Brian Niccol’s journey from Doritos Locos Tacos to running Starbucks

And it has landed him one of the biggest, and toughest, jobs in the business: fixing Starbucks.

Over the course of his nearly three-decade career, Niccol, 50 years old, has run into challenges at every stop. He persuaded consumers to reconsider Pringles. He beat back accusations that Taco Bell used filler in its beef and figured out a way to buttress Chipotle Mexican Grill’s food-supply chain without losing customers drawn to its fresh ingredients.

Niccol now moves to Starbucks as the company’s next chief executive and chairman, bringing a mix of creative marketing and operational acumen that colleagues say sets him apart from C-suite peers. He also has found ways to work with the restaurant industry’s famously outsize personalities—a potential asset at Starbucks, where longtime leader Howard Schultz keeps close tabs on the brand he built.

Starbucks announced Niccol’s hire this week as the world’s largest coffee chain abruptly parted ways with Laxman Narasimhan, who had assumed the CEO role about a year and a half ago. Since then, Starbucks’s challenges have grown deeper and more complex, ranging from baristas inundated with complicated orders to criticism related to the Israel-Hamas war. Some customers say they can face long waits for drinks that seem too expensive.

The company’s sales have fallen, and its stock, too. Shares had declined nearly 20% this year until the news of Niccol’s hire sent the stock surging 25% on Tuesday. It was the biggest single-day percentage increase since Starbucks’s stock made its market debut in 1992.

“The challenges at Starbucks are not going to be new to Brian," said Scott Bergren, a former Yum Brands executive who promoted Niccol to become Pizza Hut’s marketing chief in 2007.

Niccol, who Chipotle said wasn’t available for comment, has been Chipotle’s CEO for more than six years and its chairman since 2020. When he joined, the board wanted a turnaround leader to help fix the brand’s sales and image following food-safety problems that had sickened customers, drawn scrutiny from public health officials and sent the company’s stock tumbling.

After taking over, Niccol further tightened food-safety procedures and ramped up marketing to rectify brand perceptions. When another food-safety incident sickened hundreds of customers early in his term, Chipotle closed the Ohio restaurant tied to the outbreak and retrained its workers nationwide in safe-handling procedures.

Customers came back and Chipotle’s sales grew, rising to $9.9 billion in 2023 from $4.9 billion in Niccol’s first year as CEO, while net income was roughly seven times higher. Colleagues, other executives and analysts credited him with speeding up service and growing online ordering.

Niccol is one of the best-paid CEOs among publicly traded restaurant companies, earning a total compensation of $22.5 million last year, up from $17.2 million in 2022, according to Chipotle company filings.

Starbucks will pay Niccol a $10 million cash award and a $75 million stock grant to replace equity he forfeited by leaving Chipotle, dependent on both performance and tenure, the company said in a Wednesday filing. Niccol’s salary was set at $1.6 million and he is eligible for an annual cash bonus of up to $7.2 million. He will receive an annual equity award valued at $23 million starting next fiscal year.

Bigger stage

Niccol steps onto a much bigger stage at Starbucks, which operates in more than 80 countries, versus six for Chipotle. The coffee giant has more than 39,000 locations, 11 times what Chipotle runs, and Starbucks plans to add thousands more in the coming years. Starbucks employs roughly 460,000 people around the world, and once estimated it had 170,000-plus ways its baristas could customize beverages.

A native of Philadelphia who grew up mowing lawns as a kid, Niccol in 1995 landed a college internship at Procter & Gamble and later got hired there. As an assistant brand manager for Scope mouthwash, he was challenged to help find a way to get consumers to use Scope on the go, and the team experimented with a gum-like product that squirted the mouthwash when chewed.

It freshened breath but left a residue in the mouth, Niccol said on a podcast released earlier this year with one of his previous bosses, former Yum CEO David Novak. Niccol took it as an early lesson. “You can’t just market past what the product experience is," he said.

Rising through Taco Bell’s ranks at Yum in the early 2010s, Niccol said he approached his work at the brand as a turnaround, with room to be more than a low-cost value option.

To get there, Niccol launched the “Live Más" marketing campaign, which the company continues to use, and introduced the Doritos Locos Tacos, which sold hundreds of millions of crispy folded shells in their first year.

Keeping burritos flowing and full

Speed of service has been one of Starbucks’s thorniest challenges, with the chain at times caught between efforts to simplify store operations and offer customers the freedom to design their own drinks. Orders flow into cafes via drive-through windows, mobile apps and the cash register, sometimes leaving baristas scrambling to keep up.

At Chipotle, Niccol is credited with helping to make the most of the chain’s second kitchen production line to speed to-go orders and building more online-order-only drive-throughs. Known as “Chipotlanes," the digital pickup locations deliver some of the highest returns for Chipotle, and the company is focused on building as many as possible.

On investor calls and in board meetings, Niccol has stressed the need to avoid gumming up operations with new products. When Chipotle started selling quesadillas nationwide in 2021, Niccol restricted them to online orders only so they could be made ahead of time, because they tended to take too long when made to order on the spot.

Niccol has had to respond to suspicious customers convinced the chain had begun shorting them on scoops of beans and meat. He initially played down the theory before finding some evidence of a subset of workers that the company said needed retraining on portion sizes.

Niccol also developed a ritual to keep the burrito maker relevant.

In meetings with other senior executives, he peppered them with questions about their past week: What were their children talking about? What were their kids’ friends interested in? In other words, what did Chipotle need to know about pop culture?

“It started out as a little bit of a joke," Niccol said on the podcast with Novak. But it proved helpful. “It gives us some insight into what are the things we can do to keep Chipotle fresh, to keep Chipotle connected."

Victor Stefanescu and Chip Cutter contributed to this article.

Write to Heather Haddon at heather.haddon@wsj.com