Chipotle workers have to start as early as 6 a.m. to prep food even though the restaurants don't open for 4 more hours

• Shifts for prep workers at Chipotle can start as early as 6 a.m., CEO Brian Niccol told investors.
• The first workers to arrive undertake tasks including chopping vegetables, grilling meat, and mashing avocados.

Prep workers at Chipotle have to start work as early as 6 a.m. to get food ready for when the restaurants open, company execs revealed at its third-quarter earnings call Thursday.

"We don't have freezers in our restaurants and our teams begin preparing at 6 o'clock or 7 o'clock in the morning to be able to serve our delicious food by the time we open at 10:30," CEO Brian Niccol said.

Prep work includes grilling fajita veggies and adobo chicken on the Plancha, chopping onions, jalapenos, and cilantro, and hand-mashing avocados, Niccol said.

Most Chipotle restaurants in the US appear to open at 10:45 a.m., though some open at 10:30 a.m., and some job listings post start times of 6 or 7 a.m.

Though most Reddit and Indeed users who said they worked at Chipotle said that the earliest shifts started at 6 or 7 a.m., some said that they on occasion had to start work even earlier, such as on weekends and on days when trucks delivered supplies.

During Thursday's call, Chipotle execs discussed some of the measures that the company is taking to make food-prep work more efficient and ultimately cut down on labor costs.

This includes trialing its so-called Autocado, a machine that cuts, cores and scoops avocados, which Niccol described as a "less favorable task." It's also testing a machine for digital orders that fills burrito and salad bowls under the counter where staff members prepare other dishes like tacos and burritos.

Niccol told investors that Chipotle's staffing and turnover were "back to or better than pre-pandemic levels." The US suffered a huge exodus of workers from frontline, hourly-paid jobs in industries such as hospitality during the pandemic as workers reassessed what they wanted from their employment and sought roles with higher pay, better benefits, and opportunities for remote working.

Chipotle has more than 110,000 employees, with the average age being 24. The company spent $616.3 million on labor in the quarter to September 30, an increase of more than 50% from the same period in 2020, not accounting for inflation.