Chipotle shares are sinking thanks to social media bashing its new queso

Social media, particularly Twitter, doesn’t like very many things. They apparently really don’t like Chipotle’s new “queso”, so much so in fact that during today’s trading, shares for the company dropped a whopping three percent.

Chipotle describes the queso as “complex and slightly spicy”. Twitter users have described it in… well let’s just say different terms than that.

Chipotle Queso is so bad that I want to make an entire video ranting about how terrible it is. I'm so angry right now.

— Omni ☕️ (@InfernoOmni) September 18, 2017

https://twitter.com/jpbrammer/status/909875052304326656

https://twitter.com/mgarasic_5/status/909786755854938112

Dear Chipotle, what is this chalk-paste you have labeled as queso? #moes

— Stephanie Walton (@stephaniewalt0n) September 18, 2017

“Chalk-paste” is a new one I haven’t heard before, and I’m pretty sure Chipotle hasn’t either. Chipotle is trying to change its menu and its image after a disastrous year or so with stories about unkempt restaurants, rats, salmonella and norovirus, and this new queso isn’t quite helping that cause. And Chipotle has certainly noticed.

“What we are seeing now in terms of social sentiment is very similar to what we saw when we began marketwide tests in Colorado and Southern California, yet we were sufficiently encouraged by those tests – both in terms of sentiment from the research we conducted and business results – to roll out the queso nationwide,” Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold told Reuters in an e-mail.

60% of the company’s stock value has been lost in the last two years thanks to the illness outbreaks, dirty restaurants and now harrowing reactions to product changes on social media.

Going on twitter to gauge reactions to a new product is not necessarily the best thing to do when introducing a new product, but apparently Wall Street finds those reactions perfectly reasonable when it comes to the trading floor.

[Reuters via Yahoo Finance]