The Denver-based chain was served with another subpoena on Jan. 28 by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California requiring Chipotle to produce documents and information about the company’s practices at all restaurants system wide. click here to read full article
I don’t think you have to be a legal genius to see what the government is trying to do here. My guess is that they are going to try and show that Chipotle wasn’t operating safely and that it was a system wide problem.
By subpoenaing documentation across all restaurants it is pretty easy to build a case where the numbers look bigger than the percentage. When you have 1,755 restaurants, NRN Top 100 Unit Count June 2015. If each of those locations missed 1 temp log a week that is 91,260 missed temp logs in a year.
Do you even know if your restaurants are doing their daily checklists? If you don’t have an automated system how could you?
How many temp logs does your chain miss in a week? Even if you did them all you are bound to have lost a few from soda spills and misfiling.
What is even worse is if you get a bunch of those documents back from the restaurants and they are incomplete, or appear to be pencil whipped. That would be direct proof that you aren’t doing your due diligence as a company. If the government can prove that management knew that the restaurants weren’t all operating safely and wasn’t doing anything about it, there is your Ford Pinto case.
Anyone that follows OpsAnalitica knows that we have been harping on this stuff forever and a day because it matters.
Here is the crazy thing, if Chipotle was an OpsAnalitica client and they conducted all of their checklists and inspections on our platform, they could pull a report and send it off.
Restaurant safety goes beyond training, culture, daily checklists. A large part of it is documentation and record keeping. You can say you are safe all day long but can you prove it.
There is a reason that one of the 7 HACCP principles is record keeping and documentation.
We are committed to helping you run safer restaurants. From our white papers, to our platform, to our new managed service license. We will help you run the safest restaurants you can and do it in the most efficient way possible.
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