Chipotle Stocks Fall After Online Food Poisoning Reports

DENVER, CO -- Stocks for the Denver-based Chipotle restaurant chain fell more than 3 percent Tuesday after traders speculated on Twitter that self-reported online food poisoning incidents could be predicting another food-bourne illness outbreak. Posters on the online food poisoning site www.iwaspoisoned.com reported 77 anecdotes of food poisoning at Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurants in the past seven days.

In November, Patrick Quade, owner of Iwaspoisoned.com told Business Insider the number of self-reported illness incidents connected with Chipotle locations was at least nine times higher than other restaurant chains, leading him to believe "we should see another outbreak attributed to Chipotle sometime in the next six to 12 months." Data from Quade's site was an early notification of the norovirus outbreak at the Chipotle in Sterling, Virginia.

"There are only 2,200 Chipotles, and we've seen a rate of reporting about nine or ten times higher than other restaurant [chains] going back to 2014," Quade said in an interview with Patch. However, Quade thought traders might have jumped the gun Tuesday without understanding how the data works.

"We are really just a sentinel," Quade said. "We didn't publish anything about Chipotle today. But if there were a number of cases coming from the same store, like there were in Stirling, Virginia last summer, that information goes straight to the county health department, and it's up to them to interview the [customers] and contact the company. Then if the health agency made an official pronouncement, we would repeat that."

Chipotle denied that there was any health concern.

"There's not merit to this [rumor]," Chipotle spokesperson Chris Arnold said in response to a Patch email inquiry. In November, spokesperson Arnold called any prediction by Iwaspoisoned.com "speculative and inaccurate."

"Self-reported data of this kind includes no clinical validation and is largely speculative and inaccurate," Arnold said in November. "Using such unscientific data that is often reported anonymously to try to predict future outbreaks seems like little more than irresponsible speculation."

When "Supergirl" star Jeremy Jordan tweeted that he "almost died" from alleged Chipotle food poisoning, the chain's stock fell up to 5.9 percent.

This time around, anecdotes online and on Twitter are graphic, describing vomiting, diarrhea and stomach aches.

"Carnitas bowl, started feeling nauseous and sharp stomach pains within a few hours," reported a customer in Evanston, Illinois. "Vomiting, diarrhea, nausea lasting all night into the next afternoon."

DONE eating chipotle after this food poisoning
— Felix Snow (@Yesimback24) January" class="redactor-linkify-object">https://twitter.com/Yesimback2... 27, 2018

Don’t eat at the Pickerington chipotle literally got the worst case of food poisoning there yesterday
— Tiff Cook (@tiffcoook) January" class="redactor-linkify-object">https://twitter.com/tiffcoook/... 24, 2018

Chipotle has had issues before with food-bourne illnesses, the largest being a 2015 E. coli outbreak that sickened 60 people in 14 states, sending 22 people to the hospital. In 2015 Food Safety News calculated that 350 people had officially be been sickened in five different food poisoning outbreaks traced back to Chipotle.

Last fall, the company's founder and CEO Steve Ells stepped down as the company attempted to boost falling profits.

Image Chipotle Founder and former CEO Steve Ells, 2006 AP Photo by Ed Andrieski.