You’ll Eat Well Whether You Want To or Not!
That headline’s not meant to conjure up unpleasant childhood memories, although I guess there are some people out there for whom that would be an unpleasant thought even in adulthood. No, I used it because it’s actually happening all over the country and most people don’t even know it. I’m talking about the half-million people who eat burritos and salads at the 1000 Chipotle restaurants every day, 95 percent of whom have no idea they are supporting sustainable and, in more and more cases, local food systems.
According to Phil Petrilli, northeast regional director for Chipotle, it’s a point of pride that these customers are “playing a part in affecting change, whether they know it or not.” The reason they come to Chipotle is for great-tasting food, which was the first goal of Chipotle’s founder, Culinary Institute of America-trained Steve Ells. But they get much more than that. It started with Niman Ranch pork several years ago, and has progressed to the point where today, in the mid-Atlantic region, chickens come from Pennsylvania’s Bell & Evans, and the pork at the Charlottesville Chipotle famously comes from Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. That came about because Petrilli was personally a member of the Polyface buying club. When you’ve got folks like Ells and Petrilli in decision-making positions, good things will happen.
Petrilli spoke about all this on Saturday during a panel I chaired called Farm to Table: Moving Toward the Mainstream at Les Dames d’Escoffier DC Chapter’s Salute to Women in Gastronomy. As we talked with the audience about Wal-Mart’s move into local foods, there was a fairly general agreement that if we truly believe eating well should be available to all, we need to applaud Wal-Mart’s initiative. But there concern Wal-Mart not be allowed to browbeat farmers through sheer force of volume in a way that is at odds with what this movement really stands for. Petrilli pointed out that Wal-Mart can also choose to use its power for good by influencing the structure of distribution networks, which right now represent one of the largest obstacles for small farmers trying to work with retailers on any scale.
What Petrilli emphasized is that sustainable and local sourcing is an ongoing process that Chipotle has taken step-by-step. ”We have the highest food costs” for a quickservice establishment, he told me proudly, yet growth continues at a sustainable pace. Chipotle vets its local sources, then works with its distributors to get those farms and producers into the logistical pipeline. He said that for sourcing animal products, “humane is key” to their definition of sustainability. In 2009, they got 35 percent of their produce from local sources in season, and he expects that to be more than 50 percent in 2010. He remarked that it’s not unusual to see chefs at farmers markets, but would you expect fast-food chefs? “The chefs from our Dupont Circle store go to the market on Sundays,” he said. Sometimes they may come back with nothing, but other days the same locally grown serrano pepper, lettuce or tomato on the salad at a high-end restaurant around the corner may also be stuffed in a burrito at Chipotle. Whether you know it or not.
