Chipotle Mexican Grill is piloting a "Food Safety Risk Management Platform" built by the data analytics firm Palantir, a company that received its early funding from the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In effect, Chipotle wants a computer system to flag which of its kitchens might pose the next food safety risk. According to a report by Wired, the platform is built on Foundry, Palantir's core software product, which works like a giant digital filing cabinet — pulling scattered data into a single dashboard so an organization, whether a company or an army, can see everything at once. Chipotle confirmed the project to the outlet.

The platform reportedly runs on three inputs: health department inspection scores, pest incident records, and employee illness reports. Blended together, these data points produce a risk score for every restaurant — effectively a digital report card that nobody outside company headquarters gets to see.

Laurie Schalow, Chipotle's chief corporate affairs and food safety officer, told Wired that the company is "piloting a new Food Safety Risk Management Platform designed to provide a more consistent and centralized view of food safety risk across our restaurants."

Schalow did not say when the platform will launch, whether any consumer data is used, how many stores are involved in the pilot, or whether customers will ever be able to see an individual store's score.

Palantir's Government Roots

Palantir is not a typical Silicon Valley data vendor. Co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, the company landed its first major funding in 2005 from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's own venture capital arm, created specifically to fund startups useful to American intelligence. The CIA became one of Palantir's earliest customers.

Two decades later, Palantir still draws nearly half of its revenue from federal contracts. These include a $175 million US Army contract to build an AI targeting system, as well as a role helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) track and deport people through a tool called ImmigrationOS. The FBI has also leaned on Palantir's software: a 2021 glitch allowed unauthorized FBI staff to access a jailed Ethereum researcher's private Twitter and Facebook data for more than a year.

From Intelligence Agencies to Food Companies

Palantir, meanwhile, has spent years selling the same data-crunching playbook to ordinary businesses, not just intelligence agencies. The company already works with meat giant Tyson, cereal maker General Mills, and fast-food chain Wendy's to track food inventory, and Chipotle has now joined that list — a roster that shows the firm's commercial reach extending well beyond the government clients that made its name.

For Chipotle employees, the arrangement means the same company that helps the Pentagon target adversaries overseas could soon hold records of their sick days. Chipotle has not said whether workers can be individually identified within the platform, whether illness data is anonymized, or how a poor risk score at a local store actually gets acted on. How the company eventually answers those questions — including the pilot's size, timing, and data practices — will show how much transparency accompanies the spread of intelligence-grade software into everyday food service.

Source: Decrypt