Are Chipotle and Sweetgreen still crushing it?

By way of comparison, McDonalds is still keeping up with these guys but Chick -fil-A is losing a little steam.

The slop bowl recession has sent Chipotle’s stock cratering

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For a long time, the slop bowl and burrito scene has been a gold mine for Chipotle. But now, with competition rising and wallets getting lighter, consumers are turning away from Chipotle’s offerings.

The company posted just 0.3% growth in its same-store sales yesterday, while simultaneously cutting its outlook for the full year: the chain now expects sales to fall in the “low single-digit” percentages for this year. That news not only burned Chipotle itself, which sank 18%, but also hurt rival bowl sellers Cava and Sweetgreen, which fell 11% and 10%, respectively, yesterday.

How long such a downturn will last is hard to tell — we’ll hear from Cava and Sweetgreen on November 4 and 6 about how their sales are faring — but with comparable-store sales growth dipping below zero for two of the three companies this year, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion: we are in a slop bowl recession. Indeed, if you were to subtract inflation from each of these companies’ growth rates, they’d all be well in the red.

Not very bowl-ish

That continued drop comes in stark contrast to fast-casual counterparts like Shake Shack and Restaurant Brands International, the company behind Burger King, which both gained on Thursday after posting better-than-expected growth in established stores, despite facing the same consumer challenges.

Per Chipotle’s latest earnings call, the deciding factor might have been the youngsters — with CEO Scott Boatwright commenting that customers in their late 20s and early 30s are “particularly challenged” due to unemployment, student loan debt, and slower wage growth.