Chipotle wants to totally change its tortillas
The company wants to drop the number of ingredients in its tortillas from eleven to four, The New York Times reports.
But simplifying the recipe isn't as easy as it might sound. Many of the ingredients in the company's tortillas today serve the purpose of making mass production easier.
So Chipotle has hired food scientists at a lab in Mount Vernon, Washington to develop a simpler recipe for the perfect tortilla that can still be produced on a mass scale.
Chipotle's current tortillas contain flour, water, whole-wheat flour, canola oil, salt, baking soda, wheat bran, fumaric acid, calcium propionate, sorbic acid and sodium metabisulfite.
By comparison, the new wraps contain only whole-wheat flour, water, oil and salt. They are "golden brown with a slightly nutty taste and a bit of elasticity," according to the Times.
The company is still testing the wraps in small batches and has started serving them in a Bellevue, Washington Chipotle.
The next step?
"We'll be increasing the batch size, and the next step is to put it into production to supply a small group of restaurants," Chipotle founder Steve Ells told the Times. "As we prove that's successful, we'll expand until we're supplying the whole region with tortillas, and then move on to the next region."