Steve Ells made his name by co-founding Chipotle Mexican Grill in 1993, building it into a global leader in fast-casual dining known for serving high-quality, customizable food with transparency and integrity. He served as CEO until 2017 and remained on the board before moving on to mentorship, investment, and new restaurant experiments. Ells has long been fascinated by how technology, ingredient sourcing and process design can elevate the restaurant experience without compromising authenticity.
In his latest venture, Counter Service, Ells returns not to replicate Chipotle but to reinvent portions of its philosophy, this time with sandwiches and smarter systems. After Kernel, his futuristic, automation-oriented brand, struggled to live up to its promise, Ells pivoted. The new brand leverages his deep understanding of operational scale and ingredient quality, integrating lessons from Chipotle’s assembly-line “line cook as service” model into a more modular, digitally orchestrated format.
Counter Service, which will open its fourth location in New York City next week, looks on the surface like a modern sandwich shop. But behind its compact footprint (typically around 800 to 1,200 square feet) is an intricate, tech-powered system designed to prove that “real food” can be made efficiently and consistently at scale.
Ells’s team learned important lessons from Kernel. That earlier concept centered on robotics and automated assembly but ran into real-world issues, like maintenance, calibration, and restaurant variability, as the novelty of automation ran aground of the demands of volume and consistency. In contrast, Counter Service’s technology is less visible. Predictive analytics models track daypart traffic patterns and ingredient usage to anticipate demand and automate inventory replenishment. Kitchen management software ensures that roasted proteins and fresh breads arrive from the central kitchen in precise quantities, with temperature and freshness sensors verifying food quality at each step.
Each location communicates directly with the central hub through a cloud-based control platform that aggregates real-time operational data such as throughput, order accuracy, and ingredient waste. This feedback loop helps the team fine-tune both menu engineering and staffing schedules. Managers can view dashboards showing live prep times and temperature consistency across ovens, while supply chain algorithms suggest optimal reorder timing to minimize spoilage and overproduction. The software also flags any deviations in product flow, automatically alerting the central kitchen when certain SKUs are running low.
The system’s design blends commercial kitchen principles with insights from manufacturing logistics. Each sandwich station is arranged for maximum efficiency, guided by digital workflow prompts that resemble the “mise en place” logic Ells pioneered at Chipotle. Yet instead of robot arms or conveyor belts, Counter Service relies on data orchestration and staff-assisted precision. “Invisible automation,” as Ells has described it in interviews, allows the brand to scale consistency and speed without removing the human element that guests still value.
Even the menu design benefits from data integration. Early analytics revealed that the “Green Goddess Club” and “The Baron” sandwiches spiked at predictable lunch rush times, prompting the predictive engine to pre-stage roasted meats and allocate toasting slots automatically. The system then adjusts for traffic patterns by day and location, dynamically recalibrating prep schedules to ensure minimal downtime and waste.
Counter Service’s approach may seem modest next to the robotics promise once offered by Kernel, but Ells believes visible automation distracted from his core mission. His new thesis: technology doesn’t need to be seen to be effective. Guests prefer to experience food, not machinery.
That philosophy extends to the expansion strategy. With new units planned beyond New York City, Ells and his team are methodically building proof of concept before scaling. Their goal is to show that central orchestration, predictive systems, and lean execution can deliver consistency, speed and quality, and without theatrics.
In this quieter mode, Ells may well be chasing a second act not defined by robotics, but by intelligent infrastructure. If successful, Counter Service could offer a new model for fast food: a concept where the technology hums in the background, the kitchen is orchestrated through real-time data and every sandwich reflects disciplined engineering, not showmanship.
