Chipotle opens first drive-thru restaurant in Tulare, California

Chipotle’s first Chipotlane in Tulare opened June 24 at 2258 E. Bardsley Avenue, giving the city a second Chipotle and the Central Valley another restaurant built around digital pickup. The location runs daily from 10:45 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Chipotle said it is hiring about 30 employees for the store.

For crew and managers, the format changes the rhythm of the line. A Chipotlane is built for customers collecting digital orders without leaving their vehicles, which means the restaurant has to keep bagged orders moving on a tight handoff clock instead of relying only on in-store traffic. Chipotle has said Chipotlane pickups take less than 30 seconds on average, a benchmark that puts pressure on the make line, expo station, and the person staging orders at the pickup window to stay in sync, especially during lunch and dinner peaks.

The Tulare opening also arrives with a built-in menu draw. Customers at the new restaurant can order limited-time items including Chipotle Honey Chicken and the new Cilantro Lime Sauce, which can add another layer of complexity to a line already trying to balance regular throughput with digital demand. At a store like this, the job is not just making food fast, but keeping the digital queue from backing up while the drive-thru lane keeps moving.

The company has been leaning hard into that model. Chipotle announced its 1,000th Chipotlane milestone in November 2024 and said it was building a real estate pipeline meant to support 8% to 10% annual unit growth. It also said it planned to open 315 to 345 new restaurants in 2025, with at least 80% featuring a Chipotlane. At the time of that announcement, nearly 30% of Chipotle’s more than 3,600 restaurants had a Chipotlane.

California remains central to that expansion. Chipotle’s official California locations page lists 523 restaurants in the state, and Tulare follows earlier Central Valley openings, including a Chipotlane in nearby Clovis. For workers, the pattern points to a service model that keeps shifting toward digital orders, faster handoffs, and more tightly managed shifts, with future hiring likely to keep following the same drive-thru-first blueprint.