Chipotle's prices vary across the US. Here's how to see the difference.

• Chipotle has been facing claims that its portion sizes vary by restaurant.
• One patron pulled pricing data and found some wide differences between Chipotle locations.

Chipotle was often the first stop for Adam Cohen and his teammates after ultimate Frisbee games in college at Binghamton University in New York.

"Me and my friends loved going to Chipotle," Cohen said. "We would get it after tournaments. It was just lots of calories, good bang for your buck."

So when other patrons of the Mexican grill chain started questioning this summer whether portion sizes varied between restaurants — or whether filming Chipotle employees as they prepared your order meant you got more meat — Cohen got inspired.

In July, the 23-year-old set up chipotlecost.com, a website that lists the price of burrito bowls with one of seven different proteins at Chipotle restaurants around the US. The website provides a snapshot of Chipotle's prices for online orders.

The differences between some Chipotle locations are particularly wide, according to the map. For example, the cheapest burrito bowls in the US are at a Chipotle in West Lafayette, Indiana, where a serving with carnitas runs $8.75. Bowls are most expensive at a store in The Bronx in New York City, where a carnitas bowl costs $12.25 — 40% more than in West Lafayette.

Several years of painful US inflation have pushed consumers to think more carefully about how they spend their cash, and diners have been looking for fast-food deals lately when they eat out. While inflation has slowed, prices at many restaurants remain higher than a few years ago. Some chains, such as McDonald's, started offering value meals this year to win over customers looking to save money.

It's common for prices to vary at US restaurants depending on the cost of living where they're situated. Cohen's map includes color-coded dots for different price tiers, with green dots indicating stores with low prices and red dots denoting those with high prices.

But the map also shows some more surprising price gaps between restaurants near each other.

One Chipotle in Brea, California, charges $9.95 for a burrito bowl with Chicken Al Pastor, for instance, according to the website. A five-minute drive away, another Chipotle location was charging $10.95 for the same order when Cohen pulled the data.

Chipotle did not respond to a request for comment.

Regardless of the protein, a burrito bowl is likely to be more expensive in major cities on the East and West Coasts, such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, than in a small city in Ohio or Oklahoma, according to the map.

Cohen said he got the idea for the website from taconomical.com, a similar site that tracks prices for a handful of Taco Bell menu items at that chain's locations around the US. Creating the Chipotle version involved running a web scraper to collect the pricing data from Chipotle's website over 10 hours, Cohen said, plus about five hours of coding to build the website.

It's not perfect, Cohen said. The map is missing some locations that weren't taking online orders when he pulled the data, he said, and the prices don't update in real time.

But others appear to be impressed with chipotlecost.com. Cohen posted a link on Reddit, and the post got 1,200 upvotes (as well as comments asking for details about his methodology).

Cohen said his own friends were impressed, too, including one who studied at Purdue University in Indiana, located near the West Lafayette Chipotle with the cheapest carnitas. "He was like, 'Oh, sick, I'm glad I've been getting the best prices for my entire college career,'" Cohen said.

"It's kind of hard to get a meal for $10 or $12," Cohen said. "You could get even one-and-a-half or two meals out of it. That's great."

Do you work at Chipotle or another restaurant chain and have a story idea to share? Reach out to this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com