Chipotle Marketing Gets ‘Farmed And Dangerous’

On the surface, Chipotle looks like many other quick-service restaurant chains. Sure, the company makes basically the same type of food as its competitors. But it goes to great lengths to use better ingredients and tell its brand story in a unique way.

Chipotle has sought to build a reputation for freshness by offering healthier food than other chains. The restaurant has also generally avoided traditional media. The approach has proven quite successful: founded in Denver in 1993, Chipotle currently has about 1,500 restaurants and a market value of over $15 billion.

Chipotle’s slogan is “Food With Integrity.” The company strives to use organically grown produce wherever possible, and dairy products and meats from humanely raised animals not treated with synthetic hormones.

Now Chipotle Mexican Grill is taking its unconventional marketing tactics into new territory. Last year we wrote about Chipotle’s animated short film, “Scarecrow” (See: “Just More Marketing Or Genuine Food For Thought”). Now the restaurant is releasing “Farmed and Dangerous,” a four-part series that takes a satirical comedic look at agri-business beginning February 17.

You won’t find much in the way of Chipotle product placement in the new series. Chipotle restaurants are not shown and there are no customer testimonials. “Farmed and Dangerous” is a “Chipotle original series,” produced to further the company’s mission to promote sustainable agriculture and the humane treatment of livestock. Quoted in the New York Times, Chipotle executives claim their content marketing strategy is not about “product integration,” but “values integration.”

“‘Farmed and Dangerous’ is meant to strike large emotional chords—it’s not about selling burritos,” said Daniel Rosenberg, whose New York-based company, Piro, produced the series with Chipotle.

A restaurant chain producing a comedy series for a streaming-video service takes content marketing to a whole new level, and blurs the boundaries between advertising, entertainment, and news. The New York Times reports that “Farmed and Dangerous,” which cost roughly $250,000 per episode, will air on Hulu alongside traditional TV comedies.

Whether the series can grab the attention of its millennial target audience and get them to laugh about a subject that’s generally considered depressing remains to be seen. An ulterior goal of Chipotle is to promote regulation through comedy. The company’s chief marketing officer, Mark Crumpacker, sees appeal in using satire to tell a story that can be grim when depicted in documentaries, saying, “As you do with all comedy, you take a real issue and then amp it up.”

Will you be tuning in to “Farmed and Dangerous”?