It’s not often you find your next job because of a breaking news alert from the Wall Street Journal, but that’s exactly how my journey to becoming CEO of Chipotle began. The U.S. fast-casual Mexican food chain had been facing challenges since 2015, when several of its restaurants were implicated in a series of E. coli and salmonella outbreaks. In November 2017 it announced that it was looking for a new leader to improve its operations, digital strategy, and marketing. When I saw the news, I thought, That’s interesting.
The CEO of Chipotle on Charting a Culinary and Digital Turnaround
![](https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2021/10/R2106A_GANDOLFO.jpg)
Niccol was the CEO of Taco Bell before he became the chief executive of Chipotle, in 2018. He had watched Chipotle’s launch and rise with fascination and had enjoyed its burritos and bowls. But now he saw that it needed to get its business back on track fast. Customer lines were moving slowly. Some workers didn’t seem properly trained. The marketing was unmemorable. Niccol and his team focused on strengthening the company’s culinary culture and harnessing the power of digital to enhance its fledgling mobile app. They reconfigured the restaurants to allow for skip-the-line pickup of online orders and created a second “kitchen” to prepare those orders, freeing the regular staff to attend to in-person customers. And they shifted marketing spend from a defensive, expensive, promotion-focused approach to social media and television, where the message has become much more resonant. Chipotle’s to-go and delivery operations have been a vital source of revenue during the pandemic, with digital sales representing 46.2% of all sales in 2020.