One of the pivotal moments for me was realizing that our 'food with integrity' approach at Chipotle was satisfying my passion. That's about bringing the best quality, sustainably-raised ingredients to everyone: chicken without antibiotics; beef without hormones. These ingredients were only available in high-end restaurants, not mainstream places.
Chipotle was going to incorporate all the things I had learned at the Culinary Institute and Stars and really elevate typical fast food.
When I started Chipotle, I didn't know the fast-food rules. People told us the food was too expensive and the menu was too limited. Neither turned out to be true.
The earliest recollection I have of being in the kitchen and cooking was in the third grade, and we lived in Germany. And I remember cooking scrambled eggs.
Having never taken a business class, the economics of restaurants scared me. I opened Chipotle with the idea that I could step away from it and use it to support my full-scale restaurant.
We're not best in the world at burritos and tacos. What we're best in the world at is building a people culture, sourcing really great ingredients, cooking according to classic cooking techniques, understanding the corresponding economic model and how to tweak that and drive that and provide this really great, new fast food experience.
I remember looking to McDonald's, and, my God, they have 13,000 restaurants in the United States. Well, we have almost a couple thousand Chipotles. What if Pizzeria Locale is a few thousand, and Shod. All of a sudden, we're bigger than McDonald's in the U.S. I mean, that's not an unreasonable way to think about this.
When I told my friends and family that I was leaving Stars to open a burrito shop in Denver, they thought I was crazy, but not long after the success of the first Chipotle, I knew I had to open just one more, so I opened a second one on Colorado Boulevard, which turned out to be even busier than the first.
Our economic model allows us to invest a disproportionate amount in our food costs. We have a very efficient system: customers go through a single line, the people who serve you are the ones who make the food, and our menu board is not cluttered.
My undergraduate degree was in art history! Raising money for Chipotle was really my MBA. The money for my first restaurant came from my dad, the second from mostly cash flow. The third was an SBA loan. After my dad invested $1.5 million to open a few more, he suggested I raise the money myself for the experience.
The traditional fast food model is built on buying the cheapest ingredients - and that usually means poor-quality, heavily processed foods. But you can use quality ingredients, cook food using classic cooking techniques, and still serve something that's fast and inexpensive.
The best Chipotle restaurant managers get the title 'restaurateur' and a $10,000 bonus for each person they hire who starts as crew and goes on to become a manager.
I thought we were going to get customers excited by telling them there were no antibiotics in our meat or no growth hormones used to raise the animals or no RBGH in our cheese or sour cream. Well, that's not a very appetizing message.
After a two-year stint at Stars, I wanted to start my own full-service restaurant, but I didn't have the funds to do so, so I got a modest loan from my parents and opened Chipotle with the goal of having it fund that restaurant.
When I graduated from cooking school, I went to work at Stars, which was one of my favorite restaurants in the country at the time, and that's where I really learned to cook and to taste food in a discerning way.
I remember feeling a little guilty every time I opened a Chipotle. I felt guilty because I wasn't following my true passion. But that eventually went away. And I realized that this is my calling.
Think about the systems at McDonald's. It's a very mechanized world, where you take out a highly processed patty.
We can teach people how to run a Chipotle.
The economic model was formed by the constraints that I had: a small space, relatively inexpensive building materials, relatively inexpensive investment, a very efficient service line or assembly line.
If I had taken money from, say, venture capital, they would have wanted a certain return in a certain time period. McDonald's, on the other hand, seemed very interested in my passion about creating this brand. I trusted them, and they did not really interfere with the brand.
