Anyone that knows me well knows that I’m the invisible vegan; the path of least resistance is the path of miharu. However…

A few days back, quarrygirl made a lovely if not TL;DR post with her open letter to Chipotle in regards to her dissatisfying Gardein experience in NYC. Basically, the short version says “Thanks for the Gardein, but no thanks to the accompanying meat chunks. You would be rad without them.”

Today, an omni friend of mine pointed out that on the Chipotle Facebook page, their customer service guy named Colin was doing a crappy job of handling a Las Vegas customer that was requesting Gardein in their local store.

As you can see, I stepped up to the plate and called Colin out. I get that Facebook is for a younger clientele and it’s cool to be a smartass. However, I don’t think that translates that well to customer service. Maybe I’m just getting old. Whateves.

I also wrote a semi-crotchety letter to Chipotle Corporate, from their website, which I didn’t have the foresight to save as I didn’t think I’d be blogging about it. Lolinternetactivism. About a half hour later, I received this response from their Customer Service Manager, Joe Stupp:

Hey Crystal,

Thank you for writing us, and we are sorry we gave you the wrong impression on our Facebook page. Colin’s and my style of discourse on Facebook is to be a little more informal and a little more dry with our humor because most people writing on the page are just passing through, doing a drive-by with their comments, looking to have a brief bit of fun, etc., hence we do the same in response. You’ll notice that most companies don’t answer individual comments at all on their Facebook pages – the pages just sit there, or the companies just make generic corporate postings ala “Try our new Product X and tell us what you think,” etc. We don’t like to do that – we’re participating with most comments in what we feel is an informal yet personal way that’s unlike other corporations. That being said, we appreciate you letting us know your concerns, and your feedback is always welcome, since we have no intention to offend.

With regard to your request to bring Garden Blend to LV, we haven’t decided to do anything with Garden Blend yet besides the test in our two restaurants in DC and in NY. Since it’s only a test of our own design, it’s uncertain when or even if it will ever reach any other restaurants or any other markets. But we appreciate your desire to have it come to LV, and we thank you.

With regard to that blog from last week, yep, we saw it. But I am not entirely sure who is doing this sort of advising – I think our people are just telling folks the straight up truth about it from what we have determined. Before cooking Garden Blend at our two test restaurants, we scrape our grill clean every time in order to minimize any contact it may potentially have with non-vegan ingredients. Garden Blend is indeed prepared on the same grill as our meats, but it is prepared separately, and when meat and Garden Blend are on the grill together (something that is unavoidable at times), we take great care to make sure there is sufficient separation between them to avoid potential cross-contact as much as possible. We’re not afraid to tell people this, as it is what it is. It’s not so much an advisement against purchase as it is honesty.

I hope this helps, and we thank you for your time and patience.

Sincerely,

Joe

Fair enough.

About a half hour after that, there was this response from Colin and I couldn’t leave it alone.  (I look so butthurt.)

Either way, I’ll still be getting my vegan, guacamole-laden tacos from Chipotle. I doubt I’ll ever care about getting Gardein in that mix; kudos to Chipotle for testing it but I don’t see this one getting off the ground.