Shortly after joining Chipotle Mexican Grill as chief operating officer in 2017, Scott Boatwright noticed the puzzling look on customers’ faces while observing a busy restaurant in downtown Denver—near the chain’s then-corporate headquarters.
“Consumers would come in and pick up their digital order, and they had no idea where to go,” Boatwright told the Business Journal during an interview at the chain’s Newport Beach-based office near Fashion Island.
Confused customers didn’t know whether to stand in a long line to fetch their pre-ordered food or to “cut the line” and skip ahead to the register, he noted.
So, the operations-minded executive grabbed a metaphorical sledgehammer and came up with an instant, and quite literal, solution.
“I ended up cutting a big hole in the wall of that restaurant into the kitchen,” he said. “I put a sign that said, ‘Pick up digital order here.’”
That scrappy MacGyver-inspired solution turned out to be a game-changer.
“Digital sales went up 20% overnight because we removed that pain point for the consumer,” Boatwright said.
More importantly, it planted the seed for the creation of Chipotlanes, drive-throughs dedicated for the pickup of mobile orders.
“How the Chipotlane came to pass was how do I continue to remove the pain points from the consumer and create access,” Boatwright, who replaced Brian Niccol as CEO last year, said. “And so, we decided, what if the customer didn’t have to get out of the car.”
The first Chipotlane opened in 2018, the same year Niccol, formerly head of Taco Bell, took over as CEO of Chipotle. What began as an operational experiment quickly proved its value, especially in 2020 when COVID-19 restrictions made contactless ordering and pickup critical to a restaurant’s survival.
Now, the Chipotlane is part of the chain’s development blueprint. Of the company’s over 3,800 restaurants, 1,116 have Chipotlanes. This year, Chipotle plans to open 315 to 345 new restaurants, and at least 80% will feature a Chipotlane. The chain opened 48 in the first quarter.
Other chains have since followed Chipotle’s lead. Sweetgreen, Shake Shack, Irvine-based Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A have all developed their own Chipotlane-inspired formats to accommodate growing demand for digital orders.
For years, the credit for the Chipotlane was largely attributed to Niccol. Boatwright, who still meets with the Starbucks chief executive regularly, didn’t seem bothered.
“When you’re CEO, you get all the credit,” he said with a grin.
