I am curious to see what new "procedures" he is referencing. Does anyone have a link? I am a professional HACCP manager and food process designer and provide overall operational risk mgmt advice. I applaud companies who adopt new technology and reform processes to reduce food safety risks which will always be the single biggest brand and financial risk to any business in the food supply chain, from growers to retailers.

However I find it counter intuitive to push the "all natural" and "organic" agenda to the point of zealousness when some of the methods required are either proven to be not as food safe at worst or untested in mass scale at best. In food safety your first concern is to prioritize the risks that "we know and are imminent", for instance food born microbial risk, over the risks "we fear/think may arise in the long term", for instance long term effects of extreme levels of antibiotic use in the food supply, or potential (and largely unproven) risk of GMO's.

Is overuse of antibiotics a legitimate public safety concern? Absolutely! Do we need to go to the point of exclusively eliminating antibiotics from the food supply? Almost certainly not. Chipotle's strict adherence to this rule, and willingness to adopt to any other mainstream "all natural" or "organic" health food trend speaks a lot about their marketing strategy and how that market strategy/customer focused offering drives their decision making process, far more than it does to their dedication to providing a healthy food offering, which can be noted by their willingness to abolish the aforementioned "scary" processes but apparent inability to address fundamental food safety issues. I understand why they won't change now, their marketing strategy has built a very loyal customer base and has led them to the success they have now, I just wonder how many of these types of public food safety failures they can have before that brand loyalty decays or they are forced to abandon some of their core principles, as they continue to grow and as the spotlight continues to grow on them.

You can make the case that this event is different from the E.Coli event in that it may not have originated in their food supply, but rather from restaurant GMP's, but that still says something about what Chipotle prioritizes as being important in terms of creating healthy and safe food. Would this have happened if the premium spent on ingredients and marketing was instead spent on more robust worker training? Of course there is no way to know the answer to that definitively but such is the nature of risk management, How do you know when to cut investment on growing your business in favor of more investment in supply chain reliability/operations?