For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Health Issues page and our CAFO’s vs. Free Range page.

In the world of fast food, Chipotle’s unique approach to sourcing ingredients has earned us a lot of attention. Our vision is to change the way people think about and eat fast food, so nothing is more important to us than serving our customers fresh, delicious ingredients that are raised responsibly and prepared using classic cooking techniques.

When deciding which ingredients to source, our internal discussions consider many factors including taste, animal welfare, farming practices, supply quantity, price and location among others. We are always trying to find what we consider to be the best ingredients by balancing these various factors. For some ingredients, finding the best source is easy. In other cases, like beef, finding the best source can be quite complex — the right answer isn’t always obvious. When it comes to beef, for one thing, there are many different ways to raise cattle — from conventional (with antibiotics and hormones) to the higher standards we require for our Responsibly Raised brand beef (without antibiotics and hormones), and from grain-finished to entirely grass-fed cattle.

Over the years, we have had great success serving the premium beef we call Responsibly Raised, which is produced according to high standards requiring, among other things, that animals be raised without hormones or antibiotics. But lately, we have been wrestling with a particularly vexing issue regarding this beef. Over the last five years, as our restaurant count has grown from about 800 restaurants to more than 1,600, so have our demand for all of the ingredients we use. This has been a very good thing for the farmers and ranchers who raise those ingredients. As our restaurant count has grown, these farmers have had the opportunity to grow with us. In addition, we have helped numerous meat and dairy farmers convert from conventional production methods to the more responsible models we prefer.

Nevertheless, sometimes the existing supply of the premium meats we serve is unable to meet our growing demand. On occasions when we are unable to secure sufficient quantities of a particular Responsibly Raised meat, we temporarily replace it with a conventionally raised alternative — always informing our customers about this substitution with signage in our restaurants. This has been the case recently with a portion of the steak we serve, as the size of the total U.S. cattle herd has shrunk to its lowest point in more than 60 years.