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The Willie Nelson rendition of “The Scientist” has been downloaded about 25,000 times so far, and 60 cents from each 99-cent download has gone to Chipotle’s foundation.

The foundation has been supported by download proceeds and $1 million from the revenue generated by Chipotle’s annual “Boorito” event on Halloween, in which customers dressed in farm-inspired costumes pay a cut-rate $2 for a burrito or other dish.

Over the last two years, the Denver-based company has donated more than $2 million to groups like Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and the Nature Conservancy. At the end of last year, the foundation presented its first major award, of $250,000, to Farm Aid, which was founded by Mr. Nelson and other well-known singers to promote family farms.

http://www.nytimes.com

By: Elizabeth Olson

Chipotle Mexican Grill, the fast-food marketer, began thinking about ways to promote improvements to the country’s food supply, it decided to skip the graphic photos of jampacked chicken coops and other unsettling farm practices.

Instead, Chipotle took a more upbeat approach, creating an animated film with puppets to show a family farmer switching first to factory farming, then back to the sustainable approach of turning animals out to pasture. After showing the film, called “Back to the Start,” first online and then in movie theaters, the company decided to turn it into its first national commercial. The two-minute ad will be shown on Sunday’s Grammy Awards telecast, and viewers will be urged to download, via iTunes, the song that accompanies it — a Willie Nelson rendition of “The Scientist” by Coldplay.

The proceeds from the downloads are to go to the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation. Chipotle’s founder, Steve Ells, started the foundation last year to encourage sustainable farming methods and family farming. A major selling point for the fast-food chain, whose 1,230 outlets brought in nearly $2.3 billion in sales last year, has been the fresh and sustainably grown ingredients, including pork and beef, in its burritos and tacos.

National television is a new tack for the 19-year-old company, which has produced some advertising on local television but mostly has employed radio, billboards and digital advertising. The Grammy Awards, which this year will feature performances by Bruce Springsteen and Adele, among others, is a much bigger arena. Last year the telecast drew more than 26 million viewers, the most since 2000, and at least that many are expected to watch this year’s ceremony. •

Chipotle, which does not employ an advertising agency, devised its marketing approach based on its own research, which it said showed that 75 percent of its 800,000 daily customers came for the taste, value and convenience of its food. Those are positive reasons, but expected for any food franchise that wants to be successful. So to get customers more passionately involved, the company decided it “needed to have a general, higher-level message and to tell the story in a more approachable way,” said Mark Crumpacker, Chipotle’s chief marketing officer.

“And we wanted to make the message interesting and entertaining,” he added. (more…)