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Chipotle Mexican Grill’s food poisoning outbreak causes traffic to fall in all but one category: teens

Teenagers and young adults aged 13 to 24 account for more than a third of Chipotle's traffic volume in the U.S., roughly 35 per cent, according to NPD, and visits from that demographic climbed 11 per cent in 2015, NPD said.

TORONTO – There’s one group of customers that do not seem everything bothered by a series of outbreaks at Chipotle Mexican Grill: teenagers and college-aged youth.

How Chipotle is evolving its cooking methods after a devastating E. coli outbreak

AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File

After an E. coli outbreak that sickened more than 50 people, Chipotle is tweaking its cooking methods.

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That could signal a spot of expect a business whose fresh-prepped Mexican fast-food dishes took the by storm prior to being rocked with a food poisoning scandal this fall and winter. Hundreds of customers fell ill, with cases of both E. coli and Norovirus reported, and also the outbreaks resulted in a 44 percent plunge in the restaurant chain’s fourth-quarter profit, reported .

Chipotle reported earnings of US$67.9 million within the three-month period ended Dec. 31, or US$2.17 per share, compared with profit of US$121.Two million (US$3.84 a share) in the same period a year earlier.

The numbers beat the business’s own projections from last month, when it said it likely to report fourth-quarter earnings per share which is between US$1.70 and US$1.90. Same-restaurant sales, an important retail metric that strips out sales growth from new restaurants, plunged 14.6 per cent and revenue fell 6.8 percent, to US$997.5 million.

But data from researching the market firm NPD published in advance of Chipotle’s bruising results Tuesday offers a glimmer of optimism for the company.

NPD found that total customer visits to the fast-casual restaurant chain fell five per cent in the three-month period ending Dec. 31, compared with a traffic gain of 19 per cent within the same quarter last year.

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