Cal Poly student and friend want to bike across the country eating only Chipotle. Why?
Twenty-one burritos. Thirteen Chipotle locations. Eight days. Two cyclists. One cross-California bike trip.
Their goal? To show they can complete the same ride across the entire United States eating only Chipotle burritos.
Tasman Alexander and Tyler Brown, both 23 years old and avid cyclists, have been friends and biking partners since they met during high school in Portland, Oregon.
The pair has already done two cross-country bike trips together, once from coast-to-coast and another from the Canadian border to Mexico. Each passage took around 50 days, Alexander told The Tribune.
“Our relationship has always been about bikes,” Alexander said.
Brown is currently completing his masters in quantitative economics at Cal Poly after finishing his undergraduate studies there in 2023, during which time he was part of the Cal Poly Cycling Team. Alexander has been adventuring full time since the COVID pandemic, completing multi-month bike journeys with Brown and also backpacking the Pacific Crest and Appalachian trails, taking around six months each.
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The pair first got the idea for the Chipotle trip while on one of their cross-country rides.
“The longer the trip is, it turns into a food challenge beyond just a physical challenge,” Brown told The Tribune.
Sticking to a budget on a multi-month ride made finding quality food difficult, especially in food deserts, Brown and Alexander said. For weeks, they mostly ate processed food like energy bars, sugary gels and tuna packets.
Then they got Chipotle.
“Tyler and I were just joking, like, ‘Man, I wish that we could just eat this every day,’” Alexander said.
Their next thought was only natural: Why don’t we?
Upon their return, the pair started planning their next cross-country route based on Chipotle locations. The trip will cross 3,500 miles and hit 39 Chipotle locations from Portland, Oregon, to New York, taking them around two months to complete. With the time needed to edit and post videos every day, the bikers estimate they’ll average 70 miles a day, Alexander said.
The best way to get attention from a national brand? Go viral online
With a plan in place, the pair then needed to figure out how to catch Chipotle’s attention.
They considered just sending a proposal to the corporate headquarters, but ultimately decided they needed to do something bigger to convince the company they were capable of a cross-country ride.
They decided to bike the southern coast of California eating only Chipotle as proof of concept.
“The easiest way is to do a test trip to prove its viability — and it did exactly that,” Brown said. Their Southern California trip showed the pair was “not gonna die,” when they did the same trek across the whole country.
Alexander started the trip in San Francisco on Feb. 17 and made it to Los Angeles eight days later on Feb. 24, with Brown joining him later in San Luis Obispo County for a couple days of the journey.
The twist? The bikers didn’t tell Chipotle what they were doing.
One of their goals was to get Chipotle to approach them, leveraging the power of the internet to go viral on Instagram and catch Chipotle’s interest.
Alexander filmed every day of the journey, turning the trip into an online adventure for the public to follow along with. He called upon strangers to help him get sponsored by tagging Chipotle in the comments of his Instagram posts.
It worked. By the second day of the trip, Alexander’s Instagram videos had blown up. Overnight, he gained thousands of new followers, and everyone in the comments section of his posts were tagging Chipotle.
Every day of the trip was about the same: Alexander would bike through beautiful California landscapes, stop at a couple Chipotles, eat a couple burritos and find someplace to set up his camping tent.
One night, he slept in the backyard of a fire station, listening to the intercom go off the whole night. Another night a kind rancher directed him to a nearby church to sleep at. A RV camper offered him an empty spot behind his truck on another.
Brown met up with Alexander near Atascadero on day five of the journey and biked with him for two days down to Santa Maria before returning to Cal Poly so as not to miss class.
Alexander was originally meant to stop in SLO with Brown, but once he saw how much attention their journey was getting online, he decided to continue on to Los Angeles.
As far as their Chipotle-only rule, the bikers were pleasantly surprised by their experience.
“Eating Chipotle the whole time was easier than expected,” Alexander said. “It’s pretty good food for biking, honestly.”
The stores he visited supported him, too. One Chipotle gave him his entire meal — around $50 worth of food — for free. Another location gave him 50%.
For the longer stretches, he stocked up on enough burritos to cover the gap, ordering vegetarian meals so they wouldn’t spoil. His longest stretch without a Chipotle was two-and-a-half days — around 200 miles. He carried five burritos to hold him over, he said.
On the cross-country trip, they would be planning for a longer stretch of 400 miles across Nebraska. However, Alexander said he and Brown would be biking much faster on their cross-country trip. He said they could probably close the Nebraska stretch in three days.
“Having real food just makes it easier to ride all day,” Brown said.
Will the bikers make it across the country eating only Chipotle?
The trial trip was ultimately successful in catching Chipotle’s attention: The company reached out to Alexander the day after he finished the trip on Feb. 25.
“I have actually heard from Chipotle, and I’m optimistic that that we’ll be able to make the trip happen,” Alexander said.
Part of the reason their California trip got so much attention on social media was because he asked viewers to tag Chipotle, Alexander said. He and Brown have been thinking about how to recreate that same online hype for the cross-country trip.
“I think it would be a great opportunity to do a food-related fundraiser and bring attention to that,” Alexander said. “I definitely want there to be a fundraiser aspect on the big trip. It would just be a big opportunity.”
So are they prepared to eat only Chipotle burritos for two months?
“We’d be psyched to support Chipotle, to support their product and also to get biking into the mainstream as a way to get out there and get some exercise,” Brown said.
Plus, he said, “pulling out a burrito is not the worst thing to pull out on a ride.”
