A Minnesota woman hospitalized with sepsis after eating a Chipotle burrito bowl is suing the restaurant chain, alleging it served salmonella-contaminated jalapeño peppers that triggered a multistate outbreak now linked to more than 200 illnesses.
Kristen Behne filed the lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Minnesota, seeking more than $75,000 in damages.
According to the complaint, Behne ate a chicken burrito bowl from a Chipotle in Roseville, Minnesota, on June 24. Three days later, she fainted, developed a fever that reached 102 degrees and was hospitalized with sepsis. She was discharged on June 30 but says she has not fully recovered.
Genetic testing tied Behne’s infection to the broader outbreak, according to the lawsuit, and the Minnesota Department of Health classified her case as outbreak-associated on July 1.
Public health officials have connected at least 110 illnesses in Minnesota and 212 nationally to the outbreak, which Chipotle has publicly attributed to a single contaminated lot of jalapeño peppers. The company pulled the jalapeños from its restaurants in early August and replaced them with product from a different grower, saying it acted “out of an abundance of caution” once the outbreak was detected.
“It seems like Minnesota has kind of taken the brunt of this,” said Minneapolis attorney Ryan Osterholm, who is representing Behne. “We don’t know why and it could just be that we’re the ones that are discovering them.”
“We’re hearing this story from a lot of folks who were hospitalized for several days or longer,” Osterholm said.
Osterholm, son of the University of Minnesota epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, believes this case could be one of thousands. Osterholm also said he would not be surprised if the outbreak leads to deaths.
The outbreak has since spread beyond Minnesota, with the CDC reporting at least 345 illnesses across 27 states as of Wednesday, including 36 hospitalizations.
Food safety experts say investigations into outbreaks like this often trace contamination back to farms and water sources long before products reach restaurants.
“Any type of food-borne illness really begins on the farm level and largely through the water supply,” said Peter Pitts, a former FDA associate commissioner. “The problem already existed when the crop was harvested.”
The lawsuit argues that Chipotle should have anticipated the risk. It cites the company’s history of foodborne illness incidents, including a 2015 salmonella outbreak in Minnesota that sickened 64 people, and a 2020 case in which Chipotle paid a $25 million criminal fine after outbreaks sickened more than 1,100 people between 2015 and 2018.
“Chipotle told the public it had learned its lesson,” the suit states. “But we now know that it did not.”
Osterholm said this latest lawsuit is likely just the beginning and they may later seek punitive damages pending discovery into what Chipotle knew about the risks.
Chipotle’s Chief of Corporate Affairs and Food Safety Officer Laurie Schalow said in a statement:
“We have a robust ingredient traceability system and, upon learning of a potential Salmonella outbreak in the supply chain impacting wholesalers and restaurants, we identified jalapeños from a particular grower in Sinaloa, Mexico and distributed by Coast Citrus Distributors as a common ingredient from a common lot, proactively removed them from the restaurants where they had been distributed, and replaced them with product from different growers. The recalled jalapeño peppers are no longer in Chipotle restaurants and given these actions, the CDC and FDA have said they do not consider there to be a current ongoing risk from Chipotle restaurants in this outbreak.”
Chipotle is not alone in pulling products connected to the outbreak. Qdoba has also removed peppers tied to the outbreak from its supply chain.
“We’re in maybe the second or third inning of knowing what happened in this outbreak,” Osterholm said. “Certainly the case counts are going to go much, much higher.”
