When a robot cooks your lunch with Steve Ells of Chipotle and Kernel

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Roz, so this is the place where we tell the stories of companies that are working on big world changing ideas, and it's also where we bring back previous How I Built Thus Guests for an update. Steve Ell was first on the show way back in twenty seventeen, and at the time he told the story of how he built Chipotle from a single restaurant in Denver, To a massive chain that really changed the restaurant industry and kind of created this whole concept of fast casual dining. It's actually an amazing episode and if you haven't heard it, I definitely recommend that you go back in your podcast feed and give it a listen.

But we invited Steve to come back on the show this week because he's now working on a new concept that he also believes could revolutionize the industry. Essentially, it's a chain of very small, highly automated restaurants. that will serve a vegan menu. It's called Colonel and he's planning to open the first locations in New York City very soon. And when we left off with Steve back in 2017, Chipotle was dealing with a pretty major crisis.

A string of foodborne illness outbreaks have caused some customers to get sick. And things got so bad that Steve would actually end up stepping down from his role as CEO of the chain that he started back in 1993. When The foodborne illness. Issues.

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