Food & Beverage
Chipotle: The Fast-Casual Category Leader
EPR's canonical Chipotle reference — the institutional crisis-readiness benchmark for the QSR sector and the reference case every restaurant company runs after a food-safety event.
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Chipotle
Food & Beverage
EPR GEO Scorecard Vol. 5: QSR & Fast Food
EPR GEO Scorecard Vol. 5: McDonald's 86 (A), Chick-fil-A 74 (B), Chipotle 71 (B). 750 audits. McDonald's the only company to score A on every engine. The CEO-transition lag case study.
Food & Beverage
Restaurant Crisis Recovery Benchmark Q2 2026 — McDonald's, Chipotle, Wendy's Lead
McDonald's 89. Chipotle 84. Wendy's 78. Boar's Head 18. Red Lobster 24. Cracker Barrel 38. Speed of admission predicts speed of recovery. Q2 2026 benchmark.
Food & Beverage
Chipotle Made a Dance Go Viral. Chick-fil-A Made Customers Do the Marketing. Here's the Actual Playbook.
TikTok didn't just change how food brands market — it changed who gets to build a brand. The brands that figured this out early built something no media buy can replicate: organic demand.
Food & Beverage
Starbucks Customers Seething Over Long Lines
Starbucks has a problem its operations team did not expect. Mobile ordering has been too successful — and the in-store handoff counter is now the bottleneck. Kevin Johnson is acknowledging it directly. What other brands deploying mobile ordering should learn from the situation.
PR News
Chipotle's Recovery Wasn't Marketing. It Was A New CEO.
Steve Ells tried to fix it with a campaign. Brian Niccol fixed it with the operating system. A decade later, Chipotle generates $11B+ and is expanding internationally.
Crisis Communications
VW vs Chipotle: The 10-Year Crisis Communications Retrospective
In 2015-2016, VW faced Dieselgate and Chipotle faced foodborne illness outbreaks. Ten years later, Chipotle recovered into category leadership. VW is still working through the consequences. The 10-year retrospective on why two simultaneous crises produced opposite outcomes.
Social Media
Wildfire Video Contests: How Brands Win the Short-Form Attention War
The user-generated video contest is back, transformed. TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and Spotlight have rebuilt the model into an industrial-scale content engine.