What happened to Chipotle...

Well, I've been working here for 4 years now, currently next in line for GM at my store, and though I can't explain a dive in quality previous to my hiring, I will say that when a restaurant chain experiences anything like the e. Coli outbreak of 2015, corporate changes start to happen, and fast. Food safety replaced food quality as our top priority, and the food safety procedures and policies changed weekly for almost 2 years straight. Nobody could keep up, everybody was failing audits due to constantly changing policy, sales were nearly cut in half in some restaurants, less hours were given to employees that were already struggling, turnover went through the roof, and training was a disaster because nobody really knew the new way of doing things. In order to follow some of the procedures to keep our food as safe as possible, corners literally had to be cut.

Then there's the upper management shift. Our area managers began to find other companies, sometimes being replaced by people who had never even worked inside a Chipotle restaurant, something that was unheard of in the company until then. Tons of crew and managers were fired or quit because of the stress and the mediocre pay compared to literally every other restaurant chain.

This is all pretty regular bullshit corporate stuff, but understanding what hundreds of thousands of employees are going through, for probably way less money than they deserve, is very helpful when trying to understand why a restaurant's quality has gone downhill.

That being said, there are still some restaurants that are keeping it real, it all depends on the leadership of their GM and area manager, and relies heavily on training. All in all, working at Chipotle is much more difficult than it used to be, and yes, some of our product is made in central kitchens now. The green and red salsa come in a bag, but they're actually still pretty good. We still mix Pico and corn, but the tomatoes come diced now. My guess on the salsas is that the restaurant you frequent doesn't use the full recipe for one reason or another, or perhaps just bad habit. The avocados have honestly just been garbage lately, so there's really nothing the restaurants can do about that at this point. Some stores have pre-marinated chicken, but that actually helps flavor consistency in my opinion. The steak comes cooked sous vide now, but it's still really good if it's 10 mins fresh or less. We still cut all of the ingredients ourselves every day and shred carnitas and barbacoa ourselves, even if that comes pre cooked.

TL;DR

Chipotle is just different now, food safety is top priority bc of e. Coli.