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How much chicken could employees possibly be eating, compared to the volume of customers?
Edit3 : the 750,000 is wrong. That was from 2010/2011 when they had 1,230 restaurants.

It’s probably more around 2,100,000 customers per day now.

Which means 262,500 lbs of chicken per day for customers. Around that. … which means that the employee chicken eating would be absolutely minuscule.

Compared to: small I a sure.

But, looking at their menu nutrition… It looks like the burrito has 4oz of chicken Al pastor or around that. (Maybe a little less) for a single meat serving based on the calories and protein.

Chipotle has 3,437 locations and 116,068 employees.

Let’s assume on any given day 70% are working, and 50% choose chicken as a meal while working.

40,624 (if corporate gets a catered meal, is it always from a chipotle ? Do they have a chipotle kitchen in their headquarters employees eat at? Does it have special corporate only recipes?… I’m sure they have a test kitchen)

That’s 10,156 lbs of chicken used per day for employee meals.

University of Minnesota extensions tells me a whole chicken gives 4.5-5lbs of meat.

https://extension.umn.edu/save-money-food/buying-animals-mea...

But I don’t think all of that would be usable by chipotle.

Maybe 4lbs ?

So 2,539 chickens per day employees are eating.

If a little less meat, we might be around 1 chicken per day per location. If they have a supply chain they’re concerned about, or if I’m low in my estimate, it may make sense to slow the consumption to avoid running out. (Example, half of that is usable meat, or, they’re buying chickens only at a certain price for profitability checking to see age, I can’t find great info on how old chickens sold for meat usually are… pullets are a wide range… and I don’t want to go even further down this rabbit hole - or - perhaps deeper into this chicken coop ?)

Edit: looking at their guacamole nutrition, they give about 4 oz per order of guacamole when ordered as a topping.

https://www.chipotle.com/content/dam/poc/order/nutrition-fil...

I’m more curious now: how many avocados per day are needed to support chipotle restaurants alone.

Edit 2: but they do serve 750,000 customers per day. If half get chicken…

93,750 lbs of chicken per day.or 23,438 chickens. So I think my numbers are wrong, with employees, or, it really is hypothetically a 10.8% reduction in chicken used… which if that’s the case…. Doesn’t seem so outrageous.