Chipotle Food Is Now Safer but Less Fresh
The retooling of the Chipotle following a major E. coli outbreak illustrates the sad truth about food safety: Fresh vegetables is a problem.
While food safety advice often deals with raw meat and eggs (including our own advice on how to avoid poisoning guests at dinner ), many foodborne illnesses are spread through fresh fruits and vegetables . After all, cooking the meat can make it safe. There is nothing quite like what you can do with lettuce or tomatoes that you plan to serve fresh. Washing helps , but cannot guarantee that germs will disappear.
Thus, from now on, Chipotle will grind cilantro or tomatoes not in the store, but in preparatory kitchens, where they will be disinfected and placed in airtight containers. The company explains the change to the new food safety page on its website :
Our restaurant teams are currently implementing these changes, such as blanching many fresh foods – immersing them in boiling water for 3-5 seconds – to sanitize those ingredients before cooking.
Take, for example, the way we made tomato salsa. It takes about 5 boxes of whole tomatoes to give chipotle every day. Although we have washed these tomatoes thoroughly, it is unrealistic to test each tomato completely after washing. Even if we were able to test every tomato, it would not be pathogen free, as some tomatoes may be punctured or have a loose stem section that allows pathogens to enter the interior of the tomato where testing cannot easily detect them.
Instead, the safest way to prepare tomatoes for our fresh tomato salsa is to wash them as well and then test them after they are diced. Tomatoes, now prepared in our centralized kitchens, are washed, diced and then washed and tested again before being packaged and sent to our restaurants.
In addition, the water used to wash the diced tomatoes is carefully controlled to prevent cross-contamination between batches of diced tomatoes.
The new methods will require the company to raise prices by 3%, or about 20 cents per burrito, but they do not plan to raise prices until 2017. “The worst thing we could do is go further, implement these procedures, and then turn around and say we’re going to charge you more,” Chipotle’s CFO told Food Business News. In the meantime, they plan to send out free burrito coupons as part of their comeback plan, so keep an eye on your inbox.
How Chipotle Plans To Get You Back | Food business news
Photo by Michael Sachang .
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