When TikTok hacks backfire
When TikTok hacks backfire
Social media-savvy Chipotle spoke out against the latest trend: filming workers to score more food. How far outside the lines of decorum would you go for extra guac?
Restaurant influencer Keith Lee giveth… and taketh away.
Last month, the wildly popular TikTok creator-slash-restaurant critic panned Chipotle, complaining, in part, about ingredient portions. The food does “not hit the same” as it once did, he said, casually rating his food order a 2.5 out of 10.
It’s been just over a year since Lee and fellow creator Alexis Frost helped to launch a new Chipotle menu item, the Fajita Quesadilla. It started as a viral TikTok hack, which Chipotle quickly embraced and developed as a full menu item. Like all of Chipotle’s quesadillas, it’s only available to order on the restaurant’s app. This arrangement helped land Chipotle on Fast Company’s list of Most Innovative Companies this year (I worked on the list) thanks to the restaurant’s endorsement of a viral hack in a way that promoted mobile ordering and app downloads while proving it moved at meme speed.
During an interview around that time, Chipotle chief brand officer Chris Brandt told me that Chipotle keeps tabs on all the viral hacks it finds, though it rarely encourages them. But this particular idea — adding fajita vegetables to an on-menu steak quesadilla — was easy enough to scale, and a few months after its small-screen debut, the hacked quesadilla became an official menu item.
This time around, Chipotle seems… less excited about the recent TikTok notoriety. After Lee’s small portions pronouncement, other TikTokers jumped on, filming (and posting) themselves walking out of the restaurant mid-order if they felt portion sizes were somehow lacking.
It caused a stir. Chipotle’s chief corporate affairs and food safety officer Laurie Schalow had to confirm, to People magazine, of all places, that there have been no changes to Chipotle’s portion sizes — noting that customers are always able to customize menu items, as Lee himself has done quite publicly.
Then a different social media trend emerged: filming the hourly workers building burritos. The filmers asserted that the threat of being outed for skimping on ingredients would earn them more food, justifying their recordings… and immediately conjuring images other viral videos filled with onlookers, phones aloft, recording someone else’s worst moments.
Soon after it started, Chipotle parodied the behavior on its own social media channels. Later, employees seemed less amused. A Reddit thread titled, “Stop f*cking recording us,” posted just over a week ago, garnered over 1,000 comments.
At least one online trend-follower alleged that Chipotle sent a memo encouraging employees to overfill bowls if a customer starts filming — leading to another set of Chipotle customers just pretending to film the chain’s workers for the extras.
Late last week, Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol appeared on the CNBC show “Mad Money” — the one with the over-exuberant host, Jim Cramer — denying the chain’s portions have shrunk over time. And on national television, the celebrated CEO of one of the most successful restaurant chains in America reminded viewers that filming Chipotle employees is, in his words, “a little rude.”
My fellow queso lovers, this is not the way.
What else?
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