Curt Garner, Chipotle’s president and chief technology officer, helped boost the burrito chain’s online sales from just 5% to more than a third of total revenue.
W.When Curt Garner became Chipotle’s first CIO in 2015, he was surprised to learn that a staggering number of online orders to the Mexican food chain’s 2,000 restaurants came from old-school fax machines—a whopping $22.5 million in sales that year.
“You’d go to our website and download a faxed form. You’d fill it out and fax it to the restaurant,” Garner, 56, recalls. “If you faxed an order, you didn’t get a confirmation that it had been received and you still had to wait in line to pay. It was quite fragmented.”
Fax orders represented only 0.05% of the chain founded in 1993’s total digital sales at the time. But in her quest to digitize Chipotle, Garner soon put an end to it and began a campaign to build her online business by engineering a digital transformation with app-based ordering and rewards-based loyalty. In his decade-long tenure, first as CIO and now as president and chief strategy and technology officer, Chipotle’s digital sales have skyrocketed from $225 million in 2015 (just 5% of that year’s total $4.5 billion in revenue) to nearly $4 billion, surpassing 35% of the $11.3 billion in 2024 revenue.
Today, Chipotle’s digital business has become what it calls “a multibillion-dollar growth engine,” connecting 3,900 restaurants nationwide and a rewards program with 20 million active users, even at a time when customers are cutting back on spending at fast-casual restaurants. “We are one of the only public companies that has no debt,” Garner said. “We have a really strong balance sheet and our growth allows us to change the way people eat.”
That background helped Garner make Forbes‘ 2025 CIO Next List, featuring the best and brightest chief technology and information officers of corporate America.
Chipotle’s stock is still down 48% so far this year, and as the chain struggles with declining traffic, Chipotle’s CEO “is putting a lot of responsibility” on Garner, said Jeffries CEO Andy Barish, who covers Chipotle. “Curt has been a big part of the success,” Barish said.
Garner has been well compensated for all his pursuit of profit: Garner owns the third-most shares of Chipotle stock of any executive, worth more than $42 million, including $7 million in stock options. His total compensation in 2024 exceeded $16 million in value.
Chipotle’s digital sales are the restaurant’s highest-margin orders. There are 1,100 Chipotle stores that prioritize digital sales in their design, such as with a separate pickup lane called Chipotlane, and they generally have higher sales, margins and returns, compared to brick-and-mortar locations that have not yet been modernized. More than 80% of the new company-owned locations will have a Chipotlane.
“I remember the early days when we hit 50,000 orders in a day. Now we’re over 500,000,” Garner said. “We just want to give people access to how they want their Chipotle.”
Garner, a native of Columbus, Ohio, started in IT during a tough job market in 1991. Despite having an economics degree from Ohio State, he ended up in a temporary position answering phones for $6 an hour in the IT department at the Wendy’s burger chain. After Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, 10 restaurants were damaged, and Garner volunteered to restore the cash registers and computers at those locations.
After getting a few running, Garner made a list of the parts the other machines needed and discovered that a colleague had drawn a cartoon mocking him. His boss not only fired the employee on the spot, but also gave Garner his full-time job. And he taught Garner a valuable lesson that has stayed with him for four decades in the restaurant industry: “In restaurants, there is no job that is beneath you. You have to be of service to a guest. Don’t be a spectator.”
Garner rose to become Wendy’s international IT director in 1995, and two years later, the 28-year-old was recruited to join Starbucks, then a young coffee chain with 1,400 locations. Over the next 17 years Garner was there, he digitized Starbucks’ successful gift card business in 2011 as senior vice president of enterprise technology and, after being promoted to executive vice president and chief information officer, launched mobile ordering in 2015.
When he arrived at Chipotle, fax orders were the least of the burrito chain’s problems. That year, Chipotle faced a series of foodborne illness outbreaks, with 60 people sick and 22 hospitalized due to e.coli, plus two norovirus outbreaks and another salmonella outbreak later. The stock fell and ended the year down 30%. (And in 2020, Chipotle was fined $25 million to resolve criminal charges related to the outbreaks with the Department of Justice.)
But Garner’s plan to transform Chipotle’s digital presence helped dig the company out of the hole. It launched its app in 2017, and digital sales began to increase: During the app’s first quarter, sales increased 50% year over year. The following year, Chipotle’s digital sales reached 10% of total sales, representing $500 million for the first time. In total, about four million people used Chipotle’s app and website each month, up 65% from 2017.
And then Chipotle launched its rewards program in 2019, which gamified digital orders (through fun giveaways like offering free avocado sides for one day only) and drove sales even further. During Chipotle’s second quarter of that year, an overall revenue increase of 13% was driven by digital sales growth of 99% year over year, which was more than Chipotle made in digital sales in all of 2016.
Amid the influx, Garner modified kitchen technology so as not to distract staff serving customers in person, developing displays that illuminated the ingredients needed for an order in a way that better corresponded with digital receipts. Garner also developed a way to offer smarter pickup times. For example, orders would be sent to locations that had greater capacity or pickup times would be optimized when there was a lull in in-person customers.
Garner is also leading Chipotle’s foray into venture capital through its $100 million fund called Cultivate Next. It has made eight investments so far, including two robotics startups, an AI-based SaaS platform, a feed additives company, a sustainable oil developer, and local food logistics platform Local Line. Through Chipotle’s use of Local Line, Chipotle sourced 47 million pounds of local products in 2024 and exceeded its annual local sourcing goals for two consecutive years.
Chipotle’s app gamification continues to drive wins for Garner. Last summer, the app’s “Summer of Extras” campaign, in which Chipotle gave out 10,000 burritos (or $1 million worth), saw the participation of about 6.4 million app users. Garner said the campaign drove “a big step in reactivating inactive members” from the previous summer. Its recently launched college rewards program is also off to a strong start, as those who choose to participate have “increased frequency and engagement, which is driving a significant shift in spending,” according to Chipotle spokesperson Tyler Benson.
Artificial intelligence will also help make gamification even more personal. But until now, Garner has used AI for corporate tasks, specifically within human resources. He recently launched Avo Cado, Chipotle’s AI-powered virtual team member, which he says has doubled job applications and significantly reduced the administrative time it takes to onboard a new employee by 75%.
Still, Garner said his strategy boils down to “not letting it be about the technology.”
“Let it be about how it makes people feel, how it makes their day a little easier, how it makes people connect in a more meaningful way,” he said.