Chipotle Says No To Fake Meat Because It’s Too Processed

While restaurants are lining up to add Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods‘ products to their menus Chipotle Mexican Grill doesn’t want them.

Chipotle provides a menu that contains only 51 ingredients, less than every other major restaurant chain. Chipotle offers “Plant-powered Lifestyle Bowls” and they use sofritas as their meat substitute for their vegetarian customers, which is made from tofu. Chief Executive Officer Brian Niccol says that the fake meat products are too processed for their restaurant.

Related: Foods Most Likely to Contain Glyphosate

We have spoken to those folks and unfortunately it wouldn’t fit in our ‘food with integrity’ principles because of the processing, as I understand it, that it takes to make a plant taste like a burger,” Niccol said in an interview. “If there’s a way for them to do this that would match our ‘food with integrity’ principles, I’m sure we would continue talking with them.”

Chief Executive Officer Brian Niccol

Beyond Meat’s CEO responded with an invitation, suggesting that Beyond Meat’s factory is much better than what they’d find visiting a factory-farm.

You can come to our facility anytime. Don’t call me, just knock on the door. I invite you to do the same with all of Chipotle’s meat-processing facilities. They won’t let you, and if they did, you wouldn’t want to see it.”

CEO Ethan Brown

Many consumers are looking towards more sustainable foods and becoming more aware of the environmental costs and animal cruelty involved with factory farming. But consumers are also becoming more concerned with health problems with processed foods and GMOs.

Recommended: How to Eliminate IBS, IBD, Leaky Gut 

Both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods develop their faux meat with highly processed plant-based ingredients. Beyond Meat’s uses pea protein as their main ingredient. Impossible Foods GMO soy and heme which is made from genetically modified yeast.



Chipotle Food Poisoning – Bad Luck, Bad Management, or Corporate Espionage?

In 2013, Chipotle made the news by being the first fast food chain to tell its customers which of the foods they sold contained GMOs.

In April of 2015, Chipotle announced that they were removing GMO foods from their menu. As stated in the New York Times article dated April 26, 2015, Chipotle to Stop Using Genetically Altered Ingredients, the ban on GMO products did not include soft drinks, which are often made with genetically modified high fructose corn syrup. In addition, they revealed that their meat and dairy may come from animals fed GMO grains. This same statement was made on the Chipotle website.

Chipotle’s move toward cleaner, healthier food and the company’s transparency was not enough to avoid a class action lawsuit filed in late August of the same year. The lawsuit maintained Chipotle falsified their advertising, claiming to be GMO-free when they sold soft drinks containing high fructose corn syrup and sold meat from animals fed GMOs – exactly as they had stated. However, some ads certainly gave the impression that the entire menu was GMO-free.

Food-Borne Illness Outbreaks

In July of 2015, 5 people in Seattle were sickened by an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7. The source remains unknown.

In August of 2015, a norovirus outbreak sickened at least 234 people (including 17 employees) who ate at a Simm Valley, California Chipotle restaurant. The location had been cited for several health code violations. The company had not been compliant in addressing these violations in a timely manner, however, the source of the outbreak remains unknown.

In August and September of 2015, 64 people became ill with Salmonella Newport in Minnesota. The source was contaminated tomatoes.

In October, 2015, 3 people in Oregon and 19 people in Washington became ill from Shiga toxin-producing E. coli bacteria (E. coli O26). A third of those identified were hospitalized. There were no deaths reported. In response to people eating at 6 restaurants becoming ill, Chipotle closed 43 locations in Oregon and Washington as the CDC investigation began.

The outbreak continued in multiple states (9 total) through December 2015. As of December 18th, 53 people (original reports said 52, but the CDC later amended their report to 53) were reported to be infected with 20 requiring hospitalization. There were no fatalities. Of these people, the CDC determined that 88% had eaten at a Chipotle restaurant in the week before their illness started. The source remains unknown.

In December of 2015, norovirus struck again in Boston with 136 people affected. The source remains unknown.

An Internet search for previous outbreaks, before the announcement of a GMO-free menu, reveals 2 outbreaks in 2008. One was a norovirus outbreak in Kent, Ohio (at Kent State University), with 435 affected. The other was an outbreak of hepatitis A in La Mesa, California, with 5 affected. Chipotle’s communications director, Chris Arnold confirmed this history is correct.

That’s it. We hadn’t had any incidents of this kind for several years prior to this year.”

Industrial Espionage?

There has been much conjecture on social media about the possibility of industrial sabotage, that one or more biotech corporations created these outbreaks in an attempt to drive the company out of business due to their anti-GMO stance and publicity. The recent federal probe by the Justice Department again stirred the pot on this particular rumor mill, raising hope that industrial sabotage was the focus of the criminal investigation. This does not appear to be the case.

If the Justice Department were pursuing an investigation of espionage, they would be looking into all the incidents of food poisoning. Instead their investigation is focused on the Simm Valley, norovirus outbreak. This is in keeping the Justice Department’s new stance on corporate accountability.

In September 2015, criminal charges led to prison terms for Stewart Parnell, the former owner of the Peanut Corporation of America, and two co-defendants, his brother, food broker Michael Parnell, and the plant quality control manager, Mary Wilkerson due to the Salmonella outbreak that caused 9 deaths and 714 illnesses.

The trial was the first federal food-poisoning case to be tried by an American court and the first federal felony conviction of its kind. It won’t be the last. Criminal neglect that could result in death or disability will no longer be tolerated in the food industry, and this is a good thing.

Although the Justice Department does not seem to be looking into the possibility of espionage, it is hard to ignore the glaring facts. A popular company has no food poisoning incidents for many years, then suddenly, right after taking a stance against GMOs, incident after incident occurs across the country. The coincidence just seems too obvious. Chris Arnold says,

We’ve certainly seen those theories, but we haven’t seen any evidence to support them.”

What’s Next for Chipotle?

Meanwhile, the company has announced enhanced food safety and testing procedures and that every location across the nation will close for a few hours on February 8th for a nationwide all staff meeting to address food safety issues, answer staff questions, and discuss a new marketing plan to bring customers back.

We can only hope Chipotle is successful in weathering the storm and earning back the trust of their loyal clientele.

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Chipotle Removing More Unnatural Ingredients – Sourdough Culture to Replace Tortilla Preservatives

Chipotle made waves earlier this year when they announced that they would be eliminating GMOs from their menu. After eliminating GMO cornstarch from its tortillas, the company is now further streamlining its tortilla recipe in an attempt to offer its customers a product as close to a homemade tortilla as possible. From an admittedly short list of eleven ingredients, Chipotle’s downsizing its ingredient list even further to a mere four: whole-wheat flour, oil, salt, and water.

Mass-producing this tortilla presents a number of problems, chief among them taste, shelf life, and logistics. Early test runs have created tortillas with the elasticity needed for burritos and a nutty taste most likely be attributed to Chipotle’s decision to use more health-conscious whole-wheat flour. But when a company is serving upwards of 800,000 tortillas a day, taste and texture are not the only concerns. It needs to produce a product that is consistent and always available. The typical means to increase shelf life would be the addition of preservatives to the product. Being health conscious, Chipotle said no to preservatives and found a solution both simple and elegant: sourdough.

The Oldest Leavened Bread

Fermentation is one of the earliest forms of food preservation. Sourdough has rich history as the first leavened bread, and its use of naturally occurring yeast has made it accessible to anyone since it was recognized. Using this time-tested method for insuring its bread would last longer, Chipotle is able to keep the shelf life its tortillas without lab derived chemicals and provide a healthier product that appeals to the informed consumer.

Lactobacilli bacteria is responsible for the unique sourdough flavor as it ferments the bread, breaking down gluten and other proteins. The bacteria also acts as a probiotic. This breakdown makes sourdough easier to digest than breads made with conventional yeast, making sourdough bread a potential option for those who are unable to easily digest modern bread products.

Of course there are logistical issues, as sourdough requires a consistent temperature, a quiet place to develop, and the time to properly ferment. Starting and maintaining a sourdough culture can be a daunting task. A tortilla factory is accustomed to expanding commercial dough balls with yeast and then immediately pressing, baking, and packaging tortillas for sale. So far Don Pancho Authentic Mexican Foods in Salem, Oregon, which is serving as the test factory, is dealing with the logistics needed for fermentation by designating a separate room where the sourdough cultures can ferment before being shaped and baked. Chipotle plans on perfecting the process then expanding it throughout the entire chain, region by region.

Our Food Conversation

Chipotle’s commitment to serve “Food with Integrity” is the culinary equivalent of the canary in the coalmine – can fast food be both healthy and profitable?

Though the average diner may not have entered the conversation about what’s in our food, where it’s coming from, and what our planet can actually sustain, there is a growing number of people who want quality, healthy dining options.

This conversation needs to continue on an increasingly larger scale. Though Chipotle has always been a part of this conversation due to their transparency, they entered it in a big way when they banned GMOs. It’s up to us to reward this business for its courage and integrity. Remember, as always, we vote with our dollars.

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Chipotle goes 100% non-GMO; flatly rejecting the biotech industry and its toxic food ingredients

(NaturalNews) The free market victories against the sleazy biotech industry are coming at a rapid pace now, and the latest announcement is a real game changer: Chipotle Mexican Grill has outright rejected all GMOs and, as of today, is now serving all non-GMO ingredients in its foods.

“When it comes to our food, genetically modified ingredients don’t make the cut,” says an official announcement on the Chipotle website. “…[T]he food we serve should be made with ingredients raised with care for animals, farmers, and the environment. We’re doubtful that the GMO ingredients that used to be in our food meet these criteria.”

The fighting words from Steve Ells very closely mirror the clean food mantra that Natural News has been advocating for years. He says, quoted in the New York Times:

This is another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food… Just because food is served fast doesn’t mean it has to be made with cheap raw ingredients, highly processed with preservatives and fillers and stabilizers and artificial colors and flavors.

Well said, Steve. You get it. Your customers get it. Your shareholders might even get it, too: people want clean food, transparent supply lines, ethical treatment of animals and no GMOs!

“While some studies have shown GMOs to be safe, most of this research was funded by companies that sell GMO seeds and did not evaluate long-term effects,” says the Chipotle website. “Evidence suggests that GMOs engineered to produce pesticides or withstand powerful chemical herbicides damage beneficial insect populations and create herbicide resistant super-weeds.”

For the first time, Natural News publicly endorses the leadership of a fast food restaurant chain

With this announcement, Chipotle makes history. It is the first fast food chain in the world to outright reject GMOs in a very public manner, making its stance a feature of its food offerings.

For this reason, Natural News is now publicly endorsing the leadership and clean food vision of the Chipotle restaurant chain, honoring the courage and pioneering spirit of this chain in staking out new territory in the clean food movement.

I don’t normally eat at fast food chains, but I’m now going to make it a point to visit a Chipotle soon and check out what they have to offer. If you happen to see me chowing down at a Chipotle restaurant in Austin, Texas, don’t be surprised… (and yeah, it’s totally cool to say hi!)

Why switching to 100% non-GMO is a remarkable achievement

In order to help you appreciate the difficulty of going 100% non-GMO, allow me to share some of what’s involved in this. I’m qualified to share this because I’m intimately involved in the product sourcing, certification and laboratory testing of raw materials for products sold via the Natural News Store. We are certified organic and GMP-compliant (FDA rules). I’m also the lab science director of the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, which is in the process of achieving ISO 17025 accreditation.

Sourcing non-GMO ingredients requires a tremendous supply line effort involving non-GMO certification and documentation, complex raw materials acquisition logistics, and laboratory testing of raw materials to ensure they are indeed free of genetically engineered ingredients. None of this is easy to accomplish, and it all requires a concerted effort (and additional cost).

“Ridding the supply chain of genetically altered components is difficult,” reports the New York Times. “They lurk in baking powder, cornstarch and a variety of ingredients used as preservatives, coloring agents and added vitamins, as well as in commodities like canola and soy oils, corn meal and sugar.”

It’s surprising to even see this printed in the New York Times, but it’s also very welcomed. Indeed, the NYT is correct on this point: GMOs are “lurking” even in many popular vitamins, protein powders and some superfoods! Almost anything made from corn — maltodextrin, corn starch, corn syrup and even ascorbic acid — is largely derived from genetically engineered corn.

That’s why sourcing foods made without GMOs is no walk in the park. It adds complexity and cost to the sourcing of those foods, and at times it can cause supply line shortages. On the flip side, however, it also creates enormous profit opportunities for farmers who wish to grow non-GMO foods. The demand for non-GMO crops is now at an all-time high in America, and more and more farmers and learning that they can earn far more revenue by ditching biotech seeds and growing organic or non-GMO crops instead.

As Chipotle rises, McDonald’s falls

The timing of this announcement by Chipotle is notable, as it coincides with McDonald’s declaring another miserable quarter of falling revenues and plummeting market share. McDonald’s is in desperation mode, scrambling to try to figure out why fewer and fewer people want to eat its factory-processed, genetically modified, artificially-flavored “fake foods.” (Is that a Chicken McNugget, or a tiny scrubbing sponge for my toilet?)

The idea that consumers might be informed enough to make holistic choices about food ingredients, food supply lines, the ethical treatment of animals and even the ecological costs of certain ingredients (such as palm oil) seems to absolutely baffle McDonald’s executives. They appear to be stuck in the 1950’s, believing that food marketing is all about social engineering — children’s playgrounds and emotional marketing slogans — rather than the food itself.

What McDonald’s has yet to realize is that food awareness is skyrocketing everywhere, in large thanks to the very same independent media outlets that McDonald’s can’t control (like Natural News). With independent organizations like Natural News now owning and operating its own high-level food forensics laboratories, the scrutiny of food can no longer be controlled by corporations doing things like pressuring universities or the FDA to remain silent about food toxins and contaminants.

In other words, the age of independent laboratory scrutiny of foods is now upon us… and food transparency will be forced into the open, even as fast food corporations like McDonald’s would likely prefer to keep their food composition a secret. Imagine what will happen when independent labs across the alternative media universe upgrade their laboratories to test for pesticides, hormones or even glyphosate contamination! At that point, factory food companies like McDonald’s will have their full chemical composition publicly revealed for the entire world to see. And it won’t take long for consumers to see why restaurants like Chipotle are a far healthier choice.

Watch the sleazebags of biotech now attack Chipotle

Now that Chipotle has taken a courageous and game-changing stance against GMOs, we’re all going to get to enjoy the entertainment of watching the “biotech sleazebag brigade” roll out its contrived attacks on Chipotle and anyone who endorses them.

These attacks will of course be staged by the so-called “Monsanto Discredit Bureau” which has now been utterly exposed and revealed to be a group of quackpot criminals and fraudsters, such as the felony criminal doctor running the American Council on Science and Health, an astroturfing corporate front group that was behind the recent attempt to smear Doctor Oz.

Biotech smear operatives work for publications like Vox.com, Slate and the Washington Post, where defamation and character assassination attacks are routinely waged against humanity and all those who defend humanity against the mass poisoning by pesticide corporations (and GMO companies). Increasingly, no one believes the biotech smear campaigns anymore. That’s why the science editors of the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets are increasingly seen as being propaganda mouthpieces for Monsanto and Big Pharma rather than real journalists. “Journalism,” as they say, is printing what the corporations and governments don’t want printed. Everything else is just public relations.

What almost everyone is coming to realize is that nearly every single person defending the biotech industry is a paid corporate shill. Take a look at former Forbes.com writer Jon Entine, for example, who Natural News exhaustively exposed as being a violent wife abuser, according to these court documents. He was a key author for the ACSH, writing a booklet that ridiculously tried to claim atrazine was environmentally safe.

People who try to defend glyphosate, GMOs, atrazine, pesticides and mercury in vaccines only discredit themselves. The public is waking up, and they aren’t stupid. They know that GMOs are toxic, glyphosate is destructive to the environment, mercury in vaccines causes harm to children and, above all, corporations and the mainstream media are lying to them.

ACTION ITEM: Visit Chipotle this week and tell them why!

To celebrate this mass awakening, I’m now suggesting that everybody rush out to Chipotle this week and enjoy a non-GMO meal there. While you’re there, ask to speak to the manager of the restaurant and tell them you are a customer because of their rejection of GMOs.

Let ’em know as long as they take a leadership position in clean food, you will continue to reward them with your business. Vote with your dollars. Punish the poison-pushing corporations like McDonald’s, Kellogg’s and General Mills by simply denying them your business. Reward honorable, ethical companies like Chipotle, Nature’s Path and One Degree Organic Foods by purchasing their products.

You hold the power in your hands to change the food industry one purchase at a time. In fact, your power is enormous and lasting. Exercise it NOW… and you WIN!

Editor’s note:

If you’re going to eat at Chipotle, pop a few anti-Candida supplements like SF722 or a good probiotic (see Kill Candida). With almost every single restaurant, even their healthiest choices still feed Candida even in a healthy person. Also check out Understanding and Detoxifying Genetically Modified Foods.

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