Chipotle Showing Us a Culture of the Greater Good

How do you know if your favorite company is committed to significant positive gain?

Are they interested in making things significantly better, not just for themselves, but for their customers and perhaps even the world? While it’s hard to see a business’s culture from the outside, we can see the results of it over time. There are clues, if you know what you’re looking for...

Chipotle just announced a Virtual Farmers Market, where you can go online and order directly from some of their suppliers. This alone isn’t new, restaurants like Subway, Panera and Potbelly have all added grocery items to their offer to offset the decrease in restaurant sales. It’s how Chipotle is doing it that’s unique. 

Chipotle has a history of innovation. They helped to usher in the era of “fast casual”, they were among the first to move to natural and organic ingredients, and they even created one of the first burrito ordering apps. So our first clue is that they continually realize new innovation potential (vs. just new marketing), which means they probably have some kind of declared system internally to make things better than they are. I spend more time on this idea in the The Fastest Way to Realize Results blog if you want to check that out here. 

But that’s not the most interesting thing. Chipotle is spending money on developing a Virtual Farmers Market and marketing it, but will reportedly see no revenue from it; all proceeds go directly to their farmer partners. Why? It goes to one of the more important but rarely talked about cultural principles: doing it for a greater good. 

Simply responding to supply chain issues would have Chipotle looking for new partners and alternative sources of their ingredients they need. But they didn’t do that. Chipotle sees this as a way to support their farmer partners since people are buying far less food (at least from restaurants). And at the same time, they can get some of these good for you / ethically produced products in the customer's hand. 

There are two ways to approach anything: aiming for your good, or aiming for the greater good. A business culture that’s just aiming for their good might cut corners and constantly play it safe. A business culture that’s aiming for the greater good will consistently be talking about and enacting new ideas to support their customers and community. 

Aiming for the greater good will win in the long term every single time. When looking at problems or opportunities inside your organization, which lens will you use?