In brief
- Chipotle is piloting a Palantir-built "Food Safety Risk Management Platform"
- The platform will score restaurants using health inspections, pest incidents, and employee illness reports.
- Palantir was seeded in 2005 by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, and still draws nearly half its revenue from government work, including ICE's deportation-tracking ImmigrationOS system.
Chipotle wants a computer to flag which burrito line might make you sick next. The company it hired to build that computer is Palantir, the data firm that got its start with cash from the CIA.
Wired reported yesterday Chipotle is piloting a "Food Safety Risk Management Platform" built on Foundry, Palantir's core software. Foundry works like a giant filing cabinet that pulls scattered data into one dashboard, so a company (or an army) can see everything at once. Chipotle confirmed the project.
The platform reportedly runs on three ingredients: health department inspection scores, pest sightings, and employee illness reports. Blend those together and every restaurant gets a risk score, a digital report card nobody outside headquarters gets to see.
Chipotle's chief corporate affairs and food safety officer, Laurie Schalow, told 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." She did not say when it will launch, if any consumer data is exploited, how many stores use it, or whether customers will ever see a store's score.
Now for the part that might make you want to put down your burrito. Palantir isn't just another Silicon Valley data vendor. Co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, the company landed its first major check in 2005 from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's own venture capital arm, created specifically to fund startups useful to American spies. The CIA became one of Palantir's first customers.
Two decades later, Palantir still runs largely on government money. Nearly half its revenue comes from federal contracts, including a $175 million Army contract to build an AI targeting system, and a role helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement track and deport people through a tool called ImmigrationOS.
The FBI has leaned on Palantir's software too. A 2021 glitch let unauthorized FBI staff access a jailed Ethereum researcher's private Twitter and Facebook data for more than a year.
So why would a burrito chain hand employee illness records to a company built to help intelligence agencies profile people? Because Palantir has spent years selling that same data-crunching playbook to ordinary businesses, not just spy agencies. It already works with meat giant Tyson, cereal maker General Mills, and Wendy's, tracking food inventory. Chipotle just joined the list.
For a Chipotle employee, this means the same company that helps the Pentagon target adversaries overseas could soon hold a record of your sick days. Chipotle has not said whether workers can be individually identified inside the platform, whether illness data is anonymized, or how a bad score at your local store actually gets acted on.