Chipotle revenue rises 5.4 percent as growth strategy expands stores

Chipotle’s latest year-end numbers show a company growing by footprint while asking more of every restaurant team. Full-year revenue rose 5.4 percent to $11.9 billion in 2025, but comparable restaurant sales fell 1.7 percent and restaurant-level operating margin slipped to 25.4 percent from 26.7 percent, a sign that the brand is still pushing for more volume and tighter execution at the same time.

The chain opened 334 company-owned restaurants last year, including 257 with Chipotlanes, and added 11 international partner-operated locations. It ended 2025 with 4,056 restaurants overall. Chipotle marked its 4,000th restaurant in Manhattan, Kansas, in December 2025 and said it is working toward a long-term goal of 7,000 restaurants in the U.S. and Canada. For crews and managers, that means more hiring, more training, and more pressure to keep both the front line and the digital make-line moving without slowing ticket times.

That push is tied to Chipotle’s Recipe for Growth strategy, which the company says is designed to grow transactions and drive accuracy, efficiency and speed. In practice, that points to more line checks, more equipment changes, and a heavier focus on process discipline on the floor. The company’s digital business keeps underscoring why: digital sales were 35.4 percent of total food and beverage revenue in the first quarter of 2025 and 36.7 percent by the full-year reporting period, making Chipotlanes and pickup staging a bigger part of daily operations.

The labor side of the story has not gotten easier. Chipotle’s 2025 annual report says wage inflation and a competitive labor market can create staffing shortages, which helps explain why labor efficiency remains a central management concern. Food, beverage and packaging costs were 29.6 percent of revenue in 2025, down slightly from 29.8 percent in 2024, but the company said avocados, dairy and chicken still pressured costs earlier in the year, with beef and chicken inflation adding strain later on.

Chipotle is still expanding, still buying time with scale, and still trying to preserve its made-to-order model while speeding it up. The 2025 results make clear that the company’s growth plan is now a store-operations plan, and the people on the line will be the ones living it shift by shift.