Chipotle BOOrito
Character design and animation for Chipotle’s annual BOOrito Halloween campaign, featuring a cast of spooky mascots built from real menu items.
Let's BOO This Thing
Chipotle’s annual BOOrito event has become a Halloween tradition, inviting customers to show up in costume for a discounted entrée while supporting the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation. Working with Day One Agency, I was brought in to create a cast of Halloween characters built from recognizable Chipotle menu items.
A burrito became a mummy. Guacamole became Guacenstein. A bag of chips turned into a ghost. I developed the character concepts, illustrations, and animated GIFs used across Chipotle’s website and social content. The characters later became a recurring part of BOOrito and eventually made the jump into Chipotle’s Roblox experience.
MY ROLE
Concept Development
Character Design
Illustration & Animation
DELIVERABLES
Food Mascots
Animated GIFs
Social Content
Digital Campaign Assets
RESULTS
Characters adapted for Chipotle’s Roblox BOOrito experience
2021 3.5M+ unique plays, 8M+ visits
Chipotle’s biggest digital sales day
AWARDS
Shorty Silver, Contest or Promotion — BOOrito, 2021
Shorty Bronze, Online Event/Activation — BOOrito, 2021
Burrito Mummy
Chip Bag Ghost
Burrito Bowl Monster
Guacenstein
Saucy Devil
Food Mascots For a Spooky Season
BOOrito Brought to Life
The trick was making the characters feel unmistakably Halloween without losing what made the food recognizable. Each mascot started with a real Chipotle menu item, then borrowed just enough from familiar monster archetypes to turn it into a character.
Burrito Mummy kept the foil-wrapped shape of a real burrito. Guacenstein used a guacamole cup as the head and body. The Chip Bag Ghost worked because the bag itself already had the right silhouette. Those simple visual connections helped the characters read quickly, which mattered when they appeared as small animated GIFs and social posts.
The style stayed intentionally scrappy and handmade, combining food photography, illustration and simple animation rather than turning the characters into polished cartoon mascots. That looseness felt right for both Halloween and Chipotle’s personality.
BOOrito Comes to Roblox
Food Mascot Dress-Up
Years later, the BOOrito characters found another life inside Chipotle’s Roblox Halloween promotion. Players could explore a virtual Chipotle restaurant and corn maze while wearing digital costumes based on the original food mascots.
The campaign connected the virtual experience back to the real world by rewarding players with codes for free burritos and additional in-game prizes. More importantly for the character work, the same designs that began as simple social GIFs had become recognizable enough to work as full virtual costumes.
Chipotle reported more than 8 million visits to the BOOrito experience and over 3.5 million unique plays.
Concepts vs. Final Art
Food in Halloween Costumes
Flavorful Food Mascot Design
The characters started about as simply as they could: rough sketches of Chipotle food dressed for Halloween.
From there, I worked those ideas into finished characters using real food photography, illustration and animation. The process helped preserve the appetizing, recognizable food while giving each mascot its own expression, silhouette and personality.
That simplicity ended up being one of the strengths of the project. The characters could work as still images, animated GIFs, social content and, eventually, virtual costumes without needing to be reinvented each time.