Kevin McCoy, and Katharine Lackey

USA TODAY

Embattled fast-casual restaurant chain Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG) will close all of its eateries nationwide for a few hours during the morning of Feb. 8 for an all-staff meeting on food safety.

Conducted via a live satellite feed, the session will feature Chipotle officials thanking the company's roughly 60,000 staffers for their efforts to address recent food-bourne illness issues that arose among some of the company's customers in the Western U.S. and in the Boston area.

Outlining the plan during a Wednesday investor conference in Florida, company executives said the meeting would also include a discussion of new safety measures implemented by Chipotle, a Denver-based company famed for serving fresh food and ingredients. Employees will also get an opportunity to ask questions and voice any concerns.

"We're going to let all of our folks know about how this happened, and, in detail, all the steps that we're taking to ensure that it won't happen again," Chipotle founder and co-CEO Steve Ells said at the investor conference. "It's going to be a great rally."

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The meeting and separate plans for a new Chipotle marketing outreach follow multiple recent health incidents that sickened customers, forced a shutdown of some of the company's restaurants and sent sales plunging.

More than 120 Boston College students contracted a norovirus, a contagious gastrointestinal illness, after eating at a nearby Chipotle restaurant last month. The incident occurred as Chipotle dealt with a separate health emergency: Dozens of cases of E. coli in outbreaks at the company's locations in nine states.

Chipotle is also the subject of a federal criminal investigation over a norovirus incident at a Simi Valley, California location in August. The company said it is cooperating with the investigation being conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California and the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations.

The company has not announced the cause of the sickness incidents. Last week, Chipotle said sales at stores open at least a year dropped 30% in December.

Chipotle staffers are well-versed with food-safety measures at their individual workplaces, company executives said during the investor conference. The all-staff meeting is aimed in part to update them on new measures being instituted company-wide.

For example, tomatoes and lettuce foods that could have potentially dangerous bacteria from growing fields, will be washed and processed in a central kitchen equipped with "high-resolution" testing equipment, Chipotle officials said. Such testing is more difficult to undertake at individual eateries, they said.

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The most recent report of an illness linked to a Chipotle location occurred in late November, the executives told investors. The timing appeared to signal that the problems have passed, said Ells, who voiced hope that the Centers for Disease Control would declare an end to the surge of incidents "relatively soon."

Company warned at the investor conference that new processing and testing measures and other steps the company is taking to ensure food safety for customers would continue to affect Chipotle's finances throughout 2016. With that in mind, the company plans to begin inviting customers back, starting in February, through a new marketing effort.

“I’m confident we’ll recover from this and win back our customers,” Ells said during the investor conference.

Contributing: Hadley Malcolm, Aamer Madhani

Follow USA TODAY reporter Kevin McCoy on Twitter: @kmccoynyc.