After a summer of explosive diarrhea, lots of people are understandably a bit hesitant about the quality of the produce they come across, both at the grocery store and in restaurants. Chipotle, which recently had a potential salmonella outbreak, seems well aware of this and has decided to tap the surveillance state to help address it, teaming up with Palantir to help address food safety concerns.
According to a report from Wired, the fast food favorite will reportedly use Palantir’s Foundry, its enterprise data operating system, to create a “food safety risk platform” that will analyze different risk factors to spot potential problems. Per the report, the tool will take into consideration things like a store’s health department scores, incidents of pests in the building, employee illness, and other potential points of risk to create an overall safety score.
No part of handing over the food safety process to private corporations sounds great, but the most alarming thing in the plan (at least for Chipotle employees) is the idea that Palantir will be monitoring their health. Surely the company that is increasingly trying to get its hands on healthcare data will handle that information in a responsible manner.
Chipotle’s plan to work with Palantir isn’t great, but it’s also far from the first food giant to let Alex Karp get his fingers into their data. Wendy’s has a deal with the surveillance tech firm to monitor food inventory, and companies like Tyson Foods and General Mills have also collaborated with the company. And if you’re a customer worried about Palantir knowing your order, well, that’s a valid concern, but it can probably get its hands on that data already, if it wants to.
The bigger problem is the fact that there’s even such a gap in the food safety net that would require turning to Palantir or any private sector firm. Unfortunately, the US Food and Drug Administration is operating with a skeleton crew under the Trump administration after the FDA cut more than 4,000 jobs as part of Trump’s stripping the government down to its bones. Other parts of the food supply regulatory infrastructure like the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services have also been decimated.
But hey, at least it’s not like we’re having a historically bad food safety situation or anything—as long as you ignore the more than 12,800 illnesses that have been connected to foodborne outbreaks in 2026 alone and the skyrocketing number of food-related recalls that happened in August. Other than that, it’s all working great.
