How healthy will Chipotle’s new cheese dip sauce be?

Chipotle continues to go mainstream fast food, adding melted cheese goop to their menu — but how healthy will it be?

Life is rough for Chipotle. The “artisan” food chain is slowly moving more and more to left-of-center when it comes to distancing itself from typical fast food fare. There’s a conversation to have about the politics of the fast food game but we don’t have the effort for that right now.

What we do have time for is pondering how healthy this new excursion will be. If you haven’t heard by now (or some how didn’t read the headline to this piece), Chipotle is adopting queso dip to its menu.

This begs the important question of how healthy can a bowl of melted cheese and peppers be?

Chipotle is going hard in the paint with it’s campaign to bring queso to its store, and reportedly wouldn’t shut up about it in meeting with investors. But while it’s giving the people what they want, will it stay true to the Chipotle way of providing ‘clean’ food?

For starters, nothing that Chipotle offers is totally clean. But for the most part they’ve managed to help kick start a movement where people who eat out are more health conscious than they were in another time and place. That being said, it’s going to be up to Chipotle to provide queso in a way that really hasn’t been done before and that’s from a health angle.

You’d think that melted cheese is a straight forward side dish, but it’s not. There are so many ingredients, food dyes and added flavoring that changes it into something else. If Chipotle wants to gain back the trust of customers then it’s going to need a huge win here with the queso dip and that starts with making it healthy.

We don’t know how healthy it’s going to end up being but we’re willing to find out. This could be a moment where Chipotle pushes the chips to the center of the table, as there’s no coming back. Once you’re in the queso game, there’s only one way out. Chipotle is hoping to change the rules so they can exist in their own corner pocked of this world.