Financial Analysts Turned Attention Toward Chipotle Serving Sizes And Results Are Wild

I like grabbing a nice Chipotle bowl every once in a while, but I know as well as anyone that the amount you get in that bowl seems to be all over the place.

There are times you leave with a bowl that will barely curb your appetite, but then other times when you leave hauling a bowl hefty enough to feed a small village.

While Chipotle brass has claimed this isn't happening, some enterprising financial analysts decided to do a study to see how consistent the burrito jockeys down at Chipotle are.

The answer: they're not consistent at all.

According to Fortune, Wells Fargo analyst Zachary Fadem and his team loaded up on 75 Chipotle burrito bowls — something I'm sure Wells Fargo was thrilled about —

Data doesn't lie… except for all those times when it's presented deceptively, but this is not one of those times.

You can see the weights of all of those burrito bowls (which would have made this an expensive study, especially if they were adding guacamole, and, I mean, c'mon, you have to add guac) and they're clearly all over the place.

They found that when ordered in person, the heaviest bowl weighed 47% more than the lightest. Meanwhile, online orders saw the heaviest order blow the lightest out of the water by some 87%.

Someone is spinning the roulette wheel that is ordering a Chipotle burrito bowl. (Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The lightest bowl on the chart weighs in at just under 14 oz., which isn't much heavier than a 12 oz. can of soda (duh).

Interestingly, the 10 lightest bowls — all of which were also mobile orders — all happened to be from the same store in New York City.

Now, we've got data to prove the thing that everyone already knew: portion size at Chipotle is a real crap shoot (apologies for putting "Chipotle" and "crap shoot in the same sentence. I don't mean to bring back the memory of any traumatic incidents).