Chipotle Blurs Lines With a Satirical Series About Industrial Farming

[LiberalArkie]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/business/media/chipotle-blurs-lines-with-a-satirical-series-about-industrial-farming.html?_r=0



During the Super Bowl on Sunday, advertisers will deploy talking animals and A-list endorsers, anything to reach the 100 million Americans expected to be watching.

But Chipotle Mexican Grill, the fast-growing restaurant chain, is playing a different advertising game. Building on its unconventional marketing tactics, Chipotle next month will release “Farmed and Dangerous,” a four-part comedy series on the TV-streaming service Hulu that takes a satirical look at industrial-scale farming.

You’ll have to look hard to find Chipotle’s connection to the series. There are no scenes at Chipotle restaurants or impromptu testimonials to its tacos or quesadillas. (It is no accident, though, that the show’s young hero is named Chip.)

Rather, “Farmed and Dangerous,” billed as a “Chipotle original series,” hopes to promote the company’s concerns about sustainable agriculture and the humane treatment of animals used for meat. This stealth marketing strategy, Chipotle executives say, is not about “product integration,” but “values integration.”

[KurtNYC]

1. Telling the customer what they want to hear.

But where does Chipotle's food come from ?

[Bluenorthwest]

2. Here's what they say about their sourcing

https://www.chipotle.com/en-us/fwi/fwi.aspx

[KurtNYC]

4. Here is what others have said

“The Scarecrow” has been praised as an innovative piece of marketing and beautiful work of art, and applauded for its anti-factory-farming message. As of Monday afternoon, it had been viewed nearly 6.3 million times on YouTube. But not everyone is impressed. Funny or Die released a parody last week called “Honest Scarecrow,” which casts the video as all sanctimony and no substance. In this version, which pairs the original animation with new lyrics (“Pure Imagination” gives way to “Pure Manipulation”), we’re reminded that Chipotle is a “giant corporation,” tugging at our heartstrings with oppressed bovines not because of a genuine interest in sustainability or animal welfare but to make us buy burritos. Writing in Salon, David Sirota criticized the film for using vegetarian imagery to sell meat; the Scarecrow, on his farm, harvests sun-dappled peppers and corn, but the only animals we see are suffering in confinement at Crow Foods. Chipotle gets credit for our veggie-related good feelings, without having to depict what alternatives to factory-farmed meat actually look like. (“Indeed, no matter how it is farmed, meat is still energy intensive, it still poses serious health problems when consumed in American-level amounts, and it only gets to your plate by killing an animal,” Sirota writes.) And while the film’s message has won praise from some foodies and advocates for food reform, some agricultural producers have responded angrily, accusing Chipotle of peddling misleading representations of conventional agricultural methods: all farmers, they argue, care about their animals, and no one keeps a cow in a metal box or injects a chicken with green slime.
...
Chipotle’s attempt to source ingredients that avoid harmful practices seems more sincere than “Honest Scarecrow” gives it credit for, and Chipotle offers much more transparency about its meat’s origins than most fast-food restaurants. Still, Chipotle falls short of the film’s ideals. We can see the Scarecrow’s farm for ourselves, but we have to trust Chipotle’s assertions that its suppliers meet its standards. The Scarecrow uses only ingredients that conform to his values, but when Chipotle runs out of sustainable beef, a decidedly less happy cow could end up marinated and grilled and nestled beside our cilantro-lime rice. And Sirota’s criticism stands: “The Scarecrow” is powerful in part because it elides Chipotle’s real-life meat sourcing with the aesthetics of a vegetable harvest.

The Scarecrow, with those trembling, obsidian eyes, seems like a sensitive soul; if he showed up in our world with a craving for an inexpensive burrito, I think he’d appreciate Chipotle’s efforts. But after all he’s seen, I wouldn’t be surprised if he stuck with beans.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/09/chipotle-mexican-restaurants-animated-film-sustainable-food-marketing.html

[mucifer]

3. Even tho they are a giant corporation looking for their niche in

the restaurant business and I am a vegan, I am glad they are informing people about factory farms. They say they don't use much factory farm stuff in their food. I think most people don't know about the changes that have occurred . I think I would still be a vegetarian and not a vegan if there weren't such awful factory farms everywhere.

[Berlum]

5. Let the debate continue

Industrial Mutant Food, Inc. wants to mock this -- but Chipotle is firing a resonant volley in an absolutely essential debate.

I'm glad they are doing it.