A Chipotle fast-casual restaurant in Sterling, Virginia, made national headlines last week after 60 customers contracted Norovirus.
It all started with just a few online posts from diners expressing intestinal discomfort. Soon after, the posts began piling up with accusations that the Sterling Chipotle had made customers gravely ill. When people actually started testing positive for Norovirus, the restaurant was forced to close. The official tally sits at 60 people getting sick from the food at this one restaurant, however, more than 100 people wrote reviews on iwaspoisoned.com in the past week claiming that the Sterling Chipotle made them sick. Since the story went national, it's impossible to know how many of these posts are legitimate and how many are just put up by trolls. Norovirus is transmitted through unsanitary food-handling. Over the past two years, Chipotle has made headlines for a number of E. coli outbreaks. While E. coli comes from the food supply chain itself, Norovirus is most commonly transmitted when employees at a restaurant don't wash their hands after using the bathroom. During the E. coli outbreak, Chipotle had to close down all of its restaurants to ensure that food was safe to eat. With Norovirus, a nationwide shutdown is not needed. In fact, the Sterling restaurant was re-opened later that day once the source of the outbreak was identified.“If we would have been sitting at the table next to that it definitely would have fell on top of our food because it was literally right there,” she said. “I just kept wondering what it was, and I kept looking around until I looked at the floor, and I saw three rats, and I ran."
Chipotle's corporate office quickly released a statement on the airborne rodents.
We learned yesterday that mice got into a restaurant and we immediately contacted professionals who identified a small structural gap in the building as the likely access point. We’re having it repaired. Additionally, we reached out to the customer to make things right. This is an extremely isolated and rare incident and certainly not anything we’d ever want our customers to encounter.”
None of this seemed to stem the bleeding. When the market opened on Monday morning, CMG shares fell as low as $337.75 a share, the lowest stock price the company has seen since April of 2013.