This post has been updated.
Chipotle announced this morning that it will no longer serve food made with genetically modified ingredients (GMOs) in its US restaurants. Chipotle says it is also “actively developing” new tortilla recipes that will not include artificial additives.
In March 2013, Chipotle became the first national restaurant company to list its GMO ingredients. Prior to today’s announcement, GMO soybean oil was in a number of Chipotle recipes, including chips, taco shells and meat rubs. The chain’s tortillas and tortilla chips were made with GMO corn and soybean oil.
The no-GMO stance, the company said, will also apply to its Asian restaurant concept, ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen. The company did not mention its new Colorado-based pizza venture, Pizzeria Locale, but a spokesman, Chris Arnold, told Quartz, “I expect that we’ll bring the others along in the coming months.”
Update, 11:15am (EST): Chipotle has international locations in Canada, the UK, Germany and France, and it is unclear whether the new rules will at some point apply to those. Arnold told Quartz, “The focus now was Chipotle in the US as that’s the vast majority of our operations, and where we use a significant majority of the ingredients we use.”