Chipotle Q3 Takeaways

I’ve been nerding-out this morning looking at Chipotle’s Q3 sales numbers, which came out last week. A couple major takeaways:

1) Q3 digital sales tripled year over year
2) Digital sales currently account for 50% of Chipotle’s sales.

This is nuts. It would have been almost impossible in 2019 to have come up with a hypothetical that would have resulted in these numbers. My gut is that even with advance knowledge of a looming global pandemic with national lockdown orders few would have predicted digital sales like this. And I suspect numbers in MA are well over 65% (50% number is nation-wide).

If you are reading this blog you are also probably this sort of person that would enjoy reading the Chipotle Q3 Press Release so here it is: Chipotle 2020 Q3  Also while you are at it, it’s fun to go back and read the 2019 Q3 Numbers too.

And if you just want the cliff notes, here are a few things I found highly interesting:

• Of 2,710 Chipotle restaurants only 10 remain closed due to COVID-19
• Chipotle opened 44 restaurants in Q3 (surely all suburban) and only closed 3
• Re: margins: “Restaurant level operating margin was 19.5%, a decrease from 20.8% in the third quarter of 2019 driven primarily by COVID-19 related impacts including higher delivery expense associated with increased delivery sales, elevated beef prices, increased incidence of steak, and fewer sales of high margin beverages. The decrease was partially offset by sales leverage, lower avocado expense, improved labor efficiency realized from digital enhancements to the restaurants and benefits from menu price increases.”