QA project 04 · 2020–2025

Chipotle

Context
Chipotle, via TopNotch
Role
QA Analyst
Timeline
2020–2025

Overview

From 2020 to 2025, Chipotle thanked healthcare workers and teachers with free burritos. Each year, people went to a campaign site to nominate a team or sign up for free food. I was a QA analyst on the team that tested those sites.

The Project

Giveaways that opened to a rush

Each campaign ran around a single week, like National Nurses Week or Teacher Appreciation Week. In 2020, hospital teams nominated themselves for 25 burritos delivered by DoorDash. In 2021, healthcare workers signed up for one of 250,000 free burritos. In 2024 and 2025, teachers and healthcare workers entered on microsites to win free entrée e-cards, verified through ID.me.

Free food is a big reason to cheat. If the forms could be gamed, one person could claim more than their share. If sign-ups or emails failed, real nurses and teachers would miss out. And every page had to hold up on every browser and screen size, all at once.

Our Approach

Test the whole path, not just the page

We tested every step a person would take, from landing on the page to the email. All testing was manual and tracked in Jira.

End-to-end
Visit, nomination or sign-up, hand-off to verification, confirmation and prize emails
Functional
Forms, nominations, validation, limits and error states
Security
Injection testing on every field and form
Accessibility
Screen reader and keyboard navigation, including ARIA labels
Visual
Builds compared against the designs at each breakpoint
Cross-browser
Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge on iOS, Android and Windows
Copy
Site and email copy

My Role

A QA analyst on every campaign

I was a QA analyst on TopNotch’s QA team for each campaign. I worked across every type of testing and reported issues directly to the developers.

  1. 01Ran injection testing on the nomination and sign-up fields
  2. 02Compared builds against the designs at each breakpoint
  3. 03Reviewed site and email copy, and tested the emails end to end

Impact & Results

Hundreds of thousands of burritos, claimed online

  • 200K+Burritos delivered to healthcare teams in 2020
  • ~1,000Burritos ordered a minute when the 2020 site opened
  • 200,000Teachers and healthcare workers who won e-cards in 2025

In 2020, Chipotle pledged 100,000 burritos and ended up delivering more than 200,000 to medical facilities. In 2021 it offered another 250,000. By 2024 and 2025, the giveaways had grown to more than $1 million and then $2 million in free burritos, all claimed through the campaign sites.

These results belong to everyone who built the campaign: strategy, design, development and QA.

Next QA project

Paving for Pizza