Salmonella in Minnesota; E. coli in Seattle and Oregon; norovirus in Los Angeles and Boston. It’s been a difficult year for Denver-based Chipotle Mexican Grill, to say the least.
As a result, Chipotle founder and chairman Steve Ells has had a lot to say in recent days about how his company is responding to the food-borne outbreaks, penning an open letter published as full-page ads in a number of newspapers. He’s promised to introduce “high-resolution sampling and testing of many of our ingredients to prevent contaminants … from getting into our restaurants,” and says testing of this scale will be “unprecedented.”
It sounds impressive, and maybe it is, but Chipotle shareholders, whose investment has been battered, may well have another question not addressed in Ells’ letter: Will the chairman’s outlandish compensation suffer any dent as a result of the outbreaks and their aftermath?
Ells made $25 million in 2013 and $28.9 million in 2014 — way more than CEOs at peer companies and more than 1,000 times the median Chipotle worker. Anything even approaching those figures for 2015 would be scandalous.
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