Fast Food Rivals Fall in Love in Chipotle's Latest Animated Tale - Join The Lights

From now through May 31, middle- and high-school students ages 13 to 18 are invited to submit their original short essays “about a time when food created a memory” to Cultivating Thought. Chipotle essay contest offers students scholarships and a chance to have their writing published on Chipotle packaging. “A Love Story” illustrates how competition among food businesses has caused food to become increasingly processed and filled with added colors and flavors. The film –- which has been viewed more than 61 million times — follows the story of two young entrepreneurs, Ivan and Evie, and the escalating rivalry that leads them to build competing fast food empires with vast menus and heavily processed food. In fact, its simplified menu has traditionally been part of the brand’s success. In a survey of customers that visited Chipotle in April 2016, location analytics firm Placed found that21 percent of customers were lowering the frequency of their visits as a result of the E.

There are murmurs about offering breakfast, though Niccol says that’s not happening anytime soon. And the company has tried out $2 taco “happy hours” in the midafternoon. Chipotle was founded a quarter-century ago by Steve Ells, a chef who turned out to have great intuition as an entrepreneur. At a time when megachains were fighting to offer the cheapest possible burger, Ells insisted that people wanted something else.

As the fastest-growing peer-to-peer payment app, Venmo is underrated as a social network. Each transaction a conversation on spending habits and showing to the world just what brands, food and booze you are loyal to. Before our campaign, Chipotle was already the fourth most mentioned brand on the platform, according to Venmo. This presented our agency with an interesting opportunity for Chipotle.

In addition to having their essays featured on Chipotle’s packaging, the 10 winners received$20,000each to support their continuing education. Ever since Jonathan Safran Foer had a dream to get literary writers on fast food packaging, Chipotle has featured the likes of George Saunders, Toni Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Aziz Ansari on their bags and cups. (You can read a sampling of the stories here.) Now, they are opening up to students with a new essay contest. If you answered “yes” to any of these questions — or all of them — Chipotle just made an announcement that we think you’ll be pretty happy about. According to Business Wire, Chipotle Mexican Grill just came out with a brand-new, online memory game based on “A Love Story,” the animated short film the company released this summer. The game features 16 cards arranged in rows on your screen, and each card has a different natural ingredient printed on it.

Using traditional cooking techniques, he’d sell customizable burritos with fresh ingredients for a price closer to $10 and assemble them right in front of customers. Chipotle’s runaway success—it grew from one store to 500 at the time of its IPO and now has 2,450—has led people like restaurant-industry consultant Aaron Allen to liken Ells to Henry Ford. The model proved that customers would pay more for better ingredients, a discovery that helped give rise to other fast-casual chains like Sweetgreen and Lemonade that serve up salads and grain bowls in similar fashion.

On the morning of February 8, Chipotle stores across the country werenoticeably absent of customers, trading the bustle of burrito-rolling and avocado mashing for a company-wide live-stream on food safety. And while some 60,000 Chipotle staffers gathered for a lesson on new measures the company implemented in the wake ofone soul food festival indianapolis 2015 of the most widely-covered food safety crises in recent memory, the company’s competitors were taking full advantage. Chipotle Mexican Grill is offering a buy-one-get-one-free entrée deal to customers who play an online memory game. The company is also working on sourcing its rice, beans and cilantro from organic suppliers.

The company has said that it expects it will take 18 months to two years for sales to recover. If there was ever a reason to play an online game, it would be winning free food. Electric Literature is a 501 non-profit organization founded in 2009. Our agency delivered a first-of-its-kind partnership and drove one million sign-ups to the program with no paid advertising in the first week. 100,000 loyal Chipotle fans received a total of $250k in cold hard cash via Venmo.

We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. The “Cultivating Thought” packaging is available in many Chipotle restaurants starting today and will be arriving in all restaurants in the coming weeks. For more information about “Cultivating Thought,” please visitchipotle.com/cultivatingthought. To test your matchmaking skills, visit Chipotle.com/alovestorygame and to view the original “A Love Story” film and inspiration for the game, please visit Chipotle.com/alovestory.

Players have to match ingredients cards and avoid additives, or “imposters.” Anyone who completes the game will receive a mobile coupon for a buy-one-get-one-free entrée. Chipotle Mexican Grill was once the envy of entrepreneurs everywhere. Founded in 1993 by a classically trained chef, it grew from a single location in Denver into a billion-dollar burrito empire by 2006, the year the company went public. Its formula embraced the best of fast food while positioning the company as the industry’s antithesis, with fresh ingredients and a corporate ethos that emphasized integrity and sustainability. New locations popped up across the U.S. as the company’s stock price soared more than 3,000% in the decade after its IPO. At the peak of 2015, 1.5 million people ate at Chipotle every day.

Our mobile devices are only getting more powerful and they’re replacing platforms marketers know and love. For loyalty programs and financial products, it is no longer share of a physical wallet, but share of a digital home screen. So it is safe to say Qdoba is moving away from the fast-casual look that Chipotle pioneered? “It’s not that we don’t consider Chipotle to be competition, but we consider local, independent eateries that millennials are frequenting to pull share from,” says Craven. “To do that, we need to ensure that not only do we have the menu, but that we can explore offerings that the fast-casual restaurants don’t offer.”