Chipotle was founded in 1993 by Steve Ells in Denver, Colorado. Chipotle is a unique name, meaning a Jalapeno chili pepper. It was founded by Steve Ells and his father, who helped Ells start the first shop with an 85,000 dollar loan, where Ells started the first store that opened close to Denver University.

Steve Ells went to a culinary school in New York, thanks to his love for food, especially Mexican food. Ells and his dad had to sell 107 burritos a day to make a profit and after the first month, they had sold 1,000 burritos a day. After seeing the success, McDonald’s made a small investment in Chipotle, and soon they became Chipotle’s main investor and bought 4 stores,  but Ells didn’t want this. In October, 2001 he bought back the restaurants owned by McDonald’s and became 100% company-owned.  After 24 years of hard work, in 2017 Ells had opened over 2,400 restaurants. 

However, this did not come without hardship. In 2015 an E. coli breakout spread to 11 Chipotle shops! The CDC, the control department, seized some of the food cases heading to those restaurants, but Chipotle took this as an opportunity to make their restaurants more safe and made more food quality rules to prevent further breakouts. However, this also caused a drop in stock price, taking a big blow to the location’s profits. 

Unfortunately, Steve Ells resigned in 2017, and in March of 2018, Taco Bell CEO Mark King stepped up, and Ells was still a chairman. The change in ownership resulted in a boom, stock prices went up 12%, and the business was doing better than ever. 

Today, Chipotle is the second most valued company, right behind McDonald’s, and is known as a hard-working and resilient company, especially to be working for 30 years.