Chipotle handed its kitchens to 100 creators and promised “not a second of brand-shot footage.” The campaign, 100 Creators, was made with Brazil-based agency KIDS and placed the creators in 50 restaurants in North America and London, where they grilled chicken, mashed avocados and seasoned chili lime chips while filming and saying whatever they liked. Their clips were cut into three 30-second spots for national TV, plus YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok. “We want people to see what happens in a Chipotle kitchen, because when you see the amount of work that goes into morning prep, you have an even greater appreciation for the food,” said chief brand officer Fernando Machado.
The campaign, which debuted August 31, is Machado’s first work since he took the role in April 2026. At Burger King, Machado ran Moldy Whopper, which showed a burger rotting to prove the absence of preservatives, and a year earlier Whopper Detour, which sold one-cent Whoppers to anyone who got near one of 14,000 geofenced McDonald’s restaurants. “We’re confident in what the brand stands for, so we were comfortable giving up control and letting creators show what they actually experienced,” Machado said.
The work extends Behind the Foil, which began in 2019 with documentarian Errol Morris filming everything from the prep line to supplier farms. Transparency mattered then: the chain was rebuilding its reputation after foodborne-illness outbreaks between 2015 and 2019 sickened 1,100 people. This round skews toward Gen Z, with contributors such as stop-motion filmmaker Ben Treat and potter Emme Zhou. Asked why he extended a seven-year-old platform rather than launching something of his own, Machado said he “didn’t feel a need to change something simply for the sake of changing it.”
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