By Jeanne Yacoubou, MS
All of Chipotle’s menu items: burritos, burrito bowls, tacos, and salads may be vegan-customized. Doing so is easy through several different ways each presented on Chipotle’s website.
A nutrition calculator allows web visitors to use a vegan filter: https://chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator. Doing so renders all and only vegan menu components clickable while non-vegan items are grayed out. As a consumer clicks on desired elements while building a customized burrito or taco, nutrition information appears beside each item and a cumulative total (e.g., calories, fat, sodium, etc.) for the entire menu item displays at the screen’s bottom.
There is also an Allergens & Special Diets page https://chipotle.com/allergens which presents vegan menu components in tabular form. Here Chipotle states:
Our Sofritas is vegan…Vegans should avoid our meats, cheese, sour cream, and our chipotle-honey vinaigrette. Our tortillas, vegetables, rice, beans, salsas, chips, and guacamole are…vegan.
Chipotle lists its complete ingredient statements on another page: https://chipotle.com/ingredient-statement.
On its Dietary Options page Chipotle presents its ingredient information in another manner: https://chipotle.com/dietary-options. Suggested vegan meal options such as a Sofritas soft corn taco or a fajita bowl appear. This page also displays Chipotle’s cross contamination statement:
Individual foods may come into contact with one another during preparation, which is not reflected in these recommendations. Although we make efforts to separate ingredients in our cooking processes and on our serving line, Chipotle cannot guarantee the complete absence of cross contact with any particular ingredient in any of our food.
About added sugar Chipotle states on this page:
While lots of the fresh fruits and veggies in our food are naturally sweet, we don’t add any sugar to our food. Our vinaigrette is made with a small amount of honey…
Chipotle lays it all out for vegans very clearly unlike most chains. Their website is very accessible. Several of VRG’s staff enjoy Chipotle bowls with half pinto beans, half black beans, veggies, rice, and guacamole. These are very filling meals.
For more quick service chain information, see http://www.vrg.org/fastfoodinfo.php
For information on vegetarian restaurants, see http://www.vrg.org/restaurant/index.php
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The contents of this posting, our website, and our other publications, including Vegetarian Journal, are not intended to provide personal medical advice. Medical advice should be obtained from a qualified health professional. We often depend on product and ingredient information from company statements. It is impossible to be 100% sure about a statement, info can change, people have different views, and mistakes can be made. Please use your best judgement about whether a product is suitable for you. To be sure, do further research or confirmation on your own.