hydrostatic pressure processing," or HPP. This entails sterilizing the chorizo, at other off-site facilities, by blasting it with 87,000 pounds of water pressure for three minutes. Marsden says the HPP practice has long been used for "things like sliced turkey breast, prepared salads, usually foods that are in the ready-to-eat category."
What complicates Chipotle's safety story is that it is trying to strike a balance between its brand promise of fresh ingredients and in-store preparation, and its new one to be the safest fast-food place to eat. Although the company considered precooking its chicken at its central kitchens, too, it decided that it was too much of a logistical and financial challenge given how much poultry Chipotle serves. (Chicken constitutes 55% of its restaurant sales.) So crew workers are still handling raw chicken at its stores. Likewise, the company, which briefly moved the preparation and sanitation of lettuce to its central kitchens after the outbreaks, has since returned heads of romaine to its stores. How can it do this without risking another outbreak? For the lettuce at least, Chris Arnold, the Chipotle spokesperson, says the company has introduced a new "multi-step washing process" to reduce the risk of pathogens. Marsden boasted to me how Chipotle's lettuce is safer now because it implemented what's called "harvest testing," meaning that it is tested in the field before being shipped to suppliers. But this is a baseline standard in the industry; the company was already doing harvest testing before the crisis. Marsden has also rolled out more stringent in-restaurant safety protocols, including more worker and restaurant audits and inspections.
Marsden has also unveiled his own testing system, to replace the solution initially implemented by Samadpour, the outside consultant from IEH Laboratories (who has since stopped working with Chipotle). This new system centers on "routinely" verifying the efficacy of Chipotle's intervention requirements. Rather than having suppliers take and test more frequent samples of raw beef, for example, they can now test at far fewer intervals because the meat is precooked; they're primarily doing this to ensure that kill steps, such as the sous-vide process of cooking steak, are working properly.
The company has suggested that it is now "doing more testing than we have ever done," as Arnold tells me. Upfront, this new testing system requires resource-intensive validation studies, to ensure that the entire system is functioning correctly. But after these studies are performed, the company's food will undergo substantially less food testing than it was under Samadpour. As with Samadpour's testing program, there are complicated pros and cons to Marsden's system, but as one neutral food-safety observer says, "If you're in a courtroom and you listen to both sides of the argument, it's hard to say that anyone is 100% correct. It's all wrapped up in a lot of academic infighting and politics."
This infighting is not purely academic. According to four sources familiar with the situation, Heidi Wederquist, Chipotle's director of QA and food safety, disagreed with the direction of the company's program. She has since departed Chipotle to join Samadpour's IEH Laboratories. Her second in command, Chipotle's former QA manager, followed her to IEH as well. (Arnold says he cannot comment on the reason for Wederquist's departure. Wederquist did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this matter.)
Certainly it's safer than before. But following the outbreaks, Steve Ells, Chipotle's founder and co-CEO, indicated to the public that the company would soon be 10 to 15 years ahead of the restaurant industry in terms of food safety. The program Marsden developed, centered on interventions, is a strong system, industry experts say, but it's not exactly revolutionary. Kill steps are common in the restaurant industry, as is the type of testing Marsden adopted. If anything, this new food-safety system has raised questions about how fresh Chipotle's food remains today.
The efficacy of Chipotle's food-safety system is still left, to an extent, up to its crew workers, who are expected to properly wash items such as its lettuce; properly blanch much of its produce; properly handle and cook raw chicken; and properly follow in-restaurant hygiene protocols, such as hand washing, temperature logs, and other food audits. These 60,000 crew workers make an average of $10 an hour and the average Chipotle restaurant sees its headcount turn over at least once a year.
For that reason alone, as the company has acknowledged, Chipotle can never be fully certain that another outbreak won't occur, even as its safety measures have substantially improved since before the crisis. "We can be as near certain as possible," co-CEO Monty Moran says. "But the food-safety guys will tell you you can never be 100%."
Which of these promising fast-casual brands will be the next big success?
When Steve Ells started the first Chipotle restaurant in 1993 in Denver, at the former site of a Dolly Madison ice cream parlor, the 28-year-old Colorado native couldn't imagine that his take on a Mission-style burrito joint would one day upend the fast-food world. Ells wasn't a businessman with a particular acumen for scaling operations; he was a chef who put his heart into every onion he sliced, every pork shoulder he braised, and every meal he served. In the early days, he didn't even think to write down Chipotle's recipes on paper: He'd verbally convey them to all new hires, working shoulder to shoulder with them over pots and pans and cutting boards as they learned what made this restaurant unique compared with conventional, automated chains like McDonald's and Taco Bell.
Back then, the concept of "fast casual" didn't even exist. But as Chipotle blossomed over the past two decades, growing from a single storefront to more than 2,000 locations, so has its premium model of serving fresh, responsibly sourced ingredients in a refined dining environment. Since a series of food-safety incidents diminished Chipotle's customer base and its luster in the last 12 months—the subject of our special investigation on the company—it's worth taking stock of how radically the industry has transformed since Ells arrived on the scene. Consumers will no longer settle for any dated roadside eatery or cheap-looking chain; their tastebuds now elevated and their expectations higher, they're increasingly spending their dollars with brands that claim devotion to a higher calling—what Ells refers to as Food With Integrity. "Steve is a force: He invented the whole fast-casual thing," says restaurant consultant Kenny Lao. "Every [new client of mine] always says they want to be the Chipotle of X."
Walk around the corner from Chipotle's downtown Denver headquarters, and you can witness this revolution firsthand. On 16th Street, a popular pedestrian mall in the Mile High City, you'll find a mecca of refreshing fast-casual upstarts, all just a Yelp search away from Chipotle's own area location. There's Noodles & Company and Tokyo Joe's; Smashburger and Larkburger; Garbanzo Mediterranean Grill; Green Fine Salad Co. and Mad Greens; Juice Kitchen and Modern Market, among many others. Chain restaurants are quintessentially American, and entrepreneurs have been inspired by the likes of Ells. They're also in the fashion business, and for a long time, Chipotle set the trend for others to put their own twist on.
In this slideshow, we've complied a list of some of the more promising fast-casual brands that have popped up around the world. This is neither a comprehensive list, nor is it an endorsement or ranking of chains that we believe will grow to be as successful and culturally impactful as Chipotle. But they represent the disruption Ells has brought to our food system—not to mention the wildly improved and expanded offerings we now all have for lunch, typical fast-food chains be damned.
"It's great, isn't it?" Ells tells me when I ask what this increased competition means for Chipotle. "Certainly we're not going to feed everyone, every single meal. Other people are going to have to do that too. But wouldn't it be great if the public had more access to really good quality raw ingredients?"
Chipotle Mexican Grill was a sizzling business with a red-hot stock until an E. coli outbreak derailed its future. Can a mission-based company make gobs of money and still save the world?
Chipotle's annual shareholder meeting on May 11 was set to be a doozy. Angry activists and investors were poised to unload on the restaurant chain's co-CEOs, Steve Ells and Monty Moran.
Just two weeks prior, Chipotle had reported a $26.4 million quarterly loss—its first in a decade as a public company—following a high-profile E. coli outbreak and several subsequent food-safety incidents. Nearly one-third of restaurant sales had disappeared, and the stock had sunk by 30%. An attempt to shake up the company's board of directors was almost certain, reports said. Its "failures," as one major investment adviser had phrased it, "damaged the brand and erased billions in shareowner value." Ten billion dollars since its peak, to be precise.
I arrive at Denver's Grand Hyatt hotel shortly before 8 a.m. The meeting space, a windowless conference room, is surprisingly small and awkwardly intimate, with just three rows of nine chairs facing a cloth-draped table. Apparently, this is standard for Chipotle's annual meetings, as is the fact that the proceedings are closed to the press. (I find my way inside by showing that a mutual fund in my 401(k) includes Chipotle shares.) As board member Kimbal Musk strides to the front row, he surveys the tiny room and jokes to another director about how this setting pales in comparison to the elaborate events that his brother, Elon, throws for Tesla's shareholder meetings.
Ells and Moran march in minutes later and take their seats at the table. "Good morning," Ells says, coffee in hand. Moran quickly runs through the agenda and other formalities. He soon opens the floor to questions. One of Chipotle's harshest critics, CtW Investment Group's Michael Pryce-Jones, stands and berates the company's CEOs for nearly two minutes. "You've gone from a beloved brand to one that's been unprecedentedly abandoned," he scolds. Comparing their recent blunders with Volkswagen's emissions scandal and BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he implores the board to "seriously consider resignations."
The two CEOs remain stone-faced. Moran replies, "I think the best plan of action for us at this point is to focus like a laser on the things that have made Chipotle so popular over the years, most notably running terrific restaurants with great food and great customer service." He tries to move on to another question, but Pryce-Jones interjects to press his case again. Moran shoots him a grave look and cuts him off, saying: "That's the answer."
The tongue-lashings continue. A codirector of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, an advocacy group for restaurant-industry and supply laborers, calls Chipotle's leadership "nonresponsive" and demands better treatment of the people who provide its food. There are complaints about executive salaries—Ells and Moran together took home $57 million in compensation in 2014, more than the total pay packages of the CEOs of Apple, McDonald's, Nike, and Goldman Sachs combined—and the lack of diversity among its directors. Chipotle's board is all-white, with a median tenure of 17 years.
Many of these appeals are not new. Some of the people here are perennials at Chipotle meetings, arguing similar agenda points year after year. Today, though, they're delivered with renewed vigor—as if this time, after all it has been through, maybe Chipotle will finally listen.
After 37 minutes, Ells ends the meeting. No one resigns. There are no changes to the board. Most votes had already been cast before the meeting, and the majority of investors supported management's wishes. The only victory for dissatisfied shareholders? A resolution that will give anyone who owns at least 3% of the company's stock the ability to nominate their own candidates to the board.
As I watch Ells smile for a photo (with one happy shareholder in attendance) before he makes a hasty exit, there's a sense that Chipotle management just went through the motions at this meeting. They certainly haven't used the opportunity to try to win back former supporters.
For years, enlightened restaurant-goers, shocked and horrified by Fast Food Nation, pink slime, and the evils of Big Food, have felt an almost religious pull to Chipotle's "Food With Integrity" mission—its commitment to fresh ingredients, ethical sourcing, and disrupting the fast-food model—as if eating at a Chipotle could nourish your soul as well as your body. The company grew from a single storefront in Denver in 1993 to around 2,000 locations, becoming the envy of the industry for its premium ethos (and pricing), as well as innovations like its theatrical-yet-efficient assembly-line service. Chipotle became a go-go growth stock. If you had bought 100 shares at Chipotle's 2006 IPO price, it would have cost $2,200; by the time the stock peaked in 2015, just before the outbreaks, that stake would have been worth $75,700, a 3,340% increase.
The E. coli bacterial outbreak, which became national news as reports of sickened individuals streamed in during the fall of 2015, shattered everything. It wrought devastation far beyond the 60 people who fell ill. (Norovirus and salmonella incidents bookended the E. coli poisonings and ultimately brought the total number of customers affected to 500 people across 14 states, but Chipotle feels those episodes were isolated cases.) An average Chipotle serves 60 customers in 30 minutes. On any given day before the crisis, Chipotle serviced the equivalent of the population of Philadelphia. No one knows definitively which ingredients may have been the culprit. But each burrito includes one ounce of romaine lettuce. So, if those leafy greens carried the bacteria, that means about five $2.50 heads of grocery-store lettuce erased more than $10 billion in market cap. Or if cilantro was the source, then about as many cups of it as you'd find in a cookout-size batch of guacamole.
When a listeria outbreak caused by Dole's packaged salads was linked to four deaths last year, the public outcry was not nearly as intense or sustained (despite an ongoing federal investigation). When Tesla reported its first driver fatality while using its Autopilot feature last June, it didn't affect the company's stock price at all. Why were these deaths only blips for Dole's and Tesla's reputations? By contrast, Chipotle spent a year in hell even though no one died—and more than 265,000 Americans get sick annually from illnesses linked to E. coli.
It's understandable, perhaps, that some Chipotle insiders feel the company has been unfairly judged—by health regulators, the media, and its own customers. Yet Chipotle has had no choice but to grapple with the reality that its prestige status has evaporated. And there is no obvious road map for gaining it back.
Despite Ells and Moran's posture in the shareholder meeting, this crisis has rocked their faith. "Steve and I live for this company. We are deeply about our mission," Moran says when we meet in late June. "For something like this to happen shook the foundations of our confidence... it causes one to question one's leadership."
I spent seven months following the company's efforts at recovery. The journey took me from rural farms to industrial kitchens, from the hotbeds of Chipotle's outbreaks in Massachusetts to its fan festival in Arizona, from a summit of food-safety experts in Illinois to the company's corporate offices in Colorado and New York. I talked to scores of restaurant employees—and I ate more burritos than I can count (never once getting sick). I interviewed the co-CEOs, other top executives, current and former employees, suppliers, and food-industry partners, and I reviewed more than 1,000 pages of internal documents. The story that emerges from all this is provocative and unexpected, a tale of optimism, hubris, bad luck, and missed opportunity.
Chipotle has said it won't be satisfied until it's regained all of its lost sales and resumed its momentum. It has pledged to continue to refashion the food system. As a longtime customer, I want to believe them. Everyone wants to believe them. But as I learned, what's ailing Chipotle is more pervasive and insidious than any foodborne illness. For Chipotle to win back all it has lost will require a soul-cleansing broader than perhaps even Ells and Moran realize.
An early E. coli victim gets a call from a health official: "Did you say Chipotle?" [Illustrations: Nicole Rifkin]
On October 19, 2015, Jared Hines, a 21-year-old college senior, went to a Chipotle restaurant near downtown Seattle for dinner. He ordered a chicken burrito with white cilantro-lime rice, black and pinto beans, pico de gallo, corn salsa, cheese, and lettuce. He scarfed it down and thought nothing more of it.
Four days later, pain seized his 6-foot-3, 160-pound body. A 101-degree fever. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Then things got worse: "I had blood pouring out of me from every orifice," he tells me.
His parents rushed him to the hospital, where doctors, assuming he was reacting to a recent bout of mononucleosis, prescribed antibiotics.
Hines remembers coming to in a hospital bed days later, surrounded by his parents, his girlfriend, and a doctor who explained that he was "rotting from the inside." Hines had contracted a strain of E. coli, known as 026, which was spewing a harmful toxin into his body and essentially shutting down his internal organs. The antibiotics he'd been prescribed likely accelerated the toxin's release. His weight had dropped to 145 pounds. Kidney failure, even death, were very real possibilities, the doctor said.
A nurse arrived soon after to hand Hines a telephone. It was a local health official asking where and what he had been eating. Hines, still frail and depleted, wracked his brain to list off recent meals and restaurants. Then the voice on the line perked up. "Did you say Chipotle? We need you to remember your order right now."
Chipotle executives say they learned of the first E. coli cases from health authorities on October 30. Soon, dozens of people showing symptoms of E. coli poisoning were linked to eight restaurants in Washington and Oregon. Because the company serves 1.5 million customers per day across the country, they quickly realized that if the outbreak was more widespread, it could be catastrophic. "It was really frightening," says Moran, who remembers thinking, "My goodness... was [this] really us?" Recalls Ells, "It all caught us off guard. Nothing like this had happened. The magnitude..."
Over Halloween weekend, Moran and Ells made the decision to shut down 43 restaurants in the Pacific Northwest in an effort to contain the outbreak. Chipotle's stock price, which had hit $757 just weeks earlier but had been showing volatility surrounding a weak fall earnings quarter, slid to $624 on Monday, November 2.
The company scrambled to get ahead of the crisis. It brought in food-safety scientist Mansour Samadpour, who runs a Seattle-based consultancy. He helped the company eventually run thousands of tests on Chipotle's food, searching for indicators that it had been contaminated. Moran himself took Samadpour on dozens of unannounced restaurant visits around the country to examine operations. "It was just all hands on deck," says Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung.
To some restaurant workers, it felt like chaos. One manager recalls receiving urgent word one day from superiors that their cilantro was contaminated. "They told us not to put cilantro on anything and throw it all away, in all the restaurants," this source says. "Then, an hour later, they're like, 'False alarm! No need to do that.'"
Boxes of meat sit on a table inside a Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant on November 3, 2015 in Vancouver, Washington, one of the stores closed in the Pacific Northwest in the immediate wake of an E. coli outbreak.[Photo: Steve Dykes/Stringer/Getty Images]
Throughout November and December, Chipotle says its testing found no traces of E. coli 026 within the restaurants or its food. Because the bacteria's effects are delayed, the tainted food was likely already gone from Chipotle's system not long after the first illnesses were reported. To an audience of investors, Chipotle blamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for stirring up public alarm about an issue it felt was contained. "[The panic has] been fueled by the sort of unusual and even unorthodox way the CDC has chosen to announce cases related to the original outbreak in the Northwest," Moran told attendees of the Sanford C. Bernstein Consumer Summit on December 8. "They're not announcing new cases. They're just simply announcing new reporting to them from local health agencies." A CDC spokesperson says that this is standard practice.
Chipotle says that not a single employee was infected, which led to watercooler talk of Chipotle being a victim of corporate sabotage. Many sources, even respected luminaries in the food industry, have suggested to me that Monsanto, the agribusiness biotech giant that became a target of Chipotle's vociferous stance against genetically modified foods, could have somehow engineered this crisis. (Ells has dismissed this to colleagues in private as a "conspiracy theory." A Monsanto spokesperson says, "There's a lot of misinformation about Monsanto online, and this conspiracy theory is an example of that.")
Both Chipotle's and the CDC's investigations were further complicated by their struggle to isolate ingredients within the meals that victims ate. Many of Chipotle's menu offerings contain the same ingredients and are often prepared in small kitchens, so cross-contamination was likely. "The problem is you can't find someone who didn't also eat the beef, or didn't also eat the lettuce," explains a senior CDC official. "The case went cold."
Years earlier, Chipotle had announced a partnership with a company that makes a food traceability program, designed to assist with exactly this type of investigation. The provider, FoodLogiQ, purported that its software offered "real-time visibility of food" at every point in the supply chain, akin to how a consumer can track an Amazon package online. A 2014 case study of the Chipotle–FoodLogiQ deal even touted how the system could locate the origin of spoiled food within minutes. Despite these claims, Chipotle never got around to implementing FoodLogiQ at its restaurants. (Chipotle spokesperson Chris Arnold says the FoodLogiQ installation was a multiyear process, which was on track and has since been completed; he says its partial implementation did not impede the company's investigation.)
The CDC concluded its investigation February 1, declaring that the "outbreaks appear to be over." It did not publicly identify a cause. According to sources familiar with the inquiries, Chipotle narrowed its focus to a select few items, including onions, cilantro, and the beef it imports from Australia. Ells declines to share his theories on what spread the E. coli. "It would be irresponsible for me to say what thing might have caused it because we can't say definitively," he explains. "Having a very scientific analysis of this is different from having an opinion of what it might be."
But that didn't mean Chipotle could afford to sit by and call the outbreaks a fluke. With no single culprit, its entire food-prep process came under scrutiny.
Chipotle relies on 60,000 mostly low-wage workers to properly sanitize, dice, and cook ingredients, but turnover is high. "By the time someone learns how to handle a knife and not stick their hand in their ass before handling food, they have left," says one source.
Ells's vision for Chipotle always prioritized fresh ingredients and preparation. "When I created Chipotle in 1993," he has said, "I had a very simple idea: Offer a simple menu of great food prepared fresh each day, using many of the same cooking techniques as gourmet restaurants. Then serve the food quickly." Walk into any Chipotle and you'll see that model humming. As many as 16 employees will be staffing the line and kitchen. Customers queue up, sometimes hundreds per hour, and choose among four meal items—burritos, burrito bowls, tacos, and salads—and sides, all made from just 64 ingredients. (By contrast, a Big Mac alone contains more than 70.)
Ells, an epicurean who worked in the early 1990s under legendary chef Jeremiah Tower, not only obsessed over culinary craft—he claims he can tell the temperature of a Chipotle grill simply by eyeing the smoke rising from it—but also every aspect of his customer experience. Despite his slight build and introverted personality, Ells can be demanding in his pursuit of exactitude and, according to former colleagues, prone to Gordon Ramsay–esque outbursts. Once, on a restaurant visit, Ells lost his cool when he heard how much racket a set of new stools was making when dragged against the floor. "They're too damn noisy!" he yelled at his team, according to two sources. "I never want to see one of these stools again!" It didn't matter that he'd approved their design, or that they'd already been shipped to around 50 stores. (Arnold, the Chipotle spokesperson, says, "I am not aware of this incident.")
As Chipotle has grown, its operation has evolved to be anything but simple. The company purchases 185 million pounds of what it considers responsibly raised beef, pork, and chicken annually. The raw meat it prepares at its restaurants—as opposed to the highly processed, often-frozen goods that other fast-food outlets serve—must be handled and cooked properly, or else potentially harmful pathogens will blossom. Much of Chipotle's produce has traditionally been prepared at its stores too. "We would go through millions of pounds of cilantro! That's such a dangerous item—so many nooks and crannies where E. coli can hide," says one former Chipotle supply-chain executive. "As much fresh produce as they deal with"—Chipotle goes through more than 200,000 pounds of avocados daily—"in retrospect, I can't believe somebody didn't raise a red flag. Did their volume catch up to them?"
Before the crisis, the chain had relied on 60,000 mostly low-wage workers (the average hourly pay is $10 per hour) to properly sanitize, dice, and cook ingredients such as lettuce, avocados, tomatoes, as well as raw chicken and steak. Chipotle has an annual turnover rate of 130%, meaning the average store will replace its entire head count at least once per year. "By the time someone learns how to handle a knife and not stick their hand in their ass before handling food, they have left," says a source familiar with Chipotle's food-safety program. Now consider that Chipotle opens more than 200 new restaurants annually, or the equivalent of about one every 48 hours. It once hired 4,000 new employees in a single day.
Because of Ells's high standards and insistence upon preparing pork and some beef through time-consuming techniques such as braising, Chipotle has had to employ the same third-party, industrial-scale "central kitchens" that work with fast-food giants such as McDonald's and Subway. The term is sort of a euphemism Chipotle uses for these outside partners, which help the company handle, distribute, and even source some of its ingredients.
Before the E. coli outbreak, multiple sources tell me that this blended operation—centralized and in-restaurant kitchens, with food from scores of global suppliers being shipped to both—had just four people assigned to quality assurance (QA), a low number for a chain of Chipotle's scale and complexity. (Arnold confirms this figure, but says the team was "strengthened" with additional hires after February 2016.) "The way the supply chain was set up, they had hundreds of [suppliers] that were funneling in [raw meat and fresh produce]," says one former analyst at the company, who now works for a chain much smaller than Chipotle but with a QA team that's twice its size. "There is no way a team that small could properly manage all the food coming into that system."
The kitchen theatrics that Ells has deftly used to promote his food's freshness to customers—the sizzling plancha, the tortilla grill—obscured that it was less safe than conventional fast food. The company had disclosed this fact to investors long before the crisis. In its 2013 and 2014 annual reports, it acknowledged: "We may be at a higher risk for foodborne-illness outbreaks than some competitors due to our use of fresh produce and meats rather than frozen, and our reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation."
With customers fleeing, Chipotle's executives prioritized safety at the expense of its food and service. "Customers thought we went to iceberg lettuce," Moran says. "That broke our hearts."
Reactions, overreactions, and playing the blame game.
ln the months following the crisis, the company, advised by Samadpour and also Dave Theno, the food-safety expert often credited with saving Jack in the Box after its 1993 E. coli crisis, set about overhauling Chipotle's approach to food safety. But how would it make improvements without resorting to automation like its rivals? "If food is processed—like canned or frozen—you can reduce the risks of pathogens," Ells tells me. Chipotle didn't want to do that.
With customers fleeing (and some who remained, joking, "Can I have my burrito without E. coli?"), Chipotle's executives prioritized safety at the expense of its food and service. "There was no balance," Moran says, in reference to the company's quick decision to outsource some items to its central kitchens that it had long prepared fresh in its restaurants. When I mention Moran's comment to Ells, he says, "We didn't have a choice."
Samadpour assisted Chipotle in instituting a food-safety program designed to keep pathogens out of the food chain altogether. It included what Chipotle called "high-resolution DNA-based testing." Chipotle evaluated samples of, say, raw beef for genetic markers that it might be unsafe. For every 2,000 pounds of meat that went through its system, Chipotle's suppliers would take 60 subsamples, at around six grams each, and send them to a lab for review. If they passed this quality test—each of which cost roughly $35 and took around 24 hours to complete—the meat would be routed to Chipotle's restaurants. For produce, this meant the preparation of ingredients such as tomatoes, lettuce, and bell peppers had to be moved to central kitchens, where they would be precut and washed, sampled for testing, and "put in bags so they were ready to use [once shipped to restaurants]," Moran says.
During this period, the company still relied on its Daily Food Safety Checklist, a large document that predated the outbreaks, which the company sent to restaurant managers. In a letter included on the second page of the document, Moran said he expected managers to fill it out "correctly and accurately every day." Moran, who has been friends with Ells since Boulder High School and joined him at the nearby University of Colorado, is a handsome and charismatic outdoorsman with a firm handshake—"Mr. America," as one former employee phrases it. After graduating from law school, he rose to become the head of the Denver-based law firm Messner Reeves LLP in his thirties before joining Chipotle, where he brings an attorney's focus on detail to these types of internal employee guides.
Monty Moran's prefatory letter in the Daily Food Safety Checklist (inset) distributed to stores.
Following the outbreak, there was renewed emphasis on the checklist's requirements, such as hourly hand-washing in 100-degree water for 20 seconds ("sing 'Happy Birthday' twice," the instructions read) and crew audits, which entailed asking all employees whether they showed symptoms of illness, including vomiting or diarrhea. Additionally, the company now tasked general managers with completing food-temperature logs every hour—that is, ensuring the chicken and beans are properly cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees. "All we did [after the outbreak] was take temperatures," a former general manager bemoans.
Area managers, meanwhile, now had to conduct their own food-safety audits weekly rather than every 45 days. In an email to managers chastising them for not submitting their audits on time, Mike Duffy and Gretchen Selfridge, who effectively act as co-COOs for all of the company's restaurants, wrote that "your only job right now is to ensure all new procedures and food-safety practices are being executed 100% of the time in 100% of your restaurants." With so much time spent focused on these audits, one former restaurant manager says, "Attention to service took a back seat and it became more about how we protect ourselves from further incidents."
In spite of these measures, in early December, another outbreak hit a restaurant, in Brighton, Massachusetts, near Boston College. Early reports suggested E. coli poisoning may have been to blame, but it turned out to be norovirus. (The outbreak ultimately infected 143 people.) Shortly thereafter, the CDC announced that five more people had been infected with E. coli "and appear to be linked" to Chipotle stores in Kansas, North Dakota, and Oklahoma. Although these cases were unrelated to the larger E. coli incidents that initiated the crisis, all consumers heard was that eating at Chipotle will make you sick. The reports snowballed to create "the impression that, 'Oh man, this keeps happening,' " Moran says. Same-store sales dropped 14.6% for the quarter versus this same period the previous year.
Executives blamed the press for fanning the controversy: Moran told Wall Street analysts at the Bernstein conference, "Because the media likes to write sensational headlines, we'll probably see when somebody sneezes that they're going to say, 'Ah, it's E. coli from Chipotle' for a little bit of time. And so that's unfortunate." In an effort to reassure the public, the company took out full-page ads in 61 newspapers to apologize and highlight new safety precautions, including the company's ongoing implementation of high-resolution testing. Ells appeared on NBC's Today show on December 10, where host Matt Lauer grilled him about whether the chain had grown too fast and "couldn't keep control of things like sourcing and quality control." Ells denied that was the case. "If you look at the quality of our ingredients over time, we've made great strides in sourcing better-quality food, meats without antibiotics or growth hormones, more organics, more local and sustainably raised foods," he said. "I'm deeply sorry this happened, but the procedures we're putting in place today are so above industry norms that we are going to be the safest place to eat."
In January, not long before Chipotle's stock dropped below $400, the company sent managers a new "Food Safety Rollout Guide" to highlight the changes that would be phased into Chipotle's supply chain. The week of January 4, the guide said, fresh oregano would be replaced with a dried alternative. On January 11, the company introduced blanching of produce: Chipotle's lemons, limes, onions, avocados, and jalapeños would now be plopped into 185-degree water for five seconds—a so-called kill step that eliminates pathogens. By January 16, bags of the precut lettuce and bell peppers, now chopped at central kitchens with samples tested in laboratories, arrived at all Chipotle restaurants.
Internally, however, Ells and Moran soon began doubting the very food-safety practices they were touting, namely the high-resolution testing. They tell me that the taste of the lettuce and bell peppers suffered markedly due to being prepared off-site. "The quality wasn't what it was," Moran says. "Customers thought we went to iceberg lettuce. That broke our hearts."
Some involved with the company also felt the mechanics of adopting the sampling regimen were too daunting. "We were practically testing every piece of meat that came into the door!" recalls Chuck Nalon, president of Ed Miniat, one of Chipotle's largest centralized kitchens. "We knew, and they did too, that this wasn't our future."
In the short term, the high-resolution testing enabled the company to better profile whether its suppliers were exhibiting acceptable levels of bacterial control. This testing rejected a significant amount of food in the company's supply chain, which resulted in the suspension of a few suppliers. Chipotle confirms these actions.
When I ask Arnold whether the high-resolution testing revealed any dangerous pathogens—such as, say, E. coli 026—at its suppliers, he clarifies via email, "High-resolution testing doesn't identify pathogens." According to three food-safety experts, high-resolution testing is capable of identifying specific pathogens; Chipotle, however, implemented a system with a faster turnaround time that was essentially a pass-fail version of this test. If a batch of beef failed to pass Chipotle's quality standards, the company only knew that it failed, but not why. "[Faster testing] does make a difference when you have fresh products," says one outside food-safety expert who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. "You don't want it to go bad waiting around for the perfect test result."
According to two sources, one of the other upsides of Chipotle's pass-fail system was that it came with a different disclosure requirement. "If you are preparing produce at the central-kitchen level and you do a test whereby you determine the presence of... salmonella or E. coli 026 or 0157, you are legally required to report that to the FDA," says one industry expert who works with Chipotle. Arnold affirms this distinction, and acknowledges the pass-fail system did not require regulatory notifications, but he stresses, "Did we select the high-resolution [pass-fail] testing because of its lack of regulatory triggers? No."
In early February, Ells and Moran hired Jim Marsden, a Kansas State University meat scientist, as the company's new executive director of food safety. Marsden eventually rolled back Samadpour's high-resolution DNA-based testing. "I don't think Steve or Monty or anyone else had the slightest idea what the difference was [between pass-fail and specific-pathogen testing]," Marsden says. "It sounds all scientific—the word DNA sounds good. I think they just took the recommendation from the consultant [Samadpour]." (Samadpour says he cannot comment on this particular situation but generally disagrees with Marsden's assessment. "The testing method and choices of other test systems are always discussed with clients, and they get to choose which approach is the best for them," he explains.)
Marsden started shifting Chipotle's focus to "interventions," safety measures that assume contaminated food could sneak into the supply chain. This approach involves instituting a series of kill steps to prevent pathogens from reaching your fork. Samadpour had already introduced produce blanching; Marsden set about exploring additional safeguards.
Central kitchens took over precooking steak in March. It would now be reheated at the restaurants. The company considered having its chicken, which constitutes 55% of sales, precooked at these outside facilities but concluded it wasn't logistically feasible.
Some observers wondered if the company was overreacting, given that it didn't even know what caused the E. coli outbreak. Marsden, though, saw this moment as a fresh start. "The opportunity is that we fix everything—go through the entire list of ingredients and food products and address all the possible vectors of contamination," he says.
All the changes alarmed many employees. On a practical level, if more preparation was happening in central kitchens, some feared their labor would no longer be needed. They were not wrong. "We started cutting their hours," says a former general manager. "People took pride in cutting bell peppers and lettuce. When we took that away, morale started getting lower." (Hartung, the CFO, tells me that the company did not reduce its hours as much as it could have given how steeply same-store sales declined.)
"It's not fresh anymore!" says a source familiar with Chipotle's food-safety program. "Sooner or later someone is going to say, 'What's the difference between Taco Bell and Chipotle?' The difference is you pay much less at Taco Bell. The tomatoes, the lettuce—they're all coming from the same place. Taco Bell is [precooking] your meat and now Chipotle is too. There is no distinction."
Chipotle leaders scoff at that notion. As Arnold puts it, "We do share some suppliers with other large restaurant companies. That does not mean we use the same ingredients or cooking methods."
Because Chipotle built its image around the high quality of its food, its brand was now susceptible to questions of trust. Convincing customers that Chipotle was still better than the rest—and getting them back into restaurants—was the next big hurdle.
In the cutthroat fast-food industry, Chipotle has differentiated itself by rejecting the traditional tactics of its rivals. Along with investing heavily in the freshness of its ingredients, the company avoided pandering to its audience with limited-time stunts like the McRib or KFC's chicken-encased Double Down sandwich. Other chains peddle Happy Meals and PlayPlaces, dollar menus, and blockbuster-movie tie-ins. Chipotle never even gave in to number-coded meal items ("I'll have the No. 3, please").
Instead, Crumpacker released animated films promoting Chipotle's food ethics, commissioned novelists such as Toni Morrison and Jonathan Safran Foer to write short original pieces to feature on food packaging, and launched a "food, music, and ideas" festival called Cultivate. The results gave Chipotle a creative, ethically conscious aura—and won Crumpacker and the company a mountain of advertising awards, which line his office's shelves. It also enabled Chipotle to flourish without the conventional high-cost investments in fast-food advertising. In 2015, the company spent just $69 million on marketing, or 1.5% of its sales. McDonald's spent $718 million, or 2.8% of its revenue.
In the aftermath of its food-safety crisis, however, the company realized that this preexisting playbook was too limited. They needed to get customers back into the restaurants, and fast. The hope was, if lapsed customers just sampled Chipotle's burritos and tacos again, they would remember why they loved them, and the company's momentum would resume. But given Chipotle's marketing philosophy, it couldn't merely adopt conventional fast-food tactics. When Jack in the Box experienced its 1993 E. coli crisis, which tragically killed four children, it nearly went bankrupt. Then it slashed the price of almost all its menu items, permanently offering its signature Jumbo Jack burger for just 99 cents, and within three years was back on track. Its recovery was further spurred by a series of aggressive, irreverent TV spots featuring the introduction of "Jack," the company's "CEO." The mascot, a suit who's a pinheaded clown, was an instant smash. In one 1994 commercial, he boasts, "Jack's back"—and then is shown literally blowing up the company's board of directors.
Chipotle's options were narrower. Among other things, a discounted menu wouldn't support the high cost of Food With Integrity and could damage the company's premium "fast casual" brand positioning. Hartung says Chipotle was "careful not to jump on that treadmill... [where] you've got to wring costs out of your food... to offer things at 99 cents or $2.99 and market the heck out of it." Nor could Chipotle, with its anti-McDonald's bent, introduce some clown spokescharacter (let alone one that blows up its board). Chipotle's E. coli crisis was different from Jack in the Box's: Nobody had died, for one, but Jack also never had to deal with social media outrage. Nor did it promote its burgers and fries as a better-for-the-planet alternative.
What executives settled on was an aggressive direct-mail blitz in early 2016: Chipotle sent coupons for a free meal to 20 million households to encourage them to return. The company also introduced a $50 discount for catering orders of at least 20 burritos during the Super Bowl. The idea, Crumpacker says, was to rekindle that communal dining experience and "overcome the veto effect" of any one person steering a group of friends to a different restaurant.
Whatever progress these initiatives may have been making, though, was lost when another norovirus incident hit in early March—this time in Billerica, Massachusetts. The company promptly closed the restaurant after several employees reported symptoms; no customers were infected, yet it appeared in the news as if another outbreak had occurred. In an earnings call in late April, the company reported that sales had plunged 29.7% for the quarter. While 17.5% of the free-burrito coupons had been redeemed (and a similar mobile offer had a 67% success rate), it wasn't enough. Executives on the call talked up plans for additional giveaways worth more than $40 million. Crumpacker also trumpeted a plan under way for "the largest media spend in our history," which he said "reinforces our commitment to responsibly raised ingredients cooked using classic cooking techniques." On the horizon was another initiative to revive the faithful: A few days later, Chipotle would host one of its signature Cultivate festivals, in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Chipotle executives will tell you that Cultivate is Ells's Food With Integrity philosophy brought to life. It's a venue to advocate for the strong public stances the company has taken against genetically modified foods, factory farms, and many other hot-button issues—all in a family-friendly environment with young bands and live cooking demos.
The gates at the WestWorld fairground in Scottsdale open at 11 a.m. on a cloudy April Saturday morning, and when I arrive 20 minutes early, there's no sense that any of the bad news of the past six months has hurt enthusiasm. The line of people waiting to get in already stretches a furlong into the parking lot.
Inside, families stroll amid dozens of white pointy tents that line the trodden-grass field. Bales of hay and sacks of grain dot the mountain-framed landscape. Strips of chicken and fajita veggies sizzle on the Chipotle grills. Sure-to-be-carded boys and girls race to the tasting tents where beers from Grand Canyon Brewing Company and other craft brewers sell for $6 a cup. Food Network personality and acclaimed chef Aarón Sánchez prepares for his onstage culinary demo. The pop band Echosmith is scheduled to perform later in the afternoon.
People here are happy. The only reminder that Chipotle is in the middle of a crisis is the addition of a "Food Safety Information" tent. It's by far the least popular area of the fair. For much of the day, the eight staffers stare blankly at their visitor-free surroundings. When I ask a dad pulling his son in a blue roller-wagon what they're telling people, he jokes, "You know, things like, 'We won't kill you anymore!' "
Today's attendees are Chipotle's most forgiving fans. "My husband is a cook, and [these outbreaks] could happen to anyone," one mother says over tacos as her kids play on a picnic blanket. "They took responsibility for what happened." A slew of parents tell me the food-safety issues don't diminish their affinity for Chipotle whatsoever; they still love the company's ethical food and affordability.
Chipotle reinforces its message everywhere. Big signs placed throughout the grounds prominently display Chipotle "FACTS," such as the one by the porta-potties that reads, "Nope, Chipotle is not owned by McDonald's." (The Golden Arches was a major investor in the early aughts but fully divested by the time Chipotle went public in 2006.) A nearby merchandising tent sells T-shirts adorned with the Chipotle logo and phrases like "Family Farmed" and "Locally Grown."
Chipotle's Cultivate festival in Scottsdale, Arizona, on April 30, 2016.
There are even a handful of spots where you can "Learn Your Way to a Free Burrito." The tour begins at the "Chipotle Cinema," where under one of the tents, a large projector screen shows Ells chopping onions and cilantro as he makes guacamole from scratch at a Chipotle restaurant. Next is the "Fresh vs. Processed" food exhibit, followed by the display articulating the downsides of GMOs. Inside two shipping containers housing the "Factory vs. Farm" presentation, models of frightened-looking pigs are shown raised in claustrophobic confinement; a tall plastic tube chock-full of oversize capsules is stamped livestock antibiotics. (Signs warned that the experience "may be disturbing for children or anyone who is particularly sensitive to animal suffering.") The folks here eat it all up, including the promised free lunch.
Joel Salatin had hoped that one day Chipotle would buy 100% of its pork from independent farmers. After the crisis, its local-sourcing program was one of the casualties. "For a small business like us," Salatin says, "it's actually very economically devastating."
A week after Cultivate, I visit Polyface Farms in Swoope, Virginia, a three-hour drive from Washington, D.C. Polyface, which has been a Chipotle pork supplier since 2007, is one of the places that gives credence to Chipotle slogans like "Family Farmed" on T-shirts at Cultivate.
Past winding roads and a small bridge, I find owner Joel Salatin, arguably the world expert when it comes to responsibly sourcing pork (his latest book, published just four days earlier, is titled The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs), lugging planks of wood across a green field. He's dressed in a felt outback hat, collared shirt, Wrangler jeans, and muddy boots, with suspenders tucking in a slight belly. I ask if I'm interrupting his work. "Not a beat!" he says with a wide grin and a high-pitched chuckle I'll hear again and again.
We pile into his pickup truck and putter around his farm under a blue sky. It's so idyllic, it's almost cliché. Cows and chickens roam on shoulders of fresh glistening grass. An overdue shower recently made its way to the Shenandoah Valley and the petrichor wafts through the truck's rolled-down windows.
Polyface Farms's Joel Salatin's most recent book is The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs.
This is the pastoral image Chipotle conveys to customers. By partnering with local farmers like Salatin, Chipotle positioned itself as the antithesis of McDonald's and the industrial-food-supply complex, while gaining the blessing of a cadre of foodie evangelists such as the prominent writer Michael Pollan, whose best-selling 2006 book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, celebrated Salatin and his unique approach to animal husbandry. Pollan has said that Chipotle is his favorite fast-food chain.
Ells's first steps toward Food With Integrity began in 1999 when he read about Bill Niman, who shares many of Salatin's agricultural philosophies. Ells visited Niman Ranch in Iowa and became enamored of its approach to responsibly raising pigs. Together, Ells and Niman also toured the conventional hog farms and slaughterhouses where the majority of Chipotle's pork was then coming from. "These were not farms, they were confinement operations, factories," Ells recalls. "It was really superbad. I knew that I didn't want my success or Chipotle's based on that kind of exploitation."
Chipotle started buying pork from Niman Ranch, then a collective of around 70 like-minded family farms. "It wasn't about the cachet," Niman tells me. "Steve was... I don't know if 'compulsive' is strong enough. He was demonic about his food quality."
If Ells was going to use Chipotle to upend the traditional fast-food model, working with single-location farmers like Salatin—Polyface was just 550 acres at the time—was the next logical step. Salatin says that he and Ells "got along great, and he said he wanted our pork," recalling their handshake deal after they met in 2006.
Not everyone at Chipotle was sanguine about working with Salatin. Polyface's pork was costlier. And, unlike Niman, Salatin refused to let his pork be shipped to one of Chipotle's central kitchens. "They were going to take our pigs from here, put them on a backhaul truck to [a central kitchen], cook [the meat], and then bring it back here. I said, 'Come on, guys! Talk about a carbon footprint! That's crazy,' " Salatin says, drawing out the last word to indicate how much he disagreed with that plan.
Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface Farms
Chipotle's marketing team pushed for the deal, while Chipotle's quality-assurance team was hesitant: For one thing, Salatin did not own a refrigerated truck. "[They] were going apoplectic," he chuckles. Salatin and Chipotle eventually worked out a system that satisfied safety procedures, and after outfitting a restaurant near the University of Virginia so they could cook carnitas in-house, Chipotle began offering Polyface pork on its menu. (They later did the same at a second restaurant near James Madison University.)
It was a huge hit. "We taught the kids [at the restaurant] how to do old-school braising. Like really sear the pork, dry-rub it, roast it off in the oven, and shred it," beams Joel Holland, a veteran executive chef who worked directly with Ells at Chipotle. "It started getting a buzz in D.C.!"
Chipotle wasn't shy about publicizing its local-farmer relationships. When ABC's Nightline profiled Ells in 2009, he arranged for the segment to be shot at Polyface. The following year, when Oprah Winfrey approached Chipotle about an interview, Ells suggested to a colleague that they shoot the segment at a cattle ranch. The problem? It was the dead of winter. "There were probably 22 inches of snow on that land," this colleague recalls. "Steve was like, 'Well, can we plow the snow and still film in one of the green pastures?' " (Ells does not recall making the comment, but says that if he did, it was in jest.) Winfrey interviewed Ells in her Chicago studio.
Around this time, Chipotle was also expanding its "local growers program," the company's commitment to sourcing some of its seasonal produce from within a certain mileage of its restaurants. This distance was then defined as within 200 miles of its locations, but the company has since increased that threshold to 350 miles. By 2010, the company was working with roughly 50 family-owned farms to purchase some 5 million pounds of its lettuce, red onions, tomatoes, and other items. "Our commitment to serving produce from local farms and other sustainable sources is one of the ways we are changing the way people think about and eat fast food," Ells said at the time. By 2015, Chipotle increased its orders with these suppliers so they now provided more than 30 million pounds of vegetables, which the company claimed comprised about one-tenth of its produce purchases when they are in season.
Local sourcing has been among the casualties of the E. coli outbreak. Ells, citing safety concerns, says the company has cut its dependence on these local growers—by as much as 83%. Curious how the company determines what sources count as "local," I ask whether that one-tenth seasonal produce figure could include Taylor Farms (one of the world's largest lettuce suppliers) if there's a Chipotle restaurant within 350 miles. Ells says, "I don't think so," and Moran adds that the program is not really for large producers and promises to get me a specific answer. Arnold ultimately confirms that Taylor Farms could qualify. "Correct," he writes via email. "Proximity is the determining factor for our local produce program, not farm size."
Salatin tells me that Polyface still only provides pork to those two Chipotle restaurants in Virginia college towns. The company, he says, has discussed expanding his pork to 10 restaurants, but it has been "stymied" by its E. coli issues. Chipotle says that it never set a firm expansion goal and states that the issue is more complex. Before the outbreak, Chipotle purchased between 550 and 600 pounds of meat weekly from Salatin. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, it sometimes bought as little as 100 pounds. Today, Chipotle's weekly order hovers between 300 and 400 pounds. As a result, Salatin says that he has 9,000 pounds of pork "in the freezer that was supposed to go to [Chipotle] but that they haven't taken since this debacle occurred. We got pigs in the pipeline, and we can't afford to keep them on the hoof. For a small business like us, it's actually very economically devastating."
He's not the only one. For some of these smaller purveyors, which substantially ramped up production to meet Chipotle's demand, the lost revenue has materially affected their businesses. "Chipotle went around to all the suppliers and they just tore those places apart looking for [traces of] foodborne illness," one supplier tells me. "Everybody came up clean, but that doesn't mean they weren't damaged [from the lost sales]."
Salatin remembers his friends in the farming community warning him of this possibility five years ago. He would give talks to thousands of farmers each year, and "they started coming to me everywhere I travel, saying, 'I called Chipotle and they won't even return my calls. They don't want local food! They're just using you as a poster child for publicity!' " Salatin remembers.
He had hoped Chipotle might one day source 100% of its pork from Polyface-size suppliers, but it was clear even then that this was an unlikely outcome. When he confronted a Chipotle meat executive around that time—telling him, "I love you guys, but I don't want to be used here"—he was told the company was doing its best to source more food locally but that it was an extremely complicated process given all the associated logistics and costs.
"I'm sure Joel [Salatin] wasn't happy with how it played out. I wasn't, either," says Holland, the former Chipotle chef. "Did marketing get what they needed out of it [and move on]? I don't know. Inside of me, I want to believe it just got short-circuited for business reasons. Where is it marketing? Where is it real? Where is the transparency?"
Steve Ells says it's "misleading" to call Chipotle's steak "precooked" at central kitchens . . . "It's sous-vide."
Chipotle's efforts to revive its sales accelerated in late June. The company introduced a summer-long rewards program, called Chiptopia, which has already attracted several million sign-ups. It launched a branding campaign centered around a heartwarming animated short film titled A Love Story, which played on more than 10,000 movie screens. And it added a new protein, chorizo, to Chipotle's menu in select markets. "That stuff works when people say, 'Oh, something new, I want to try that,' " says Crumpacker, the marketing impresario. "That's a page we pulled out of the traditional fast-food playbook."
Around this time, the company reported its second-quarter earnings. Chipotle fell short of Wall Street's expectations, but there were signs of recovery: They returned to profitability and its quarterly same-store sales, which were down 23.6% year over year, narrowed their decline when compared with Chipotle's first-quarter results when sales dropped 29.7%.
But just as Chipotle leadership began to feel some sense of momentum, an unexpected crisis embarrassed them: Crumpacker was indicted for cocaine possession leading into Independence Day weekend. He surrendered to police and faces seven counts of drug possession; Chipotle placed him on leave, and he checked into rehab.
Two weeks after the news of Crumpacker's arrest, I travel to New York to meet with Ells at Chipotle's Union Square office. These recent events are an awkward backdrop to my visit, but when Ells strides into a conference room to greet me, he's poised and upbeat, dressed in a navy blue Lacoste polo and crisp khakis. He says he wants to go to a room where there's more sunlight and briskly escorts me to his corner office (which is next to Crumpacker's now dark and unoccupied one). It's a minimalist space; an iMac hides in a small nook across from his diploma from the Culinary Institute of America.
We sit at a mahogany table over blueprints for a new restaurant, and Ells tells me that what's top of mind for him is instilling safety into the company's mind-set. "[It's] the hardest thing to put into place... Cultures are developed over a long period of time," he says. "It has to be deeply instilled, much like our people culture or our food culture. We're coming at this from all angles: from the supplier side, the procedures in the restaurants, things through the distribution system, training, and auditing."
The culture Ells is most comfortable talking about is food. I ask whether the company is still living up to its Food With Integrity promise to consumers and how Chipotle precooking proteins like steak in central kitchens fits in. Ells says it's "misleading" to call the steak "precooked." Rather, he says—his eyes peering over his narrow-framed glasses—it's "sous-vide." This is the French cooking term for immersing food, sealed in a bag, in a low-temperature water bath to heat it slowly and more evenly. "This technique was used by many chefs and still is because you can precisely control the characteristics of meat and achieve a certain kind of tenderness," Ells says. "I'd say the steak is [now] more tender. It actually improves it."
When I bring up Chipotle's blanching of produce, Ells says it's more akin to "tomato concassé," which is a "French term for when you blanch the tomato, cool it, and peel the skin off. It's part of the world of classic cooking techniques." I feel as if I'm being schooled by a judge on a cooking show (which, incidentally, Ells once was, on NBC's short-lived America's Next Great Restaurant).
Holland, the former Chipotle chef (who still reveres Ells), suggests that Chipotle is now selling "smoke and mirrors," a kind of "doublespeak" that implies its new food-safety practices somehow count as classic cooking techniques. "The moves they're making now kind of rebut everything they've done in the past," he says.
Speaking on background, even one of Ells's close friends agrees with this assessment. "One of the unfortunate consequences [of the crisis] is that this wonderful fresh food, which comes with a risk, is going to be precooked, pasteurized, double- and triple-washed, all the things that you wouldn't do [at home]," the source contends. "Would you rather eat [real fresh food and] take a chance on getting a case of the shits? Or would you rather have your food precooked and every possible intervention done to [it]?"
When I relay this assessment to Ells, he says, "Nothing could be further from the truth."
What's dismaying to those who know Ells well is that he has always fought to do what he thought was right to improve the food Chipotle serves, even when it didn't benefit Chipotle's bottom line. He once spent a year and a half cycling through prototypes for an egg cooker so Chipotle could offer breakfast burritos. "We chased that to no avail and spent who knows how much money," recalls a former executive who worked intimately with Ells and had knowledge of the failed effort. Once, Ells wanted to wedge a Jamba Juice–style blender operation into every Chipotle restaurant so workers could freshly squeeze limes, even though its kitchens only consume a half-cup of citrus juice per batch of guacamole. That didn't work out either. At Ells's insistence, many stores boast a custom-built $6,000 grill, though the inside joke among some executives is that despite all the fancy kitchen improvements Ells added or attempted over the years before the crisis, the burritos pretty much taste the same as they did 15 years ago.
But others will argue just as vehemently that his creativity and knack for tapping into a je ne sais quoi is what made Chipotle so special. "The thing with Steve is, every now and then you'd get one [brilliant idea] and it might turn out to be the next big thing," says the former executive. Ells says, "I certainly could've made a lot more money buying cheap ingredients and people might not have been able to tell the difference. That was never a part of the calculus. It was not part of my DNA."
In balancing food safety with Food With Integrity, Ells admits that the pendulum swung too far toward more conventional methods of fast-food production immediately following the outbreaks—for the sake of Chipotle's customers and its business. Now, though, Ells says that the company is working to correct certain overreactions. He promises to recommit to the local growers program and believes Chipotle will return to the precrisis number of independent suppliers in 2017. He says Chipotle has moved more ingredient preparation back into its restaurants, including whole heads of lettuce and bell peppers.
How can Chipotle pull this off without risking another outbreak? After all, if another one were to happen, even the rumor of one, "it'd be really bad," Hartung says. "Our recovery has been fragile so far."
One new tool in the Chipotle arsenal: On June 1, the company rolled out The Black Book—a revamped version of the Daily Food Safety Checklist—which ushers in stricter in-restaurant safety protocols, including 10 "critical control points," ranging from additional personal-hygiene checks to more detailed temperature logs. It also introduced the role of food-safety leader, who is the most senior manager on duty and makes sure all these mandates are met.
The Black Book's changes demand considerably more audits; its Food Safety Leader Guide, for example, features 32 bullet points on hand-washing and disposable-glove procedures alone. "We believe that... achieving our goal of being the industry leader in food safety is within our reach," Ells and Moran wrote in introducing the Black Book.
Jim Marsden, the executive food-safety director, says the company has also added a number of pasteurization methods, including "high-hydrostatic pressure processing (HPP)," which essentially sterilizes food such as chorizo by blasting it with 87,000 pounds of water pressure for three minutes. (This practice takes place at specialized, off-site facilities that can support these 85-ton HPP machines.) Marsden boasts that Chipotle is now an industry leader in the practice, though, he admits, it's long been used for "things like sliced turkey breast, prepared salads, usually foods that are in the ready-to-eat category." An FDA report on HPP says the process results in changes that are usually "undesirable because the food will appear to be processed and no longer fresh or raw." Arnold says that chorizo has been well received. Chipotle has since rolled it out to restaurants nationwide.
Marsden also instituted his own testing approach, replacing Samadpour's system with one that centers on "routinely" verifying the efficacy of Chipotle's intervention requirements. Rather than having suppliers take more frequent samples of raw beef, for example, they can now test at far fewer intervals because the meat is cooked; they're primarily doing this to ensure that kill steps, such as the sous-vide process, are working properly. As with Samadpour's program, there are complicated pros and cons to this system, but as one neutral food-safety observer says, "If you're in a courtroom and you listen to both sides of the argument, it's hard to say that anyone is 100% correct. It's all wrapped up in a lot of academic in-fighting and politics."
Ells remains adamant that nothing has changed with the food Chipotle serves. All these new measures are predicated on his belief that it is now not only safer but also tastier and fresher than ever. Proteins like steak, he argues, are "marinated just like we've always marinated" them at the restaurant: The sous-vide meat arrives from the central kitchen and "looks raw and very red" before it is cooked on-site. (When I ask a kitchen worker at a restaurant if Chipotle's steak has changed, he matter-of-factly responds, "Yeah, it's precooked now.") "It might be different, but it's still delicious," Ells says. "We want our cake and we want to eat it too!"
The comment reminds me of A Love Story, which has garnered 60 million views. The film seems to reflect the company's own angst regarding its current state. The ad, which went into development six months before the crisis began, depicts two neighborhood kids who build their rival sidewalk juice stands into fast-food empires. The result is a dystopian future where their food is manufactured by machines on assembly lines, and new menu items and buy-one, get-one-free deals lead to huge profits. The main characters eventually leave it all behind to start a taco truck where they cook food with fresh ingredients and, of course, love.
The point of A Love Story, like two previous award-winning shorts, is that Chipotle is not McDonald's. But it's impossible to ignore a different subtext now given all the change the company has undergone: Is Chipotle in danger of becoming the evil fast-food chain?
I decide to put Ells on the spot. I ask if I could have a list of every Chipotle supplier. Ells says he's never heard such a request before but that he'd have his team look into it. He tells me that the reason the list isn't made public has nothing to do with trade secrets. (Later, Arnold explains that he can't share a list of suppliers with me for "business competitive reasons.")
Would Ells at least share the names of Chipotle's beef suppliers in Australia? "I don't know the name offhand," Ells responds. "It's not like a brand that you would buy at the grocery store." (Chipotle sources some of its beef through JBS Australia, a giant of the meat industry that also works with McDonald's.)
I also ask if I can visit Chipotle's central kitchens, the ones that work with McDonald's, Subway, and Pizza Hut.
To my surprise, Ells agrees.
"Isn't it beautiful? And it smells good!" says Chuck Nalon, who runs one of Chipotle's large central kitchens. Could Chipotle do all its food prep here? "Hmmm, and still be Chipotle? Not everything, no."
Ed Miniat, one of Chipotle's three largest central kitchen partners, is headquartered in the Chicago suburb of South Holland, Illinois, near a long stretch of strip malls. Once inside this 200,000-square-foot facility, I am greeted by Miniat president Chuck Nalon, and he and I don rubber boots, parkas, lab coats, two sets of gloves, latex sleeves, earplugs, protective eyewear, red hairnets, and hard hats. We slop through a pool of antibacterial foam spraying at the entryway to sanitize the soles of our boots—"a nice car wash!" jokes Nalon, a burly salesman whose own hard hat is painted to look like a football helmet from his alma mater Purdue. "This is where it all starts."
The scale of Miniat's operation is immediately overwhelming. Nalon guides me through warehouse-size rooms filled with yellow vats of raw chicken and hundreds of workers, who are decked out in the same safety gear as we are. They're running massive metallic machines, including "The Injector," a hulking apparatus with more than 975 parts designed for meat "augmentation." ("Chipotle doesn't use the Injector," Nalon clarifies, though other Miniat customers do.) The highly industrialized atmosphere calls to mind visions of the boiler room on the Titanic, with all of Miniat's pipes and blue lights flashing everywhere, along with its ceaseless clangs and clanks, whirls, and whirrs.
Miniat processes roughly 500,000 pounds of beef and pork each week for Chipotle, and it's now ramped up production of the chain's sous-vide steak. Nalon first takes me to the line that prepares Chipotle's barbacoa beef. Butchers occupy 22 stations, and they trim shoulders of any excess fat and gristle. A small computer screen at each station monitors each worker's meat yield; every chunk of protein is weighed before it slides down a conveyer belt. It eventually ends up in a huge, cement mixer–like machine that swirls it around in a blend of adobo paste, water, and garlic.
We go through several massive doors—which slide open when Nalon tugs an orange cord hanging from the ceiling—to a space where I can see the sous-vide process Ells mentioned. Forty-eight tubs, each the size of a dishwasher, are filled with 180-degree water that slow-cooks bags of meat for six and a half hours before they're chilled for another three. Finally, I watch workers, including one with a pitchfork, shovel the finished meat into five-pound portions, before it's sealed and later boxed and shipped to Chipotle's restaurants.
"Isn't it beautiful? And it smells good!" says Nalon, who echoes Ells when he mentions how these are all just "classic cooking techniques. This is your [household] kitchen times 25,000. There's no other way to pull this off."
The modern and hygienic facility does smell delicious, and it is difficult to imagine how Chipotle could decentralize its entire food operation to more than 2,000 local restaurants. "There's nothing mysterious about what we're doing, and everything can be easily explained," Nalon says. "The whole goal is to make good food. The average person should be able to go, 'I never dreamt this is how it works behind the curtain, but I get it.'"
That said, Miniat is the only central kitchen that allowed me inside—only at Ells's request—and even then, the company doesn't allow photographs of its facilities. The fact is that Miniat, like Chipotle's other major central kitchens OSI and Ready Foods, is a factory—not the mechanized sweatshop in A Love Story, but it's not home cooking either. Sanitizing this place, for example, requires the "Miniat Elite," a 64-person team, which, each night over the course of seven hours, rinses and washes every single inch of the facility (including all 975 disassembled parts of the Injector) and cleans up 12 tons of goopy carcass remains, grease, and oil, using 52,000 gallons of water in the process.
Although McDonald's relies on a similarly centralized model, Chipotle supporters contend that the chain has higher-quality ingredients and preparation standards. In their first meeting to discuss pricing, in 1998, when Chipotle had just 15 restaurants, Nalon recalls "Steve's face getting more and more contorted" as Nalon explained how to make the recipes cheaper by "adding starch, injecting [meat] with marinade," and so forth. "I marched down the list of all my food-science options," he tells me, and "Steve said, 'Promise me you'll never do anything like that to my food.' " Nalon isn't allowed to discuss Miniat's other clients, but he does acknowledge they utilize his kitchen differently than Chipotle.
Back in Nalon's office, where an old menu sign from a Chipotle restaurant hangs on the wall opposite a Food With Integrity poster, I ask whether Chipotle could simply move all its food preparation to central kitchens like this one. After all, if the food can taste just as good, why wouldn't they, especially if it's safer? "Hmmm, and still be Chipotle? Not everything, no," Nalon says. "I love the fact that they do what they do in those stores, because it is totally unique. You could do everything in central kitchens, but I don't think that's exactly what they want. They want to bring as much freshness and as much cooking as they can to the stores. But [some of these items] really need to be done with somebody like us."
To become a Chipotle restaurateur, you had to pass muster with a C-level executive. One time, Moran's mood turned when he encountered "easily the dirtiest fucking pans I've ever seen."
A proud CEO, "the crème de la sour cream," and what $9 per hour buys.
If Ells is the food person at Chipotle, co-CEO Moran is the people guy. It's his task to drive the company's employees to safely prepare, assemble, and serve Chipotle's food at a pace that can sometimes exceed 350 transactions per hour. "[Without] dramatic improvements in throughput," Moran told investors before the outbreaks, using the restaurant-industry term for serving customers quickly, "we would not be able to achieve such phenomenal same-store sales."
Moran has been a trusted confidant to Ells since Chipotle started. Moran served as Chipotle's outside general counsel before joining in 2005 as COO to help scale operations. Following the company's 2006 IPO, Ells increasingly relied on him, and when Ells decided to move to New York full-time in 2008, Moran essentially took over the company's Denver headquarters.
By the time Moran was elevated to co-CEO in 2009, the company had moved to a new office on Denver's Cherry Creek River, where the mood became more "corporate" and "tense," sources say. Dogs were no longer allowed, and executives initially moved to an area locked to most staff. "It was the weirdest thing," says a former longtime employee who worked closely with Moran and Ells. "I mean, you had to be buzzed in! The office became so sterile and cold. Monty ran things like a law firm."
Moran's ascendancy at Chipotle has coincided with an increased rigor (some would say bureaucratization) in the company's restaurant culture. Restaurants are graded on the "Four Pillars" of throughput, such as "Aces in Their Places," which requires that crew workers are ready in their prime positions at the exact second their shift begins. In fact, the cameras above the line in all Chipotle's restaurants aren't only for security; managers and internal analysts access these live feeds either weekly or monthly for surprise, 15-minute "visual audits" to gauge how well teams are executing the Pillars during peak hours. "Everyone would see these audit results, including Steve and Monty," recalls a former operations executive. "You did not want to be at the low end."
Chipotle's unrelenting culture has sometimes embroiled the company in controversy. This past summer, 10,000 employees filed a class-action lawsuit against Chipotle accusing it of not paying them for all the hours they worked. In mid-August, a court ordered Chipotle to pay a former crew member of a Washington, D.C., restaurant $550,000 for workplace discrimination. A jury found that her supervisor had, among other things, restricted bathroom breaks and access to water for this employee, who was then pregnant. (Chipotle maintains that its actions in the Washington case were legal, but does not plan to appeal.) When I ask Moran about all this, he says, "Do we hire people who make mistakes? We sure do," noting that the company will recruit 60,000 people in the next year. "I spend all of my time making this culture the very best it can be."
Moran prides himself on engineering the company's "Restaurateur Program," which he conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and considers central to the company's success. The program is designed to imbue workers with the long-term ambition of becoming "Restaurateurs," a sort of certified-excellent general manager position, which comes with a higher salary, a company car, stock options, and other bonuses. Moran calls the GM "the most important person in the company," because "if you've got excellent GMs, you're going to have wonderfully safe food, delicious food, and a great customer experience. If you don't, you won't." Restaurateurs, then, are the "crème de la sour cream" of all GMs, as Chipotle phrases it in recruitment materials.
The program incentivizes managers to evaluate employees based on whether they are "top performers" or "low performers." To even get a shot at the restaurateur title, you have to work your way up—often starting at crew member—and train top-performer replacements as you advance. "A manager who leads in an enlightened way creates teams of top performers who are empowered to achieve real standards," says Moran. "Those are magic words around here."
Chipotle's upwardly mobile structure increases service speed and eliminates "loads of bad habits," says Moran, who, along with Ells, would personally approve restaurateurs based on intense in-person assessments. When a restaurateur would be ready for review, one of the CEOs would make a trip to his or her restaurant, scour the place for red flags, and even individually interview each crew member. (As the company has grown, other C-level executives also perform evaluations.)
According to more than a dozen sources who experienced or witnessed these reviews firsthand, this became a "dog-and-pony show." If Ells showed up in a bad mood, a candidate's odds would be especially slim; several sources relate stories of him ripping into prospective restaurateurs for mistakes as trivial as, say, finding leftover grains of rice on a tabletop or using two different types of lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures. If Moran, who is friendlier, conducted the visit, he'd usually base his evaluation on the temperature of the room—how many customers are smiling, the enthusiasm he senses from crew members. Moran, though, could be just as demanding as Ells, and once nearly ended an otherwise perfect visit after stumbling upon "easily the dirtiest fucking pans I've ever seen." Moran acknowledges, "If we see things that are dirty, that would be one of the many things we would look at. But no, we'd never say, 'There was rice on the table, you're not a restaurateur.' "
At its 2016 Cultivate festival in Arizona, Chipotle depicted the effort required to become one of its "restaurateurs" in the form of a high-striker game: The more effort (and pressure) you apply, the greater the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle.
The restaurateur program has reinforced a culture where "low-performer" employees are acceptable collateral damage. At the company's 2012 all-managers meeting, for example, Moran asked the hundreds of attendees for a show of hands if they had low performers on their teams. Most raised a hand. "Why are you letting these people stay on your team?" two attendees recall Moran saying. "If they're not doing a good job, just fire them. We don't need them." "Those words—low performer—were weaponized at Chipotle," says a former team leader, who regretfully recounts meetings among managers where they would viciously appraise crew members. "You'd put someone's name on the whiteboard and [a manager] would growl, 'Aarrgghh, no! Low performer! They're no good!' Once they were [deemed] low performers, their careers at Chipotle were torpedoed whether they knew it or not. Everyone was disposable."
Perhaps that helps explain why crew-level turnover is three times higher than manager turnover, which itself is a challenge: Out of every 100 kitchen managers Chipotle promotes, only 25 of them remain on staff after 12 months. Despite the churn, "there was an abundance of applications," says a former lead recruiter. "Instead of investing time and energy into making sure the [low performer] was developed, it was like, 'Whatever, we have 150 more applications. Let's get rid of that person and take one of them.' " (In September 2016, the company would repeat its one-day hiring stunt, this time announcing it would hire 5,000 employees at once.)
As Moran tells me, "There's no way to force mediocre or low-performing teams to do a great job day in and day out. You can get a clipboard and write them up, and yell at them and tell them to clean stuff, and tell them, 'If it's not cleaned by tomorrow, I'll fire you.' That checklist management mentality [is] not effective." In June, when Ells and Moran released the Black Book operations protocols for food safety, they stated, "We're counting on our empowered teams of top performers to learn all of the high standards that we have for food safety." If any "symptoms" are discovered, Ells and Moran wrote, "your diagnosis can only be a lack of top performers."
From Moran's perspective, Chipotle's restaurant culture is a thriving meritocracy. Crew members, he and his executive team point out, receive twice-annual merit pay increases, and on average get promoted to kitchen manager within 10 months—a position that comes with a 20% raise—and from there to service manager in another year. In the process, they learn invaluable people, service, and management skills. "We have substantial rewards that we give to our people," says Hartung. "Some of the national discussion about just increasing the starting wage, it only talks about that bottom rung, like what's the lowest-paid person willing to earn who works in your company. We think the narrative ought to be more about investing in that person, developing that person."
The "national discussion" Hartung is referring to is the so-called Fight for $15, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Chipotle is sensitive to the impact a 66% increase to its minimum wage of $9 per hour (which is higher than the $7.25 federal standard) could have on its business. Without prompting, Moran defends his compensation. (It would take a starting Chipotle crew member more than 1,500 years to earn his 2014 pay package.) "The only reason I deserve, or anyone [at Chipotle] can deserve, to make more than a GM," Moran says, "is if they have the effect of empowering or helping loads of GMs get better. That's the only way."
Some company observers believe that if Chipotle led the Fight for $15—effectively extending Food With Integrity to the people who serve it—it could help the company reduce turnover, improve training and food safety, better its relationship with its low-level employees, and change the narrative around the company in the wake of this crisis.
Hartung disagrees that it would reduce turnover. "The idea that $15 will solve things, I think it solves it temporarily," he says.
Not long ago, I spoke with a current crew-level employee who has been with the company for almost two years. He works around 40 hours a week, believes in the Food With Integrity mission, and can handle the line and grills during the lunch rush. "It's overwhelming, very stressful. The line never dies, sometimes for three hours," he says. And yet, "The most raise I ever got was 10 cents, up from $9 per hour."
He still loves what Chipotle represents and the skills it's taught him—"I never thought I'd be cutting onions and peppers and cooking chicken and able to use a knife," he says—but he wants a livable wage and has joined the Fight for $15 movement. Even if that isn't successful, though, he won't leave Chipotle. "I've gotten so far and worked so hard for the company that I'm almost there to becoming a manager," he says with pride. If he attains this goal, though, he expects his salary to be bumped up just $1.50 per hour. "I wish Chipotle realized that with what we do, selling all this Food With Integrity and their vision that we promote to everyone, we should be getting paid more," he says. "Why do we earn almost the same as McDonald's workers when the care we put in is 20 times what they do?"
Activist investor William Ackman, known for his caustic approach, amassed a 9.9% stake in Chipotle. "He thinks it's undervalued and feels we have a very strong brand that he personally likes," Moran says. "And so he's interested in being involved as an investor, I think, for a longer term."
New pressures, lessons learned, and what happens now.
On September 6, Chipotle's leadership team learned that investor William Ackman had amassed a 9.9% stake in the company through his hedge fund, Pershing Square. In an SEC filing disclosing the position, Pershing called Chipotle "undervalued," with a "strong brand, differentiated offering, enormous growth opportunity, and visionary leadership." It also stated its intention to "engage in discussions with [Chipotle's] management and board of directors" about everything from the composition of the board to the company's cost structure and strategic plans. Chipotle's share price jumped nearly 6% on the news.
Ackman is one of Wall Street's most high-profile activist investors. Known for his controversial bets and caustic approach, he's not like "those individuals" in Chipotle's annual shareholder meeting, as Moran described them, who "read proposals and air a protest or two." In the past, Ackman has taken substantial positions in fast-food chains, including McDonald's and Wendy's, and then agitated for them to adopt major transformations such as divesting assets, embracing franchising, and replacing management. (Ackman declined to comment.)
When Ackman announced his stake, he was Chipotle's second-largest shareholder. The first was still Fidelity (though its massive mutual fund Contrafund cut the number of shares it held by more than 40% between April and the end of July 2016, according to filings). Ells and Moran each own less than half a percent of the company. Ackman's investment, then, could be a harbinger of bigger structural changes. "As we've gotten nine or 10 months out [from the crisis], maybe there's a bigger case now to be made that a different management tack needs to be taken," says Morgan Stanley analyst John Glass, who specializes in the fast-food industry and maintains a "hold" rating on Chipotle. "Early on, there's nothing to be activist against. But enough time has passed [for someone like Ackman] to say, 'Look, you tried your way and it hasn't worked.' "
On September 20, Ells and Moran call me from a car while they're on their way with Hartung to an investor meeting in New York. The company had promised to update me on Chipotle's recovery, but when I kick off our conversation by asking them how things are progressing, Moran first declines to answer, and then says, "Hold on a sec, hold on a sec." I can hear murmurs between the three executives, and then Moran comes back on the line and still demurs, citing regulatory restrictions.
I ask them about Pershing Square and whether its large position in Chipotle's stock has altered their game plan in any way. "It hasn't affected our strategy. Mr. Ackman said he is very interested in our company," Moran says. "He thinks it's undervalued and feels we have a very strong brand that he personally likes. And so he's interested in being involved as an investor, I think, for a longer term."
On October 25, approximately one year after the outbreaks, Chipotle will announce its third-quarter earnings, and we'll learn more about whether customers are giving the restaurant another chance. Perhaps same-store sales will rebound, revenue and profitability will jump, and Chipotle will regain favor with investors. Crumpacker, who returned to his post after Labor Day (his court date for cocaine possession is pending) and who now serves as the company's chief creative and development officer, offers a tidbit of positive data the day after my call with the CEOs. The company's Chiptopia rewards program has signed up 6 million people by the end of August, he reports, up from 3.6 million in late July, and 3.1 million of them, just over half, are eating at Chipotle at least once a month. "I'm happy with where we are with those numbers," Crumpacker says.
In September 2016, Chipotle ran a Sunday kids-eat-free promotion to woo back families. Pictured: Chipotle's kid's menu.
Still, whatever signs of recovery Chipotle exhibits, the events of these past 12 months have revealed deep-seated issues that the brand must grapple with to ensure a bright future. The company's food-safety director, Marsden, once told me that not knowing the exact cause of the E. coli outbreak meant the company had a chance to fix everything. While he was talking about Chipotle's safety protocols, he could've meant so much more.
Ells and Moran have not yet seized this moment of crisis to rethink everything about Chipotle with the kind of daring, unexpected thinking that made it a beloved brand. Chipotle was a pioneer in introducing responsibly sourced and fresh ingredients into the world of fast food, and it deserves much credit for rejuvenating the industry and inspiring widespread change, from the big players like McDonald's pledging to offer more cage-free eggs to the host of ethically conscious chains such as Beefsteak, Cava Grill, and Sweetgreen popping up around the country. What this moment offered was an opening to reinforce and even broaden its commitments to Food With Integrity (beyond a more thorough embrace of food safety).
Chipotle could still choose this course. It could publish a list of all its suppliers as a way to reassure customers, introducing radical transparency to the industry. It could jump into the Fight for $15 movement, demonstrating its commitment to higher goals and to its own morale-challenged workers. What if Ells used the crisis to engage Americans in a larger conversation about the challenges of our food system and eating habits? "You can't go around here surreptitiously talking better than you're walking," says Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms. "How do you have integrity without accountability?"
For a company that has thrived on speed and efficiency, Chipotle has been slow to adapt. Its chorizo, only the second menu addition in its history, was on its product road map before the crisis began. For all its talk of fresh and local food, it has not embraced seasonal meal offerings that could entice customers to visit more often. A Love Story, conceived before the crisis, did not even attempt to address Chipotle's current reputation challenges. Chiptopia, which went into development in April, five months after the E. coli outbreak, followed years of investor pressure to offer a rewards program.
Chipotle's brand has been pummeled to a degree that seems out of proportion to the scale of its limited food-safety outbreaks. But there's always been an inherent risk in the company's pursuit of a mission as high-minded as Food With Integrity, says Crumpacker. He isn't surprised that Chipotle experienced a more severe reputational punishment than Tesla or Dole after their recent crises. "People buying products from Dole—it's a can or bottle of juice—it's not the same," he says, indicating that Tesla is also not in Chipotle's league in terms of brand affinity. "There's a Chipotle in every town, a lot of people have a connection to it, fond memories of going when they were in high school or taking their kids there." The outbreaks fractured that special feeling for many customers.
What's more, Chipotle could never offer customers a satisfying closure to what caused the problem in the first place. "When you don't know what it is," Crumpacker continues, "people are like, 'Well, gosh, did they fix it?' "
Is Chipotle closer to offering 100% Food With Integrity, or further away? When I ask Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and a public advocate for responsible eating, about whether Chipotle is still his favorite fast-food restaurant, he laughs and says that he forgot he ever said that. He tells me he prefers it over McDonald's but that he'd rather live in a world where "we have 2,000 individually owned burrito shops rather than one big one. But to the extent that we live in a world where people want a very predictable fast-food experience, then it's better to have those restaurants trying to engage with the kinds of values that Chipotle professes to care about and, in fact, has cared about."
Chipotle's future hinges less on hourly audits or triple-washed lettuce or rewards programs than a reimagining of what Food With Integrity means for the next 20 years. Can a leadership team helmed by three college buddies make that transition? What about a board of directors with a 17-year median tenure? "Whether or not the food-safety issues happened last year," says Morgan Stanley's Glass, "this is a company that is in the throes of a midlife crisis, where the skills that got them here are not the same skills they need to get them to the next place." Every chain restaurant, he says, goes through this rite of passage. For every success like Starbucks, there are former high-flyers like Baja Fresh and Boston Market that no longer have cultural currency and are slowly fading.
Moran remains confident that Chipotle will not end up an afterthought dotting the strip malls of America, but he preaches patience. "Will we climb out of it and get back to our former greatness? I absolutely believe we will," he told me in June. "But will that take a year or two or three or four? I don't know. The full recovery from this is going to take a long time."
Moran says he wants everyone to know exactly what happened, and to judge him and Ells based on that. "I wish that every single person in the U.S. knew exactly the truth about what happened," he says. "I wish they knew exactly the truth about everything that Chipotle does."
Communicating better and faster should make workers more productive, especially on a platform they're already familiar with, right?
You already wastespend a lot of time on Facebook while you're at work, don't you? Your boss may be fine with that—and might soon actually require it.
Last week the social network launched Workplace, its answer to Slack, HipChat, and other collaborative work platforms designed to cut back on email and boost productivity. But since so many people regularly scroll their newsfeeds to distract themselves from work, does it make sense to try to use Facebook for work? Here are cases for and against this latest development.
Hootsuite, the social media management platform, was one of Workplace's beta testers over the past year. CEO Ryan Holmes (who also contributes to Fast Company) said the decision to try out Facebook's new product was a no-brainer.
For starters, says Holmes, "We've never had a policy barring Facebook use while in the office, and that's not just because we're a social media company. Social media is the watercooler of the 21st century," he believes, because it's already one of the most important conduits for information—including business information. "I'm happy that some of the more outdated clichés about social media just being a place to share cat photos are finally being put to rest."
If that's truly the case, Facebook is actively working to put them to rest. Workplace is the company's first major tool for businesses, and its subscription pricing is meant to undercut Slack's, at $1–$3 per employee for Workplace versus Slack's $6.65 and $12.50 tiers. What may prove even more decisive is that Slack and its competitors came on the scene as enterprise platforms, while Facebook is blazing a trail into the market from the opposite direction.
For Holmes, that's a huge advantage. "If you can use Facebook, you can use Facebook Workplace," he says, since the two are designed to look similar to one another. "The concept of the newsfeed and of groups is already familiar to people," and the same is true of the platform's overall user interface and functionality. That's eliminated the need for an onboarding process, says Holmes. This ease of adoption also drove the design of platforms like Yammer, which bears a striking resemblance to Facebook's feed, down to the likes, icons, and blue bands.
And while it might be expected of employees at a social media company, Hootsuite's teams have embraced Workplace enthusiastically.
"This is really part of a broader wave of the consumerization of IT," Holmes points out, adding that that's probably a net good:
Mass consumer platforms like Facebook in some ways represent the height of usability. They have to be intuitive and user-friendly because they're competing for eyeballs. This usability, in turn, is a huge plus in the workplace. When functionality improves, you get more done and more people use the platform.
Not everyone agrees. "The single biggest impact Facebook could have on workplace productivity would be to go out of business," wagers Cal Newport, a Georgetown computer science professor and author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
At Hootsuite, Holmes reports that Workplace has proved to be "a huge time saver." As with other group messaging platforms, "instead of firing off dozens of group emails, you can have a much more natural conversation by posting and responding on a Facebook group," Holmes explains. "There's also the visibility factor. By subscribing to different groups, you get insight into what's going on across departments."
But Newport disputes whether any of that counts as actual work. "Using Facebook Workplace is not working. It's talking about work." Not only does Facebook know this, he claims, but its business model with Workplace depends on precisely this misunderstanding. "Facebook is optimized to be sticky. The company's ideal use case is one in which you spend your entire day following the appetizing morsels it serves up to keep you clicking and scrolling."
"Over the past decade or so," Newport continues, "knowledge workers have told themselves the story that the main thing obstructing them from producing more value is that they can't get access to enough information fast enough." If email persists on this "fairy tale," he believes, group messaging apps and, now, Facebook Workplace, capitalize on it. With each successive communication tool, employers are trying to "[optimize] for more connectivity, more information, more speed," says Newport. But while productivity may be aided by optimal communication—up to a point—it's a different thing entirely.
"The main way knowledge workers produce value," Newport believes, "is by improving rare and valuable skills and applying them to information to produce rare and valuable output." Writing for Fast Company recently, one former designer at IDEO shared this sentiment, arguing that deploying high-value skills in high-value ways is often a solo undertaking.
Even the "visibility factor" Holmes praises, Newport sees as a distraction. It's unwise, he says, to "essentially hook everyone, regardless of their role, onto one big party line—[whether that's] implemented with email, Slack, or something like Facebook Workplace—and then have them just figure things out on the fly as an ongoing, unstructured, ceaseless conversation."
To be fair, Facebook groups and Slack channels are meant to add focus and cut down on that mayhem. But there are already many who agree with Newport that any real-time communication tool is basically a bad idea, because it encourages reactive rather than deliberative decision making—in other words, the low-value stuff.
Newport concedes that tools like Workplace may be "simple and convenient," just as Hootsuite has found it to be, and other companies are likely to as well. "But the goal of work is not to make life easy," he says, "but instead to produce things that are valuable—an inherently hard task." And one from which most people sometimes want to distract themselves.
Woods gives us an exclusive look at his new brand and explains where his business is heading.
Tiger Woods was planning to make his highly-anticipated return to competitive golf this month, after a 14-month break to recover from a back injury. At the eleventh hour, he dropped out from last week's Safeway Open, disappointing many of his fans. But it turns out he's got something else teed up.
Today he is announcing the launch of TGR, a new company that will house a portfolio of Woods-related businesses. Woods will serve as chairman and plans to be closely involved in day-to-day decision-making. "There is so much excitement about the potential of TGR," says Woods. "I'm excited to explore the possibilities in design, product development, hospitality, and possibly entertainment." He is also unveiling his new logo, made up of three triangles that look like a tiger's stripes and also resemble a W.
It's a big move for the golf superstar, who is bringing all of his existing businesses under a single umbrella for the first time and will also pursue new endeavors under the TGR brand. The company gives Woods a unified corporate structure that will serve as a home base for all of his businesses moving forward. Woods is wagering that the move will help define his legacy and keep him in the game long after he's done bringing home golf titles. TGR will now oversee TGR Live, his events company that organizes PGA TOUR tournaments; his The Woods restaurant, which opened last year (its name will stay the same); TGR Design, a golf-course firm he launched a decade ago; and his charity, the Tiger Woods Foundation, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month. Several new endeavors are set to be announced over the next few months.
Woods has been closely associated with Nike for the last 20 years, and that relationship will continue. But in August, Nike announced that it would no longer make golf equipment, including the clubs that Woods has used throughout his career. That vacuum is sure to prompt speculation about whether TGR will start making golf gear. While there are no specific plans for TGR to enter the equipment business, Jeff Kempler, COO of Sub Rosa, the corporate strategy and branding firm that Woods hired to help develop his new brand, says it's a possibility at some point.
Though Woods's overall brand has been tarnished by highly publicized personal-life scandals, TGR will give him a platform from which to launch the next stage of his career. He had been thinking about building this kind of umbrella operation for several years now, but only began nailing down the details last December, shortly after his 40th birthday. Woods and key executives from his existing businesses started strategizing ways to create a brand that would take advantage of his position as one of the world's most recognizable athletes, but would not necessarily be directly tied to golf. They brought in Sub Rosa to help define what TGR would stand for and how it could scale across a wide range of industries. "If chapter one began when he was first on national television playing golf, now it's Tiger, the enterprise or Tiger, the portfolio activator," says Kempler. "He has a really clear mind-set about what his personal brand means."
The first step was to identify some central themes from throughout Woods's career. "We knew that there was connectivity," says Emily Taylor, a VP at the Tiger Woods Foundation who has been working with Woods for 14 years and was integral to TGR's brand-development process. They ultimately came up with three qualities that they believe Woods is known for: precision, the ability to master a wide array of skills, and determination. "It goes all the way back to how I was raised," says Woods in an exclusive email interview with Fast Company. "In the military, they have a saying, 'Train hard, fight easy.' You're going to master your craft if you approach the mind-set and method properly."
Sub Rosa was tasked with incorporating these ideas into the TGR narrative, so that as the brand scaled and entered new markets, it would be instantly identifiable as an extension of Woods. But they also wanted to create a business that could exist apart from its namesake, like, say, Paul Newman's food empire. "How can Tiger's global fame and recognizability both empower the new brand, but not create a dependency that would undo longevity?" says Kempler, describing the kinds of conversations he's had with Woods.
Now that TGR has launched, the team is considering where to go next. One candidate for growth is The Woods, the restaurant that Woods opened last August near his home in Jupiter, Florida. "The [concept] is already in demand in several cities," Woods says. "We are evaluating which ones [would] make sense if we expand." There's also potential to grow Woods's 10-year-old golf-course-design company, which is now called TGR Design. Woods has designed courses in two locations—Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and Montgomery, Texas—and has projects beginning construction in the UAE, Mexico, and China. "We are also looking at a couple of new opportunities in and around the U.S.," Woods says.
Of course, Woods could, at the age of 40, still have many years ahead of him as a competitive golfer. Given his famously intense training regimen and diverse business interests, how will he manage everything? "I pride myself on being efficient," he says. "I also don't sleep much."
The principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz is invigorating cities across the country with a new approach to urban parks.
On the west side of Manhattan, an armada of cranes and construction workers is building the city's largest 21st-century development. A 28-acre, $25 billion megaproject by Related Companies, Hudson Yards will include six skyscrapers, 17 million square feet of commercial and residential space, a performing arts center, and a hotel. The project's scale is impressive, as is its location spanning one of the busiest railways in New York City—an industrial site filled with train cars and a tangle of tracks and tunnels. But when it's completed in 2025, people won't see any of that heavy infrastructure. They'll stroll through 14 acres of open space planted with native flowers and grasses, beneath groves of trees, and along pathways that will link the new neighborhood to the surrounding parks and streets.
And that's just aboveground. Below the surface, the park will be an engineering marvel. Temperatures hit 150 degrees on the railway, meaning the 225 trees and 28,000 plants will need protection from the heat. To ensure the vegetation in the park stays healthy, a cooling system will route chilled glycol around the planters. An irrigation network, rainwater storage, and ventilation system will also be integrated into what's essentially a massive green roof. "It's like cultivating an oasis over a desert," says Thomas Woltz, principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architecture (NBW), the firm enlisted to design Hudson Yards' landscape.
The concept illustrates Woltz's vision for urban parks: a marriage of local ecology and culture that acts as a connective tissue for the city. For centuries, parks have been civic beacons and points of pride, moments of respite amid steel and concrete. But as cities grow increasingly complex, with real estate at a premium and sustainability and resiliency top priorities, Woltz sees the role of parks evolving. They are now essential to the urban fabric. "As a society, we do a pretty good job of creating urban parks as destinations, but it's important to see those destinations as connected to our daily lives via the streetscape, public transportation, the systems of storm-water management," Woltz says. "It's about seeing [everything] as one giant complex system."
NBW's approach to urban design has distinctly rural roots. The firm first made its name in ecological restoration, working to return, for example, commercial farmland to its natural state. Woltz, who joined in 1997, spent the first 15 years of his career immersed in these sorts of projects before applying his regenerative method to cities. He's now the sole principal of NBW and working on nearly a dozen high-profile, large-scale urban parks in North America and New Zealand. And though they look nothing alike, they share his signature technological savvy, ecological sensitivity, and attention to history.
Woltz and his 45-person team, which is split between New York City and Charlottesville, Virginia, begin each project by digging into a location's past, reading old newspaper stories, tracing the line of ownership, and uncovering what was on the site before human intervention—all clues for how it might be restored. Such work led them to discover a vital untapped water source for Nashville's 132-acre Centennial Park. For St. Louis's two-block Citygarden, the area's history as a warehouse hub informed NBW's unique, parceled-out plan.
Woltz's team also takes a scientific approach to discovering a site's current characteristics, looking into soil composition, native plant and insect communities, and hydrology. That meant gleaning how to use water from the Patapsco River to naturally cool the adjacent buildings for Under Armour's forthcoming campus and waterfront promenade on a post-industrial site in Baltimore. When NBW was tasked with reinvigorating Houston's 1,560-acre Memorial Park, the firm developed a master plan that balanced the needs for urban wild land and recreation space (for more, see Parks and Restoration). "By the time you've done this ecological research and a deep dive into the cultural research, you're just fighting away the ideas," Woltz says.
One of Woltz's recently completed projects was turning a pocket-size field in Brooklyn's Navy Yard complex into the Naval Cemetery Landscape. Because the site is a former potter's grave (the Navy has since exhumed most of the bodies), the designers couldn't dig into the earth. Instead, they built a raised wooden path that meanders through a field of native tall grasses and wildflowers—a natural habitat for insects and birds and a nod to the area's rural past. "It's a pollinator of information as well as plant materials," says Milton Puryear, cofounder of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, which commissioned the park.
"Culture and biodiversity, that's what it's all about," Woltz says. "There's a growing realization that bridging the two yields the most responsible, exciting, and engaging landscapes in the public realm."
Amid reports that the billionaire plans to donate $1.25 million to Donald Trump, many threatened to boycott PayPal, which he cofounded.
Amid reports that billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel plans to donate $1.25 million to the Donald Trump campaign, many threatened to boycott PayPal, the company Thiel is famous for cofounding.
But Thiel, who gave a speech in support of Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, does not have any current affiliation with PayPal. He left the company when it was sold to eBay in 2002 (it has since spun off). And he's not even a major shareholder.
Boycotting Thiel's interests, especially if you were to include investments made by venture capital firms in which he is a partner, would be much more difficult than just canceling one account. If a protester wanted to make absolutely sure that they were not directly or indirectly benefiting Thiel, they'd need to quit Facebook, avoid making transactions using credit card processor Stripe, stop listening to Spotify, carry a list of thousands of Y Combinator companies, and move somewhere other than the United States (without booking an Airbnb). Because Thiel is deeply tied to many of Silicon Valley's most popular products:
Facebook: Thiel was the company's first outside investor. Though he unloaded most of his Facebook stock in 2012, he's still a major stakeholder in the company and sits on its board.
Founders Fund companies: Founders Fund, the venture capital fund that Thiel cofounded, has invested in more than more than 150 companies. It led a $200 million round for Airbnb in 2012, and has also funded Spotify, ZocDoc, and Lyft. It has a stake in Asana, which many offices use to coordinate projects, and Stripe, a credit card processor used by Twitter, Kickstarter, Shopify, Salesforce, Lyft, Blue Apron, Adidas, OpenTable, Best Buy and "thousands of businesses." And NPR.
Y Combinator companies: Thiel is a part-time partner at the incubator, which takes a stake in young companies in exchange for its mentorship program. Y Combinator has thousands of alumni companies. Its president, Sam Altman, has said that he will [url=https://news.fastcompany.com/in-tweetstorm-y-combinators-sam-altman-says-hes-not-going-to-fire-peter-thiel-for-supporting-trump-4022008[/url], and that cutting ties with opposing views leads to extremism.
Palantir: Thiel is the cofounder and chairman of the company, which has sold shares at a $20 billion valuation. Not much to boycott here, though—Palantir makes data analysis software that it sells to customers like the FBI. Which means, of course, that even if you somehow manage to avoid patronizing businesses that directly or indirectly make Thiel richer, you won't be able to say the same for how your tax dollars are spent.
The razor-thin design of the Note 7 may have contributed to its battery-safety issues. Here's one way to free up precious real estate.
In the wake of the Note 7 blowup debacle, Samsung is likely to take a new look at the entire design of its phones. The removal of the headphone jack seems like a logical first step.
With news of the explosions, many consumers are just now beginning to understand a quandary that Samsung engineers and designers have been wrestling with for years. People want smartphones that do more things: connect better, charge faster, and last longer per charge. But they also want them to be 7 millimeters thin. When we finally lift the curtain on Note 7 crisis, I have a hunch the key takeaway will be that you can't have your cake and eat it, too. There are limits to the internal space, power availability, and cooling capability necessary to support all the features du jour in a razor-thin design.
In light of the battery-safety issues that made the Note 7s prone to exploding, it may be high time for Samsung to remove the headphone jack in its next major premium smartphone release, which will presumably be the Samsung Galaxy S8, next year. The removal of the jack has a lot to do with the safety of the battery.
The analog headphone jack—and all the housing needed to accommodate the jack inside the phone—takes up a lot of space. And the one thing we're fairly certain of is that the instability of the battery in the Note 7 was related to the super-compact design of the phone and, by extension, the battery.
Lithium-ion batteries contain tightly packed positively charged and negatively charged plates. If these plates touch each other, it can set off a chemical reaction that can cause the battery to "vent with flame," which is manufacturer parlance for "blow up." Indeed a Korean government regulator concluded that the positive and negative charged plates inside the Note 7 batteries were too close to one another at the rounded edges of the phone.
It's pretty likely that other factors were at play—the Note 7's rapid-charging function, for instance. In fact, Samsung, as far as we know, still doesn't know what happened to cause the Note 7 phones to explode. But it's a safe assumption that if there were more space inside the phone for the battery, the battery design could have put more space between the positive and negative plates.
Removing the analog headphone jack might buy back some of the space needed to do that.
Making such allowances for safety can run counter to the normal design thrust within a phone's evolution. Phone makers want to put money, design effort, and in-phone real estate into customer-facing features that directly affect the consumer experience. Battery safety features don't really do that. It's seen as a downside risk, not an upside opportunity to delight the user.
The good news is that, despite skepticism from some in the tech press, the conversion of the phone to an all-digital device (no analog headphone jack) might kill two birds with one stone. Not only will the switch to digital create precious real estate inside the phone, it will also remove the analog bottleneck to audio quality. And noise-cancelling headphones wouldn't have to be so big and bulky because they'd be getting power from the phone and wouldn't need their own big battery on board. The list of benefits goes on.
Yes, there are risks. There's a chance the phone maker could use the digital format to impose control over what kinds of headphones and speakers can be connected. Audio content owners could feasibly use the digital format to impose new digital contact management (DRM) controls on users. I think phone makers and content owners would think twice and three times before doing such consumer-hostile things.
The simple fact, as the phone makers see it, is that consumers want higher audio quality from their phones. And phone makers will all give it to them, digitally. Removing the analog headphone jack won't fix all Samsung's problems, but it could be a good start.
Before you hit "send," quickly scan that email—since that's what the recipient will do. Does it still make sense?
Chances are there's more than one horrifyingly long, convoluted email thread sitting in your inbox right now. Sometimes that's unavoidable—big projects often do take a lot of back-and-forth. But they don't necessarily take as much as you might think. Here are some steps you can take to write more actionable, efficient emails that get the job done with fewer messages written in fewer words.
Email is not a good venue for debate. Thus, messages that offer nothing but a question like—What do you think about X?—are generally ineffectual. Busy people don't want to figure out your problems for you, and they don't want to write you a lengthy response. They want to say yes or no and then move on to the next thing. So if you want to get a response—and to get your way—don't just pose questions; propose solutions.
Let's imagine that you're emailing your boss to ask if you can attend a conference. You could write:
Hi Tina—I noticed that people are already booking hotels for the SXSW conference next year. I'd like to go. What do you think?
Or, you could write,
Hi Tina—I've been thinking about ways to enrich my work skill set, and it looks like there are some speakers and workshops at SXSW next year that would be very helpful. I can also put together a report to share what I've learned with the team after I return. I've estimated the cost, and it looks like a ticket, hotel, and airfare would run the company about $2,500. Do you think the company could sponsor me to attend?
The first message is short but lazy and will require numerous back-and-forth messages to clarify what's really at stake. The second email is longer but includes everything necessary for the conversation to be resolved immediately. The writer has done her homework, the costs and benefits are clear, and it's easy for the boss to just say yes. Being proactive in your communications takes more work upfront, but it pays huge dividends in the long run.
Use bullets, numbers, and/or bolding to make your email skimmable and digestible, emphasizing the key points. If you scoff at this type of spoonfeeding of information, go ahead and get over it. Emails are about getting results, not testing your recipient's reading comprehension. Here's an example of how you might recap next steps after a client meeting.
Hi Sharon—Great call yesterday! I'm excited about next steps. Here's a recap of what we discussed doing in the coming week to meet our deadline:
Action items for Sharon and team:
—Approve revised mockups (Due: Mon 4/9)
—Provide final copy for banners (Due: Wed 4/11)
—Supply hi-res photography (Due: Wed 4/11)
Because this email requires the client to do something, you want the action items to pop out of the email—thus the bold text—and be easily digested—thus the bullets. Due dates are also offset in parentheses so they're easy to see. Remember: if you really want to get things done, success depends upon making it easy for your reader to quickly process the email and understand the salient points.
Is your email urgent? Does it need a response now? In two days? In two weeks? It may surprise you to learn that busy people love deadlines because they help prioritize exactly when things need to get done. In fact, I've found that emails that have no timetable are more likely to get ignored. You certainly don't want to be imperious or overly demanding, but do give your reader some polite context for timing.
If you're emailing a close colleague about an urgent task, you can be pretty straightforward about timing:
For the project to stay on schedule, I'll need a response from you in the next 24 hours if possible.
If you're extending an invitation to someone you haven't met, you might politely share your follow-up timeline:
I'm sure you're busy and will want time to mull this opportunity over. I'll follow up in two weeks if I haven't heard from you.
Or say you want to allow your boss or a client to weigh in on a decision but need to move forward if they don't respond in time:
If I don't hear back from you by this Friday, Aug 17, I'll go ahead and proceed with the solution I've proposed above.
Including a deadline is like dropping an anchor: it fixes your request in space and time, making it more likely to get noticed and get done.
For your email to be read, it has to be opened. Your goal should be to compose a subject line that is clear and, ideally, provocative. It's much like writing a compelling headline for an article or blog post that you want people to click on. Let's say you're a successful musician reaching out to a designer about doing the cover for your new record. You have a decent-sized audience, so you expect the album to perform well. You could use:
Subject: Design Gig
It's accurate, but it lacks specificity and makes your email sound like a humdrum offer. Alternatively you could use:
Subject: Cover design for high-profile album release?
This is still accurate, but it piques curiosity by clarifying what exactly the project is and promising good exposure. Especially when you're writing an "ask" email to someone you've never met before, the subject line functions like a first impression. And you only get one chance to make a first impression.
After you've drafted your email, re-examine it with an unsympathetic eye and take out anything unnecessary. Being clear and concise from the get-go saves time for everyone. (Of course, you want to achieve this without seeming abrupt, but more on being friendly in the next section.) There's no doubt it takes more time to craft a tight and to-the-point email, but it will also be much more likely to get a response.
As mentioned earlier, your email message is most likely going to be opened first on a mobile phone. Therefore, it's wise to understand what your message will look like on a handheld. What seems digestible on a massive desktop screen often looks like War and Peace on a mobile phone. Preview your message on the small screen, and if it still looks way too long, ruthlessly edit it again. If your message gives the impression of being overwhelming, it's probably going to get ignored.
Companies such as Qualcomm are reimagining networks to let them connect just about everything—from drones to surgical instruments.
Wireless technology is a stone soup of acronyms, jargon, numbers, and marketing gibberish that the industry likes to boil down into terms like "4G," the technology used by today's phones. (It's also known as LTE, which stands for "long-term evolution"—as if that clarifies anything.) Now tech companies are talking about 5G, and Qualcomm has announced its first 5G modem chip, the Snapdragon X50, for phones and other gadgets. No surprise: 5G will be faster than 4G. But it will also bring tens or even hundreds of billions of new devices online.
Yes, the new standard will download apps and web pages way faster, and allow higher-resolution video streaming that doesn't stutter. But it could also create a whole new connected world. Realistic scenarios include fleets of delivery drones flying in formation, tens of billions of wireless sensors constantly measuring every aspect of our planet, and a doctor on one side of the planet controlling a robotic scalpel on a patient on the other side. It could also finally kill landline broadband, cutting one more cord into the house or office.
This isn't just speculation about future scenarios; some of it's already happening. "5G is still based on LTE concepts," says Akshay Sharma, who tracks wireless tech for research firm Gartner. Many tricks that engineers are doing with 4G/LTE, like loading phones up with extra antennas to goose speed, will be the foundation of 5G.
Qualcomm's new X50 chip is an educated guess to get the process of 5G implementation going.
"New technology is essentially a gradient, a consolidation of many steps on the old technology," says Serge Willenegger, an engineer and VP for product management at Qualcomm. (His name is on over 50 wireless tech patents.) The Snapdragon X50 modem includes the new 5G technologies Willenegger and others are developing.
Your next phone—and maybe even the phone or two after that—is unlikely to be a 5G model. The X50 modem uses a flavor of the technology that's Qualcomm's best guess at what the open, international standard will be like once it's finalized sometime in 2018. "It's part of the process to build up the ecosystem," Willenegger says. "Ultimately you don't know everything until you put it to the test, start playing with it in the field." It's close enough, the company thinks, for gadget makers and wireless carriers to start trying out the technology by the second half of 2017.
If all goes as Qualcomm hopes, its chips might go into final products in 2018. 5G probably won't get a wide rollout until 2019 or later, although South Korea is hoping to show off a 5G network during the 2018 Winter Olympics. Of course, Qualcomm will face stiff competition from other chipmakers, such as Intel and Samsung; and it may not have correctly anticipated the final standard. Intel, for its part, is instead providing reprogrammable chips for 5G trials and prototypes. It's waiting before it commits to a chip design, which it told us will be "available to coincide with 5G mobile network deployments."
The complex jiggering of physics principles, government regulations, and corporate interests to enable 5G will remake not just what people can do but how business gets done. The challenges facing nascent 5G technologies even hint at the problems that 6G may someday have to solve.
If you've heard anything about 5G, it's probably the speed figures. Today's best 4G tech, LTE Advanced, is advertised at 225 megabits per second for downloads, and up to one gigabit per second in technology demonstrations. That's pretty astounding, especially since LTE started at a top speed of about 12Mbps back in 2010. A lot of work has been done since then, and 5G codifies and expands those advancements, promising over 10 Gbps.
What will be the upshot of all that speed? We don't yet know. "Two things will happen for sure," says Willenegger. "Those advanced capabilities will be used, and they will be used in ways that are different than we envision." Consider that work on 4G started a dozen years ago. "In November 2004 there was a workshop on what should be in 4G," says Durga Prasad Malladi, the senior VP for engineering at Qualcomm, who has a whopping 233 patents. "Serge and I were there. I remember, it was Election Day." Since then, George W. Bush won a second presidential term, an unknown named Barack Obama shot to fame and served two terms, and we're nearing the end of an unfathomable race to pick his successor. Talk about an unforeseeable future.
That first 4G workshop was over two years before Apple announced the iPhone and thereby kicked off a smartphone revolution that encompasses tablets, drones, smart watches, fitness trackers, virtual reality, Snapchat, Tinder, and Pokémon Go. Work on 4G started before most people had 3G (which the first iPhone didn't support), when just getting email on a phone was a big deal.
But 5G offers another kind of speed that may be even more important: A speedy response time. Every network has latency—the lag between when you do something, like ping a web site, and when the signal arrives. Today, the latency is measured in dozens of milliseconds. Testing firm OpenSignal found Sprint to have the lowest 4G latency in the U.S., at 66ms; AT&T was highest, at 85ms. That's fine for voice calls: any lag under 100ms is considered imperceptible. But it's downright languid for some near-future scenarios. For instance, carmakers and trucking companies are already envisioning autonomous convoys that share information, like when the lead vehicle needs to slow down, so they can drive in tight formation.
Using smaller data packets and faster processing (thanks to Moore's Law), 5G aims to have a typical latency of just 5ms, and get it down to less than 1ms—essentially instantaneous—when needed. There are some technical downsides to doing this for every bit of wireless data, but 5G networks will be able to turn on low latency when required. A fleet of Amazon drones, for instance, might get into trouble flying over a congested city if there's a delay involving dozens of milliseconds.
The full name for this tech is "ultra-reliable low latency communication." How reliable? As low as a one per billion error rate—safe enough for a surgeon to control instruments over the internet. "Of course we're a long way from that," says Malladi. "But if you have the capability, can you do it? Yeah."
Though known for its ability to move huge amounts of data very quickly, 5G is also designed for new gadgets that move just a few bits, rather slowly—environmental and other sensors. Cheap cloud networks and powerful artificial intelligence are creating an insatiable appetite for sensor data that companies can munch, crunch, and learn from.
Some sensors, like the ones on planes and factory machines, will collect and stream oodles of data. But others, like soil moisture sensors on farms or connected water meters that report usage to the utility, might just send a blip every hour or less. Today, networks go through a big setup process to establish a connection between gadgets. That's important for the reliability of a phone call or a video stream (and certainly for drone fleets or robotic surgery). It's overkill for occasionally tossing a few digits from a sensor to the network—such overkill that it would overwhelm networks on a planet featuring hundreds of billions of sensors, as some futurists foresee.
5G uses something called "connectionless access" that requires much less network chatter. "We literally just say, here's a packet of data, here's a radio channel, just shoot it across…and we'll catch it," says Jason Elliott, the 5G market development manager for Nokia. (The company no longer makes phones, but continues to sell a lot of network hardware.) He likens connectionless access to tossing a ball to your friend, rather than first putting the ball in a tray and then passing over the tray.
The speed of light being a constant, wireless engineers have still found ways to make networks faster, with tricks like more efficient algorithms and more powerful chips to encode and decode signals. But the real boost in 5G comes from carrier aggregation—using several wireless signals at once, like a band of 700MHz and a band of 1900MHz spectrum. A simple analogy would be adding more lanes to a freeway, but it's more like combining lanes from several different freeways that may be miles apart. "It's about aggregating all the radio assets you can find so you can deliver the highest possible rate," says Willenegger.
The process has already started with 4G, with phones combining any two of 20 or more possible bands to download pieces of a huge videogame or upload bits of a HD Snapchat video. 5G wants to do a lot more of that. Where the iPhone 7 has two antennas, and the Samsung Galaxy S7 has four, their 5G successors might have 36 or more, all fitting on a chip the size of a dime.
5G's millimeter wave frequencies are plentiful enough to enable 800 MHz-wide channels, vs. 60 MHz for 4G/LTE.
Like opening up the western frontier, governments and corporations are opening a lot more wireless frequencies, 11GHz, for 5G—more spectrum than is currently used for all wireless data service on Earth. (The bulk of this is at frequencies of 20GHz and higher, often called "millimeter-wave.") This plentiful spectrum also allows much wider wireless channels to pack more data: 800 MHz wide, vs. 60 MHz wide for 4G.
There's a reason why no one's done this before. "This spectrum is horrible spectrum," says Willenegger. "The laws of physics are against us," adds Malladi. The two have been working together for more than 15 years on 3G, 4G, and now 5G technologies; and they often finish each other's sentences.
Short-wavelength signals don't travel very far, and they bounce all over the place. "If you hold your phone the wrong way, maybe you lose your coverage completely," says Malladi. Willenegger chuckles and recalls Steve Jobs's famous "Just avoid holding it in that way," admonition to iPhone 4 owners who lost reception due to bad antenna placement.
When things move around, the wireless system has to continually track where gadgets are going. That takes a lot of transmitters. Forget towers: We're talking iPad Mini-size boxes all around buildings and streets. The more obstacles, the more you need. Both the cells and the mobile devices direct the signals—a process called "beamforming"—even bouncing them around corners. That's one of the reasons they need so many antennas: It takes an array of them, interacting with each other, to steer a beam. This is really hard physics.
Beam steering can bounce signals around corners.
"Why are you going there? It's self-inflicted pain," says Willenegger. "The reason to go there is resources. There's oil, but the cost of drilling is increasing," he says, adopting an energy-industry metaphor. "We're fracking now," adds Malladi.
They are drilling in other places too, like the frequencies used for Wi-Fi, which runs on frequencies around 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Most Wi-Fi networks stick with the lower frequency, leaving lots of capacity around 5GHz. 5G devices might use this for cellular signals, or they might just piggyback on Wi-Fi for extra capacity, since some phone companies also run public Wi-Fi networks. Or they might do both.
Dynamically juggling frequency bands and wireless standards—or trading off latency, accuracy, and expediency—requires a very different kind of network than has existed up to 4G. It's a move from pieces of hardware with specific duties to what's called a "software-defined network." "It's not about buying a specific box to do a function," says Elliott. "It's about having a datacenter with a rack of servers, and you could deploy the different functions on those servers." (As with many things 5G, software-defined networks are already emerging in 4G systems.) Intel is not only hoping to sell a lot of modem chips for 5G gadgets, for instance. It's hoping to sell CPUs, RAM, and solid state hard drives for servers.
Software-defined networks still have a lot of hardware aspects. There are physical routers, for example, but they can be reconfigured on the fly to widen or narrow the connections between them in response to what the network needs.
A reprogrammable network will become even more important as 5G starts running out of capacity, which will happen. One idea for dealing with that eventuality is to share airwaves so that, for instance, if a Verizon phone isn't using a frequency for a few milliseconds, an AT&T one can sneak a few packets through. This could create up to a 1000-fold increase in bandwidth, says the U.S. military, which is sponsoring a contest for engineers to develop these spectrum-sharing technologies. "I think the entire industry, including academia, is looking at that one," says Malladi.
Willenegger jokes that spectrum sharing might be in the 6G standard. But then he considers and says that new technologies will definitely get added onto 5G, until it accumulates so many changes that it's time to create a 6G. Spectrum sharing might be one of those additions. "There will be 5G+, 5G Advanced, 5G Turbo, whatever the increment," says Willenegger. "Some will say there will never be a 6G because we've done everything we can imagine."
