Chipotle switched from food processors to hand-dicing onions for salsa and guac. The processor bruised onions and made them oxidize faster, killing the citrus brightness. Hand-dicing kept them dry, improved flavor, cut labor, and made crew members faster and prouder of their work.
Chapters
I went in and tasted our salsas.
Once, and I went across the street.
To a competitor and tried their salsas.
And their mild salsa was better.
And I thought, oh, ours isn't as good.
And so I shared that with Steve, and I said, hey, our salsa is not as good. It doesn't taste great.
And he was frustrated. And so we went into the store.
And what we did is we made the salsa again in the store with the same ingredients that it was already made with, and found that when we.
Made it, it tasted great. Well, the difference was that at that.
Time at Chipotle, we were dicing our onions with a large food processor.
And the way that food processor worked is the thing that pushes the onions through a grid of bl. And as it pushes them through the grid of blades, it cuts them, it.
Dices them into a quarter inch.
Dice works every time. Problem is that even when those blades are brand new, they're not perfect.
But after a week or two, as.
They get dull, since it's pushing the onion through, it actually juices the onion.
It creates a lot of juice.
Well, onion juice isn't tasty.
It oxidizes also very quickly.
When we made the salsa with Steve.
Who is an excellent chef, you know.
We used a knife to cut the onions, a sharp knife.
And when you cut onions with a.
Sharp knife, what happens is it doesn't bruise them or cut them or smash them.
It just slices them, and so there's.
No juice that comes off.
I said, you know what? I think we have to chop onions.
By hand with a knife.
All the Chipotle's nationwide, because we need to have our salsas be the best they can be.
And not only the salsas, okay?
Also, the guacamole contains the exact same onions. And I said, this is going to make all our food taste better. And there was a lot of pushback at Chipotle at that time. The operations people are like, we can't do that. We can't train everyone in this company to cut onions. And I said, well, that's absolutely not true.
People are brilliant.
You just have to give them the opportunity to do it. Let's try. We came up with a really good way to cut onions and created the video about that, shared the video with all the stores. So everyone knew it and said, hey.
We'Re going to cut onions by hand from now on. Well, what happened was actually wonderful. First of all, our. Our crew people who did it all day, every day got excellent at dicing.
Onions, and they got really fast at it.
And they took great pride in producing wonderfully diced onions. Now, how does this matter? Well, when you put these onions in.
With, for instance, with a mild salsa, tomatoes, cilantro, salt, and citrus, and you mix it all together, if the onions.
Have juice in them, that juice gets in the citrus juice, and it gives an off note to the entire salsa.
But if you put the dry onions.
In the same recipe, citrusy stays bright and delicious.
And so our salsa is dramatically better. But not only was our salsa way.
Better, our crews got so fast at this that it actually saved time because there was no food processor to clean.
At the close of cutting onions. And so it actually ended up being a labor savings.
But in addition to being a labor savings, people in the restaurants, our crews.
Were incredibly proud because they weren't just cramming onions through a machine. They were dicing onions.
They were preparing food expertly.
And they felt the pride of that.
That expertise that worked so well that we started dicing the tomatoes by hand as well. And that added another element of excellence to our food.
So we were able to make the food much, much, much better by trusting our people that they were excellent, that.
They cared, that they wanted to do a great job. And they.
They took it and ran with it in a way that was exceeded all of our wildest day.
This is how Chipotle had some of the best tasting guac and best tasting salsa of all Mexican restaurants.
