Chipotle Taps Palantir to Predict Your Next Food Baby 🤰🌯

Chipotle Mexican Grill has begun piloting a food safety software platform built by Palantir Technologies, the data analytics company co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, according to a report from Wired. Chipotle chief corporate affairs and food safety officer Laurie Schalow confirmed the project, telling Wired the company is "piloting a new Food Safety Risk Management Platform designed to provide a more consistent and centralized view of food safety risk across our restaurants." The system runs on Palantir's Foundry software and combines health department inspection scores, pest sightings and employee illness reports to generate a per-location risk score that is not visible to the public.

The choice of vendor has drawn scrutiny because of Palantir's intelligence community origins. The company received its first major investment in 2005 from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, and the CIA became one of its earliest customers. Palantir continues to derive a substantial share of revenue from government work. Federal contracts have included a $175 million U.S. Army deal to build an AI targeting system and a contract supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement's ImmigrationOS tool used to track and deport individuals. The FBI has also used Palantir software; a 2021 access-control bug allowed unauthorized FBI personnel to view private Twitter and Facebook data belonging to jailed Ethereum researcher Virgil Griffith for more than a year.

Palantir has expanded its commercial footprint over the past decade and lists food-industry customers including Tyson, General Mills and Wendy's for supply-chain and inventory tracking. Chipotle is the latest restaurant chain to adopt Foundry. Schalow did not provide a launch date, specify whether customer data is included in the platform, state how many restaurants are enrolled, or indicate whether individual store scores will ever be disclosed to the public.

The pilot arrives as Chipotle operates more than 3,700 locations across the United States, Canada and Europe. The company has not said whether the risk scores will inform staffing, supplier changes or restaurant closures, and Palantir declined to comment beyond confirming the partnership through Chipotle.