Chipotle breakfast sounds like a magical thing. Breakfast burritos and scrambled egg tacos and quesadillas made like crepes filled with blueberries and cream cheese! ‘Tis the stuff dreams are made of. What if I told you that Chipotle already offered breakfast and that you’re too late to partake? Would you scream? Would you cry? Would you grab a vat of sofritos and throw them at your nearest Burrista? I hope not because, friend-o, it’s true. As I learned this morning while meeting with Chipotle marketing executives, Chipotle used to offer breakfast in airports and they’ve since moved on.

If you flew through Washington Dulles (IAD) or Baltimore-Washington (BWI) in 2013, you could have partaken in the mythical Chipotle breakfast. These locations offered breakfast to satisfy the airports’ requirement that they be open during certain hours and while IAD only served the regular Chipotle menu according to this Food Business News story, BWI had a genuine breakfast menu where frittatas were made and then chopped up and layered into burritos. Gah! Me wants!

Unfortunately, the whole program ended when Chipotle realized that customers were more likely to opt for their traditional Chipotle order at any time of the day rather than choose from the new breakfast menu. As Communications Director Chris Arnold says, “If you’re a chicken burrito guy, you’re a chicken burrito guy.”

Since I had the executives’ attention, though, I pressed to see if more breakfast was on the horizon. Perhaps a barbacoa hash? Some tortilla-warmer hashbrowns? A sofri-tatta? Arnold wouldn’t give me a definitive answer when I asked if there were still internal discussions about Chipotle breakfast, but he did offer some hope:

“We haven’t closed the books on it,” he said.

We have hope, people! Keep dreaming of delicious Chipotle breakfast burritos and they just might become a reality!

 

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