A late Easter this year put a crimp on the Chipotle’s (CMG-0.57%) “burrito season” earnings.
For those of you who might not be familiar with “burrito season,” it’s actually Chipotle’s busiest time of the year. It’s the period from March through the end of the semester at colleges. The weather is warm, students are on the prowl, and they often end up at the campus Chipotle. The Easter holiday — especially when it falls in March — often serves as the opening bell to burrito season.
While only 15% of Chipotle’s stores reside in college towns, those that do perform “exceptionally well,” former Chipotle chief financial officer Jack Hartung told Business Insider in 2022.
Adam Rymer, Chipotle’s current CFO, lamented the impact of a late Easter on 2025’s “burrito season” during an earnings call this week.
“Easter is a springboard really for our burrito season and getting us on the spring seasonality. And so the fact that, that happened several weeks later, there’s a bunch of layers to kind of peel back there,” Rymer said in describing its impact on earnings.
The chain made a push to hire 20,000 additional employees this year in advance of burrito season. The chain used the burrito season lure to try to persuade some of those hires to stay on and climb the corporate ladder.
“’Burrito Season’ presents candidates with an opportunity to start here, stay here, and reach their career goals with us,” said Ilene Eskenazi, who heads up human resources. “As current team members have demonstrated, our restaurants can be the foundation of a fulfilling career, and we’re committed to bringing in the best candidates who share our values and onboarding them as efficiently as possible.”
The chain noted in a press release to kick off burrito season that there are currently five regional vice presidents at Chipotle who started their careers as crew members and now manage regions with restaurant sales of over $1 billion.
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