Should companies make their logos hyper-personalized?
The biggest mystery between the Chipotle and sweetgreen lawsuit
With 3,000 locations around North America, each Chipotle location won’t look the same. But you know it when you see it. It’s not as noticeable from blocks away in the same way that the Golden Arches are for McDonald’s or the red-headed pigtail girl is for Wendy’s. Still, their logo isn’t as plain as words in a bun like Burger King. There’s something distinct about that chili pepper and the font of the company name!
While that chili pepper may be even more obvious in Athens, Georgia on a bright red building, it’s even recognizable on the gray side of the restaurant location. While I normally don’t care about logos, Chipotle’s logo transition is interesting to me because it started off so boring when I was first assigned to do a mystery shop there. Right after I earned my undergraduate degree in 2003, I started making side money doing mystery shops with real estate firms, restaurants and department stores.
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I thought Buffalo Wild Wings would catch on fast because I was the only customer in there buying black bean burgers and pretty much anything that didn’t have meat in it. I lost interest in that gig quickly, considering the limited menu. But Chipotle was way easier. With 55 ingredients and local and organic produce, it was an easy food chain to enjoy eating in and snooping on. For some odd reason, it also paid almost three times as much as other restaurants and food chains, so I was trying to get those gigs as much as possible. Even after the mystery shop assignments dried up, I still had a taste for the food.
I quietly observed the logo go from just words to a black and red circular design to the maroon and brown designs featured above. I knew them for their bowls, burritos and then lost my mind when they introduced Sofritas on the menu in 2014. You couldn’t keep me out of Chipotle after spicy tofu was an option! (Their tofu option rivaled Noodles & Company’s seasoned tofu.)
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But I used to go into Chipotle and just buy their bowls full of vegetables and protein pre-Sofritas. So I was a little confused when I heard sweetgreen recently offered a “Chipotle Chicken Burrito Bowl.” Granted, I don’t eat chicken. But when I think of a “Chipotle Bowl,” I’m thinking of the chain with the red pepper logo, not sweetgreen.
What blew my mind more was that Chipotle didn’t already own the name “Chipotle Bowl.” On March 17, 2020, Atlantic Natural Foods purchased the name for a “vegetarian plant-based prepackaged meal,” but then abandoned the name by August 14. And the name “Chipotle” was owned by Chipotle Entertainment LLC, a streaming service for audio, visual and audiovisual material, from March 27, 2019 to November 2, 2020.
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Knowing this, I went from side-eyeing sweetgreen to wondering why they didn’t fight harder to keep their Chipotle Chicken Burrito Bowl. Two days after Chipotle filed a lawsuit against the latter restaurant, TODAY reports that sweetgreen reached an agreement and changed its own new menu item to Chicken + Chipotle Pepper Bowl.
Call me a crazy mystery shop lady, but isn’t that still a little too close to the logo and the kind of food served at Chipotle? Would Chipotle have been better off finding a name and logo that was more personal to the company? After all, trademarking a red chili pepper is like trademarking a croissant. Far too many restaurants have it on their menu, even though fast-food restaurants recognize it far more as a staple for Burger King’s Croissan’wich.