Chipotle CFO strives for transparency

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There’s never really an easy time to step into the CFO seat, but there’s definitely a hard time: 2025.

The year was always going to be fateful for Chipotle CFO Adam Rymer: His initially planned January 2025 CFO appointment was accelerated to October 2024, guaranteeing that the famously uncertain year would mark his first full one as CFO.

CFO Brew talked to Rymer shortly after his first day on the job, back in 2024, when he spoke about the importance of communication, mentorship, and, of course, avocado pricing. Now, with a year and change of experience, the same general outlook applies, with a bonus: He’s lived through it.

Learning on the job. “2025 was a really interesting year,” Rymer told us, citing challenges like tariffs, consumer spending concerns, and broader uncertainty. “It felt like many, many years of events all into one.”

Of course, those challenges have hardly gone away. “Anytime that consumers feel a bit of uncertainty, the concern is: Are they going to have the confidence to go out and spend money in retail, at shopping malls, at restaurants?” Rymer said. “We saw a little bit of this in 2025 and I think, unfortunately, some of this is continuing into 2026,” he added, regarding consumer spending concerns.

“In a situation like [2025], with that many unknowns, the thing that I really appreciated throughout the year, first and foremost, was the team that I had around me,” he said.

Rymer has been at Chipotle in various capacities—including a stint in HR—for over 15 years, meaning he has long relationships with some of his colleagues.

In a tricky year like 2025, it especially helped that “we really understood each other,” he noted. “We really understood this business, and knew how to support one another to get the best information to be able to make quick decisions.”

Do as I do. Former Chipotle CFO and Rymer’s mentor, Jack Hartung, played a large role in fostering that spirit of camaraderie, Rymer explained.

“My ability to take this position and be successful in this position is really [thanks to] having leaders like Jack that really exposed me to what’s happening within the organization,” he said.

Often, leaders simply inform underlings of already-made decisions from conversations they were locked out of, Rymer continued, stressing that “the most important part” of those conversations isn’t the outcome; it’s the “why” behind a given decision.

“The more that you can expose people to the ‘Why?’ behind all of that, the better they’re going to understand and support the decisions that were made,” he said. “That’s really what I appreciated that Jack did over the years. We had long conversations around decisions that were made.”

“Too often leaders don’t invest the time to really explain the ‘Why’ behind everything,” he added.

Being open. In his first year in the post, Rymer was hyper-focused on replicating the same openness that benefited him.

To that end, he set up recurring individual meetings with core players on the finance team. “Then, once a week, I get the team together with all of our more senior leaders within finance, everyone at that senior director, and VP level, every Tuesday for about an hour to talk about what's going on in the business, what decisions have been made, back to the ‘Why?’ around them,” he said.

The meeting was “strategically placed” to fall right after Chipotle’s executive team meets on Mondays, and everyone (in that meeting) is offered “the latest look on how the business is trending on the week before that,” Rymer said.

Tuesday’s meeting, however, isn’t meant to be a PowerPoint summary of Monday’s meeting.

“The whole point is to have a conversation so everyone feels like it’s a back and forth, asking questions,” he said. “We very much allow it to be very free form and go where it needs to go, so that everyone basically walks away from that meeting feeling like they’re more connected with what’s going on in the business.”

Future memory. And if Chipotle’s next CFO happens to be on the finance team (or at the company) now, as Rymer was before taking over, he’s spent some time considering what they might take away from his leadership philosophy.

“I would love one day, looking back, however many years from now, if people were to describe me, it would have been…‘Oh, I loved going to him with a question or a topic, or whatever it may be,’” he said.

“If you’re a direct report, if you’re somebody that’s been on the team for a couple of weeks in a more entry level position, I always want to make sure that I’m spending the time necessary, if it’s something important to somebody, to have a conversation around it,” Rymer said.