Obsessed With Chipotle? 6 Ways to Get a Bigger Burrito for the Same Price

Leave it to interns to hack the fast-food industry and figure out how to get more food for less money. Interns always know the best tricks for getting free food.

Thanks to one intern at ApartmentList.com, we now know six ways to get at least 15% more ingredients — and in some cases, up to 86% more — in your Chipotle burrito.

Dylan Grosz visited the restaurant several times over two weeks and ordered five burritos each visit to determine where the biggest benefits were apparent.

He toted his haul back to the office to separate and weigh the ingredients, which is quite noble — I probably would have gotten four minutes into this experiment before aimlessly eating all the variables.

How to Get More Food in Your Chipotle Burrito

“Burrito legend has it that the bowl’s lack of tortilla constraints influences servers to give burrito bowl customers huge portions in general,” Grosz noted.

So instead of getting those fajita veggies wrapped, ask for a bowl, and wait for the goodness to be heaped on.

You can still get a tortilla — just ask for it on the side. The intern found that asking for a bowl-plus-tortilla over a wrapped burrito yielded 15% more food in his belly.

Another surefire method is one I see a lot in the Chipotle line, so I know servers don’t balk at the request: two meats.

Grosz’s tests showed that by asking for two meat options in your burrito — half chicken, half pork, whatever your craving — you won’t get a true half-and-half split. You’ll really get three-quarter scoops of each meat. The intern says that you get 54% more meat, resulting in a 9% increase in total burrito weight.

The intern warns that you’ll be charged for the more pricy of your meat choices, but what’s a couple of cents when you’re getting almost two scoops for the price of one?

Remember to get those two meat options in a burrito bowl to maximize the generosity of Chipotle’s serving spoons!

Foil-Busting Burrito Fun

If you use these two Chipotle hacks plus the other four ordering tricks the intern suggests, you’ll have a gigantic meal, a burrito so large that you’ll have to double-wrap it with two tortillas ordered on the side. In fact, you’ll get a burrito that weighs up to 86% more than a normal burrito from Chipotle.

Splitting your giant burrito bowl with a friend is kind. Saving it for yourself to eat for two meals is smart spending. But such simple schemes were not enough to determine the fate of the many, many burritos brought back to Grosz’s office.

After parsing out and weighing the ingredients of each burrito during the experiment (going to guess he used a few forks for this, not his hands), Grosz reassembled the burritos and left them for the masses in the office kitchen.

“They all mysteriously disappeared within a few minutes,” he says. I guess you could say he was paying it forward.

Visit the ApartmentList.com Rentonomics blog for all the money-saving Chipotle hacks before you place your next order.

How to Get Paid to Eat Chipotle

Getting a bigger burrito is awesome. So is getting paid for it.

Before you go, or if you’re stuck waiting in line, download the Drop app.

Drop is a financial tech company that rewards you for your purchases — including at Chipotle.

All you have to do is link your credit and debit cards. When you make a Drop-qualified purchase, you’ll automatically earn points, whether you’re grocery shopping, hailing an Uber or ordering a burrito. The points will add up, and you can then exchange them for gift cards to popular retailers like Amazon and Starbucks.

You can sign up right here.

Lisa Rowan is a writer and producer at The Penny Hoarder. She orders a veggie bowl so the guac comes free.