Fast Food: Benevolent Burritos | Chipotle

By Ratha Tep

Fast food with a conscience? Chipotle, one of the country's fastest-growing restaurant chains (with over 400 locations and 100 more due to launch this year), is a huge advocate of sustainable farming. The restaurants make burritos and tacos with ingredients like Niman Ranch's humanely raised pork; in fact, for each new Chipotle, Niman invites another family farm into its purveyor network. Chipotle's flavors are delicious too—lime-scented rice, just-made guacamole, two-chile corn salsa—and founder Steve Ells deserves the credit: Before he was a margarita mogul, he cooked at the seminal Stars restaurant in San Francisco.

Published April 2005