Chipotle has an ambitious plan for changing the way you think about fast food.
Detailed in an extensive piece published in The New York Times, The Company is in the midst of overhauling its tortilla recipe, saying it wants to start producing "artisanal tortillas on an industrial scale."
Working together with Washington State University's 'Bread Lab', Chipotle is trying to nix ingredients like fumaric acid, calcium propionate, sorbic acid and sodium metabisulfate from its existing recipe. The goal of the collaboration is to create an easily reproducible 'artisanal' tortilla made off just four basic ingredients: Whole Wheat Flour, Water, Oil, and Salt.
The word artisanal is often associated with tightly controlled, small batch production. The problem is that Chipotle's Tortilla consumption is the furthest thing from that. At present the company uses an estimated 800,000 tortillas a day on the various Burritos and Tacos available on its menu with demand expected to reach 1 million in the near future.
Developing a wholly organic tortilla capable of withstanding the rigors of industrial mass production and a strict supply chain schedule is the challenge.
"Not only did we need to change ingredients, we needed to get most of them out," says company CEO Steve Ells. "We also would have to go back to the tortilla bakery and really change the whole way tortillas are made en masse."
The undertaking is just one of the many ways Chipotle is trying to make their food as healthy as possible. In April of this year
Ells announced to CNN that the company had axed all GMOs from its menu, a first in the industry.
They say these ingredients are safe, but I think we all know we'd rather have food that doesn't contain them," he said.
