After a barrage of criticism over what customers claimed was a reduction in portion sizes, the company this week had to publicly refute a rumor that diners could get larger portions simply by taking out their phones and filming them. Chipotle employees as they prepared their orders. The company also offered to make amends to those who felt wronged.
“There has been no change to our portion sizes and we have reinforced appropriate sharing with our employees,” Laurie Schalow, Chipotle’s director of corporate affairs and food safety, said in a mailed statement electronic to the Washington Post. “If we haven’t kept our promises, we want our customers to contact us so we can make it right. »
The statement follows increasingly vocal complaints online in recent months from diners about the perceived stinginess of the burrito chain’s portions, once considered so generous that a crafty customer could feed themselves for days with just one bowl. But things took a big turn when the hugely influential food critic Keith Lee echoed those laments — and added some sounds — in a May 3 TikTok review.
Lee, whose gentleness and efforts to avoid special treatment have set him apart from a sea of online food critics, wields considerable influence even beyond his 16.3 million TikTok followers . (It’s called the Keith Lee effect, and it’s real.)
“I loved Chipotle,” he said at the start of the segment, in which he ordered several menu items. “Lately, Chipotle hasn’t hit the same mark, in my opinion.” Things didn’t get better from there. He had trouble finding pieces of chicken in his bowl. “See, I don’t see any chicken at all,” he said as he dug in with disappointment, ultimately giving it a 2 out of 10 after locating a few solitary pieces. Her once-favorite steak quesadilla got a 2.5 (“tastes like steak-umms”).
What stung critics — and no doubt true for viewers — was that Lee was previously known to his followers as an enthusiastic Chipotle fan. He even collaborated with the brand last year, with Chipotle introducing a special menu item, the “Keithadilla,” inspired by a custom order that Lee and fellow TikTok celebrity Alexis Frost popularized in a series of videos viral.
The incident only highlights that the influence of social media influencers can cut both ways, says Kate Finley of Belle Communications, which works with both brands and influencers. And she says if so many customers are noticing the same type of changes, Chipotle — or other brands — should recognize it. “If there had been a change, they could have used influencers to proactively communicate about that change, as well as the ‘why’ behind it,” she said.
For Chipotle, the virtual stacking has intensified. Some people have called on users to express their dissatisfaction with the company by leaving one-star reviews on its app. Others took their grievances to their premises, posting videos of themselves placing an order but walking out of the restaurant halfway if they thought the employees behind the counter weren’t handing out items. sufficiently generous balls.
All of this is happening against a backdrop of customer frustration with rising food prices at every level: at the grocery store, at fast food joints and at white-tablecloth restaurants. Rising costs for ingredients, labor and more are to blame, experts note, but consumer reaction has been vitriolic. In some widely circulated videos, people denounced the prices of Big Mac meals, some as high as $18. And although Chipotle insists that its portion sizes have remained the same, consumers everywhere are facing “shrinkflation,” a tactic often used in the food world, where customers pay the same amount for a product that is subtly smaller.
Chipotle got into even more trouble with a new series of videos about what some called a “Chipotle phone hack” or a “Chipotle phone rule.” It’s unclear where this came from, but on TikTok, videos claimed that Chipotle employees were instructed to hand out larger portions if customers filmed them. Many videos showed workers piling food into bowls, which posters considered “proof” that the rumors were valid.
But stopping the wildfire-like spread of a message on TikTok isn’t easy, Finley said, especially among millennials and Gen Z. “They’ll speak it like Encyclopaedia Britannica,” a- she declared.
Of course, efforts to hack Chipotle’s orders — many of them in an effort to get the most food for the least money — are practically as old as the company itself, founded in 1993 and widespread across the country in the mid-2000s. After all, its ultra-customizable bowls, burritos and tacos lend themselves to DIY – which bargain-seeking customers have learned to maximize for their own benefit.
Chipotle did not respond to a request for details about its portion policies. But some people shared images from an employee guide showing standard sizes, including four ounces of meat, rice and beans.
The human element of the chain has also long made it a target. Workers take customer orders and prepare them on site, so every interaction can be seen as a potential for manipulation. Case in point: According to self-proclaimed professional food hacker Anderson Nguyen, one trick is to ask for the toppings one at a time. “If you list every item you want, the worker is already going to rank each item in their mind and give you less,” he says in his video titled “Every Chipotle Hack to Maximize Your Order,” which has a 9.1 rating million views on TIC Tac.
Channel hackers have been working on this for years. A canonical truth among them is that chain bowls are the best way to stock up on gifts (just check out this decade-old guide, where it’s suggestion #2, behind the offering a big smile to employees). But over the years, they’ve resorted not only to psychological trickery, but also to actual science, at least according to a 2015 BuzzFeed article titled “This Guy Used Science to Make a Burrito 86% Bigger in the World”. Chipotle.”