Chipotle’s Challenge: Wrap What You Love

For the last five weeks, Chipotle Mexican Grill (NYSE: CMG) has wrapped its signature burritos in gold foil to call attention to the premium quality ingredients it uses to make all of its food. Now, the company is calling on customers to wrap what they love in gold or silver foil, photograph and upload them to its website at chipotle.com/gold, as part of its "Wrap What You Love” contest.

Through the five-week contest, users will compete for prizes for the most creative and most popular entries. Chipotle will award a $10,000 grand prize for its favorite submission, based on creativity, popularity and for adhering to the spirit of the contest. For the entries with the most "love” votes each week, the company will award 1.4-ounce 24-karat gold Chipotle coins, with one winner for each of the contest’s five-week run. The company will also contribute $1 to FamilyFarmed.org for each "love” vote the entries receive (up to $150,000) in support of its programs to help family farmers bring more food to market.

The contest is an extension of Chipotle’s "Unlimited Time Only” campaign where the company is wrapping its burritos in gold foil (rather than the iconic aluminum foil) to call attention to its better ingredients from more sustainable sources, a commitment Chipotle calls "Food With Integrity.” The campaign launched on March 1 and runs through June.

"Unlike most restaurant chains, we don’t have limited time menu offers – a cornerstone of fast food marketing,” said Mark Crumpacker, Chipotle’s chief marketing officer. "Instead, we created a limited time promotion to highlight the unlimited time nature of our great ingredients. Now, we’re letting our customers get in on the action by wrapping their favorite things in foil.”

On the "Wrap What You Love” site, customers can upload their entries, "goldify” photos of objects wrapped in standard aluminum foil (a nod to the difficulty of finding gold foil), vote for their favorites, view popular entries, and link their submissions to social networking sites.

Those needing instruction or inspiration can watch tutorial videos featuring comedian and author Amy Sedaris. In one of the vignettes, Sedaris blings her smile with gold foil, while in another she beautifies otherwise sickening fresh-cut flowers with gold foil.

Through its commitment to Food With Integrity, Chipotle serves more naturally raised meat than any other restaurant company in the country – more than 100 million pounds in all for 2011. Chipotle is also the only national restaurant chain with significant commitments to local and organically grown produce, and was the first to serve dairy products made with milk from cows that are never given the synthetic hormone rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone). Today, Chipotle is actively working to increase its use of dairy from cows that are raised outdoors on open pastures.

"Our commitment to Food With Integrity isn’t a passing fad for us, it’s something we have done from the beginning,” said Steve Ells, founder, chairman and co-CEO of Chipotle. "We have always used the best ingredients we can find, and are always looking to improve them. Now that we’re telling our customers about that commitment, we thought it would be fun to turn the tables and let them tell us what’s important to them.”

About Chipotle

Steve Ells, founder, chairman and co-CEO, started Chipotle with the idea that food served fast did not have to be a typical fast food experience. Today, Chipotle continues to offer a focused menu of burritos, tacos, burrito bowls (a burrito without the tortilla) and salads made from fresh, high-quality raw ingredients, prepared using classic cooking methods and served in a distinctive atmosphere. Through our vision of Food With Integrity, Chipotle is seeking better food from using ingredients that are not only fresh, but that where possible are sustainably grown and naturally raised with respect for the animals, the land, and the farmers who produce the food. A similarly focused people culture, with an emphasis on identifying and empowering top performing employees, enables us to develop future leaders from within. Chipotle opened with a single restaurant in 1993 and currently operates nearly 1,100 restaurants. For more information, visit Chipotle.com.