If you’ve ever ordered something from a fast food restaurant, you probably received your items in a humble paper bag. Most people don’t give the bag a second thought, because, after all, it’s the items inside that you spent your hard-earned dollars on. But every once in a while, when I think about the under-appreciated wonders of the modern industrial world, something as simple as a paper bag can become a marvel of engineering. For most of human history, paper was so valuable that only the rich could afford it. Now, it has become so cheap that you get it for free with a purchase of your $5 burger. And that is what makes the complaint of this article ever so trivial.
Allow me to set the stage: you have just ordered your fast casual burrito bowl, with carnitas, white rice, pico de gallo, guacamole, and just a touch of sour cream. You get to the cashier and they pull out the standard burrito bag to put your bowl in. Even when it’s completely inside, the bowl is still not sitting flat on the counter because the paper bag is just too small. You see the slightly nicer paper bags with handles, the ones that actually do fit the entire burrito bowl inside, sitting there on the shelf behind the counter, just out of reach, and sigh. According to this highly-reliable source a nine-year-old Reddit comment from someone who claimed to work at a store, they only give out the good bags if you order two or more bowls. Alas.
One time that situation happened to me, and in the process of trying to force the bowl flat , the bag actually ripped open a little. I was so frustrated, I brought out the tape measure. A standard chipotle bowl is 10" by 7", and the standard paper bag is only 8 1/4" x 5 5/16". I’ve created a scale-accurate diagram below. You can see the problem.
There’s no way that they couldn’t have found a more suitable paper bag size for their burrito bowls, I thought. So I did what any sane, clear-headed person would do: started browsing commercial paper bag supplier websites in search of an answer. And boy did I find one. For the purposes of this experiment, I assumed that even though their bags have custom printing, their size selection would be the same as for un-printed bags. After a bit of searching, I found this bag that fit the dimensions of the standard chipotle bag exactly. Only 5 cents a bag when you buy it in bulk, that’s remarkably cheap! There’s a size selector on the page, but the one they’re using is the largest one on there.
So I guess they’re out of luck. The bags with handles that are big enough are five times as expensive, so it makes sense why they wouldn’t use them. Chipotle’s net margin is only 14% as of 2024. Assuming that the average bowl is $14, swapping to the nicer bags for single-bowl orders would bring their profit per bowl down 10%. That’s a significant amount, and I can understand why’d they be hesitant about it.
However, that’s not the only option. Just because the size selector on that specific product only goes up to 25lbs, that doesn’t mean that there are no other options available. I found this bag, which is not only big enough to fit burrito bowls comfortably, but also is only 8 cents a bag, much more affordable than the bags with the handles. If they were to switch to using these bags for burrito bowls, the customer experience of everyone who orders food from them will get just a little bit better. But over millions of orders, that’s a lot of collective frustration saved.
It’s really sad that I have to do this work and write this article. If I were to become the CEO of a company, I hope that I’d be using my own service enough to notice and fix these kinds of things. Obviously the executives of Chipotle do not. No one in authority cares about the little things like packaging anymore; it’s a bit depressing. We should be appreciating the availability of paper so cheap we can throw it away as the miracle it is, but instead we take it for granted.