Chipotle will pay $25 million after allegations it made hundreds sick

Chipotle Mexican Grill will pay a $25 million fine to satisfy federal criminal charges accusing the fast-food chain of sickening more than 1,100 customers with norovirus over three years, U.S. attorneys said on Tuesday.

The federal prosecutors also said that Newport Beach-based Chipotle pressured ill employees to come in to work.

The fine is the largest ever imposed on a company accused of starting an outbreak of a food-borne illness, said Nick Hanna, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles.

In addition to the fine, Chipotle agreed to spend millions of dollars to update food-safety protocols for its stores.

In a statement released Tuesday, Chipotle executives said among the changes the company has implemented is guaranteeing employees paid sick leave.

The executives also said they improved their ability to track shipments of perishable food and instituted better food-safety training for employees, as well as mandating hand washing and health checks before shifts.

Prosecutors said numerous Chipotle employees – including teenagers – reported they didn’t receive proper training on how to store food at safe temperatures.

The employees also said restaurants lacked adequate staff, with some managers forcing them to work even if they showed symptoms of an illness.

At least five outbreaks from 2015 to 2018 at Chipotle restaurants across the country began when employees failed to follow food-safety rules, the U.S. attorneys say.

Each of the locations exposed hundreds of customers and employees to pathogens like the norovirus, which can transfer through infected surfaces, as wells as bacteria growing in food stored at improper temperatures, according to the allegations.

At least 234 customers and employees who visited a Chipotle restaurant in Simi Valley became ill after a worker there vomited while on the job, the federal lawyers say.

The worker was sent home, they added, but the restaurant didn’t report the incident to officials until two days later, after multiple customers reported feeling ill.

In another incident at a restaurant in Boston, 141 people were sickened when a Chipotle manager ordered an employee “to continue working after vomiting inside the restaurant,” the U.S. Department of Justice says in a statement.

Two days later, the same employee helped package a catering order for the Boston College men’s basketball team – and several team members later became ill, prosecutors said.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Chipotle should have known of the risks of food-borne illness.

Chipotle executives in annual reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have acknowledged their restaurants “may be at a higher risk for food-borne illness outbreaks,” because of using fresh produce and meats susceptible to spoiling.

Chipotle worked on its own to prevent outbreaks of food-borne illness as far back as 2008, when 400 people were sickened after eating food at one of the chain’s restaurants in Ohio. But protocols introduced after that outbreak were frequently ignored, employees with the company said.

According to the agreement, an analyst working in Chipotle’s department for tracking reports of customer illnesses said the company “never honored a foodborne illness claim when there was only one customer complaint of foodborne illness.”