“It’s great to be back. Obviously what’s happened and what’s ongoing is something I wouldn’t wish on anybody. But stuff happens.”
That’s Mark Crumpacker, the chief creative officer and marketing lead at Chipotle, upon returning to the restaurant chain after a three-month leave of absence. Following a cluster of food-safety incidents Chipotle experienced in the last 14 months, which devastated the company’s business and is the subject of our new Fast Company feature, Crumpacker was indicted for cocaine possession, on June 30. It was a bizarre aside to an already tumultuous time for Chipotle, though many observers saw it as yet another interruption in Chipotle’s protracted recovery. On September 8, the company surprised some outsiders by announcing Crumpacker’s reinstatement, after he completed a drug rehabilitation program. “I’m really lucky,” Crumpacker tells me just two weeks later.
Since returning, Crumpacker’s team has launched a new ad campaign, in partnership with Austin-based agency GSD&M, highlighting the “royal treatment” Chipotle gives its ingredients. The company has also completed its nationwide rollout of its newest menu item, chorizo, which Crumpacker says was on the product roadmap before the chain’s E. coli issues. “We were like wait a minute, we can’t introduce something new before we got all of the food-safety measures in place,” he says.
This focus on promoting Chipotle’s ingredients post-outbreak is intentional, Crumpacker explains. These efforts, along with the company’s previously introduced rewards program Chiptopia and animated film A Love Story, were designed to remind customers what they loved about Chipotle’s food in the first place, before its reputation was muddied. “Obviously our marketing is built on this idea of fresh, high-quality ingredients,” Crumpacker says. “So [the food-safety issues were] sort of like the ultimate insult to that position.”
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