Lots of people love Chipotle, but how many eat there every single day? According to recent news reports at least two. Mark Rantal and Andrew Hawryluk have been at the popular Mexican grill for over 100 days straight!
Rantal, 30, who has been eating at the restaurant for 108 days now, said he got into the practice by accident. “On Monday, I decided to get Chipotle and on Tuesday, I made the same decision, then got lunch with my friend there on Wednesday,” he told reporters. “We laughed about it at lunch and he asked how long I thought I could go. And that began the thought.”
Soon, Rantal hit one week, and then a month, and then he just kept going from there. “Every time I hit a milestone, it was very easy and convenient to imagine hitting the next,” he said. And he got the same meal every single time – a burrito bowl with white rice, pinto beans, fajitas, sofritas, mild salsa, corn, medium salsa, cheese and lettuce.
Photo: Mark Rantal/Facebook
“For me, food is one of those things as fuel instead of celebration,” he explained. “I’ve just never really gotten so into it. It became so convenient of you know where you’re going, you know the friendly faces of the staff, you know you enjoy the meal and you know you’re going to get the calories.” He might have gotten more calories than he needs though. In a Reddit AMA that he hosted on his 100th day of eating Chipotle, he revealed that he has gained 14 pounds since he started.
Nevertheless, Rantal is a regular at his local Chipotle in Colorado Springs, and he has no plans of stopping any time soon. In fact, the staff are so familiar with him that they offer him a free meal for every ten he pays for. “It’s fun. Right now it’s convenient and it’s a habit, so I don’t see a reason (to stop),” he said. “The (one-year) milestone isn’t appealing enough to have to put in the effort, but there is a tiny wistful part of me that just thinks, ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious to be the guy who ate Chipotle for a year?’ But I don’t know if I want to be that guy.”
Way ahead of Rantal is Andrew Hawryluk, who has eaten at Chipotle for over 150 days now. The 23-year-old animator from Los Angeles started the challenge as a joke – he told his brother that he would eat Chipotle for the 40 days of Lent. So he did just that, and he documented his journey on a website called Chipotlife. And once the 40 days were done, he just decided to see how much longer he could do it.
Andrew has spent over $1,500 on Chipotle since then, never missing a single day. He even buys extra meals in advance and stocks them up for company holidays like Easter and July 4. His standard meal consists of white rice, chicken, guacamole, and lettuce, topped with Tabasco chipotle hot sauce. “It’s an undeniably delicious meal,” he wrote on his blog. “It tastes kind of like Mexican sushi. Unlike Rantal, Andrew says his eating habits haven’t affected his weight at all. The pictures on his blog show off his bodybuilder physique.
Photo: Andrew Hawryluk/Twitter
He has no plans to stop either, and he even plans his vacation destination based on whether or not they have Chipotle restaurants. “I’m going to Vancouver, and they have one,” he said. “I want to go to Berlin, but I can’t because they don’t have a Chipotle.”
“Chipotle is objectively the best restaurant,” Andrew added. “I believe the main factors that determine the quality of a restaurant are cost, taste, speed, decor, consistency, ingredients, portion size, and transparency. If you know of a restaurant that dominates any or all of these categories as thoroughly as Chipotle does, please let me know.”
@SavedYouAClick This. @businessinsider What happens when you eat Chipotle for 153 days straight pic.twitter.com/Pt1T5YtaEG
— Andrew Hawryluk (@waryhulk) July 20, 2015
So Chipotle has at least two very loyal customers, but it still has a long way to go to beat McDonald’s in that department. A few years ago we wrote about two of the fast-food chain’s biggest fans – Don Gorske, who in 2011 ate his 25,000th Big Mac and is probably well on his way to 30,000 by now, and Dennis Rosinlof, who has eaten over 12,000 Big Macs in the last three decades.
Sources: ABC News, FOX, Business Insider