Chipotle Fred Prouser/Reuters

Chipotle has nurses check whether some employees who call in sick are genuinely unwell or just hungover.

„We have nurses on call, so that if you say, ‚Hey, I’ve been sick,‘ you get the call into the nurse,“ CEO Brian Niccol said at a conference on Wednesday. „The nurse validates that it’s not a hangover — you’re really sick — and then we pay for the day off to get healthy again.“

The restaurant chain trumpeted the policy as part of its improved food-safety practices, which also include a table cleaner that kills norovirus.

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Chipotle has nurses check whether some employees who call in sick are genuinely unwell or just hungover.

„We have nurses on call, so that if you say, ‚Hey, I’ve been sick,‘ you get the call into the nurse,“ CEO Brian Niccol said at a Barclays conference on Wednesday. „The nurse validates that it’s not a hangover — you’re really sick — and then we pay for the day off to get healthy again.“

The restaurant chain trumpeted the policy as part of its improved food-safety practices. It suffered a norovirus outbreak among customers in Virginia in 2017, and an internal investigation found it was caused by store managers failing to follow safety procedures and an employee working while they were unwell.

„We have a very different food-safety culture than we did two years ago, OK?“ Niccol said. „Nobody gets to the back of the restaurant without going through a wellness check.“

Only some Chipotle workers speak to a nurse when they call in sick, and all employees are entitled to paid sick leave, the company said in a statement to Business Insider.

„When an employee reports serious symptoms to their manager, the clinical nurse team at Zero Hour Health will follow up with those employees to understand their illness,“ Kerry Bridges, Chipotle’s vice president of food safety, said in the statement.

„Not all ill employees talk to a nurse, but all Chipotle employees receive paid sick leave from their first day of employment to use when they are not feeling well,“ she continued. „Chipotle ensures that all employees are healthy so that they can prepare real food and serve it to our customers.“

However, a healthy workforce isn’t always enough to prevent customers from getting sick.

„There’s probably people in here that might have the common cold,“ Niccol said at the conference. „Even if we clean up after you, and we don’t use a cleaner that kills that germ, it hangs around for the next customer.

„Even though our team member did nothing wrong — there was nothing wrong with our food — we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard to make sure that the dining room gets sanitized in a way that it hasn’t been in the past,“ he said.

Chipotle has a solution: „We’ve got cleaner that actually kills norovirus when you clean the tables in the dining room,“ Niccol said.