Crunch time for cage-free
Despite setbacks, battery cages are on the retreat
My colleague Emma Buckland contributed (excellent) research to this piece. All opinions and errors are mine alone.
It’s deadline time. Over the last decade, many of the world’s largest food companies — from McDonald’s to Walmart — pledged to stop sourcing eggs from caged hens in at least their biggest markets. All in, over 2,700 companies globally have now pledged to go cage-free.
Good things take time, and companies insisted they needed a lot of it to transition their egg supply chains — most set 2025 deadlines to do so. Over the years, companies reassured anxious advocates that their transitions were on track. But now, with just seven months left, it turns out that many are not.
Walmart backtracked first, blaming both its customers and suppliers, who “have not kept pace with our aspiration to transition to a full cage-free egg supply chain.” Kroger soon followed suit. Others, like Target, waited until the last minute, when they could blame bird flu and high egg prices for their backtracks.
Then there are those who have just gone quiet. Some, like Subway and Best Western, still insist they’ll be 100% cage-free by year’s end, but haven’t shared updates on their progress in years. Others, like Albertsons and Marriott, are sharing their progress, but have quietly removed their pledges to reach 100% cage-free.
Opportunistic politicians are now getting in on the act. Nevada’s Republican governor recently delayed his state’s impending ban on caged eggs by 120 days. Arizona’s Democratic governor then did one better by delaying her state’s ban by seven years. US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is trying to outdo them all by pushing Congress to wipe out all state bans on the sale of caged eggs entirely.
The European Commission missed its pledge to propose an EU-wide cage phase-out by 2023. And the UK’s Labour government remained non-committal on phasing out cages there in a Parliamentary debate this week.
Some industry voices are now cheering that the move to cage-free is stalled. Is it?
Cage half full or half empty?
Not really. Despite the setbacks, 45% of US hens, 62% of European hens, and 82% of British hens are now cage-free — up from about 13%, 44%, and 50% respectively a decade ago. Fully 150 million fewer American, European, and British hens are now caged than a decade ago, even as egg demand has risen in all three markets.
This is a big deal. Because this progress has compounded over multiple generations of hens, well over 300 million individual birds have now been spared life in a battery cage. And, assuming this progress sticks, it won’t be long before that number is a billion. I think this will be the most animals any animal welfare intervention has ever helped.
In fact, most companies with cage-free pledges — over 1,400 — have already implemented them. They include America’s largest fast food chain (McDonald’s) and coffee chain (Starbucks), and two of its largest retailers (Amazon and Costco). All five of America’s largest packaged food manufacturers — General Mills, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Nestle, and PepsiCo — are on track to be there by year-end too.
European companies are doing even better. Seven of the UK’s top 10 supermarket chains have stopped selling caged eggs entirely, as have almost all major German supermarkets. French and Italian supermarkets, which started from much a lower base, are not far behind (see chart below). As a result, all four countries look on track to phase out cages entirely in the next 5-10 years.
Even the laggards have made progress. Walmart, Kroger, Target, Subway, Best Western, Albertsons, and Marriott all appear to be selling or using at least 25% cage-free cages — well short of where they promised to be, but enough to spare over 30 million hens in their collective supply chains from cages. (Though this may be mainly due to laws stopping them from selling caged eggs in seven US states.)
And then there are the sales of actual cages. Last year, I visited the world’s largest poultry industry trade show, in Atlanta, Georgia, and asked the makers of hen housing systems about their sales. They almost all said they’d stopped selling new cages in North America and Europe — and many had stopped selling them in Latin America too.
Eggstraordinary Eggscuses
Still, the companies’ excuses for breaking their cage-free promises are galling. Corporate PR teams have largely settled on three: weak customer demand, high prices, and inadequate supply. Let’s take each in turn.
Customer demand. Kroger’s excuse is typical: it explains that “the proportion of cage-free eggs purchased by our customers has increased slowly.” But Kroger didn’t pledge to just wait and see if its customers would buy 100% cage-free eggs by 2025. It pledged to stop selling caged eggs, and could easily do so, as Amazon, Costco, Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods all have — and as Kroger has in the seven states that require it do so.
But let’s say that’s too radical. Why not just label the caged eggs? Even as supermarket chains insist that their customers want caged eggs, they refuse to accurately label these eggs as “caged.” Instead, they let producers slap all kinds of deceptive labels on caged eggs (see image below). Customers are not demanding caged eggs; they’re demanding cheap eggs. Which brings us to the price of eggs…
Prices. Target frames its failure to meet its pledge in equity terms, stating “cage-free eggs are significantly more expensive than conventional eggs, which are the most affordable protein option we offer for families.” And it’s true that cage-free eggs are often significantly more expensive than caged eggs at Target. At the time of writing, the cheapest dozen cage-free eggs at a Target in Chicago were $4.69, a full $1.70 more than the cheapest caged eggs, at $2.99.
This is curious: cage-free eggs currently cost US egg producers just 19 cents more per dozen to produce than caged eggs. And in neighboring Michigan, which bans the sale of caged eggs, Target is selling a dozen cage-free eggs for … $2.99. The same holds true for every other supermarket chain I checked: in most states they’re selling cage-free eggs for a premium of $1 (Kroger) to $2.50 (Publix). But in states where they can only sell cage-free eggs, they sell them for the same price as caged eggs elsewhere.
Supermarkets are likely taking a fatter margin on cage-free eggs because they know many consumers will pay it. So high prices are actually a sign of customer demand. But in states without caged eggs, supermarkets price cage-free eggs for all consumers — and use organic or pasture-raised eggs as their high margin product. If they did so everywhere, they’d only be left with one excuse: the “supply crisis.”
Supply. US Foods blames “market forces outside our control,” especially the bird flu crisis, for its failure to go cage-free. Chick-fil-A blames the bird flu and mysterious “numerous industry dynamics.” But neither company had made much progress before bird flu hit. And the availability of caged eggs has fallen more than that of cage-free eggs since bird flu hit.
Nor are egg producers lacking the funds to invest in cage-free expansion — they’re making record profits on high egg prices. (Record-enough to have prompted a price-fixing investigation.) In a recent survey of major US egg producers, 49% expected no cage-free egg shortages this year or next and 48% expected only brief shortages.
Outside the US and Europe, the cage-free supply chain is less developed. But it’s rapidly growing: top egg producers in China, Brazil, and Malaysia are all investing in large new cage-free farms. And in countries where supply isn’t yet consistent, cage-free impact incentives allow companies to offset their use of caged eggs at some stores by buying extra cage-free eggs elsewhere.
Cracking down on broken promises
Advocates now have three main priorities. The first is to get the largest laggard US and European companies to follow through on their pledges — whether this year or in the coming years. US advocates are focusing first on Ahold-Delhaize, the sixth largest supermarket group, which in December delayed its cage-free deadline by a cool seven years, and Subway, which hasn’t shared its cage-free progress in years.
The second priority is to expand cage-free progress globally. The immediate focus is on multinationals with global cage-free pledges. Some, like hotel giants Accor and Hilton, are making good progress. Others, like Best Western and Marriott, are not — and are the subject of new campaigns.
The third priority is to enshrine cage-free progress in law. In the US, the focus is on protecting state bans on the sale of caged eggs from repeal attempts at the state and federal levels. In Europe, the focus is on getting the European Commission to propose a long-overdue ban on cages across the EU. This week the Commission announced a call for evidence on a potential cage ban — EU citizens can weigh in here by 16 July.
An end to a century-long experiment in cruelty?
Battery cages are the product of perhaps the most unfortunate randomized control trial in history. In 1931, a Pennsylvania metalworker named Milton Arndt put 220 birds outside and 220 indoors in “batteries” of cages. Regrettably for chickenkind, the caged birds, unable to waste calories on exercise, both ate less feed and laid more eggs than the outdoor birds. Long before “factory farm” became a slur, Arndt triumphantly proclaimed that he had invented “the chicken factory.”
In the century since, these cages have confined over 100 billion animals to lives of abject misery — unable to so much as flap their wings in their overcrowded microwave-oven-sized prison cells. It’s trendy in certain circles to question whether cage-free is any better. But, according to the most comprehensive analysis to date, it’s not even close.
There’s still much work to do. Hundreds of companies are trying to break their cage-free pledges. Thousands more haven’t yet committed to go cage-free. And, as a result, billions of hens are still suffering. We can’t let up in our efforts to help them.
But take a moment to reflect how far we’ve come. A mere 13 years ago, the Humane Society of the US, despairing of ever getting the US egg industry to go cage-free, backed a compromise to legislate an industry transition to larger “enriched cages.” When the pork industry — triggered by the specter of any farm animal welfare legislation — sank the compromise, it looked like battery cages were here for good.
Then advocates got to work. With fewer than a thousand full-time advocates globally, the movement waged campaigns that have now spared over 300 million hens from cages. That’s over 300,000 hens per advocate. Wayne Hsiung, who initially opposed cage-free campaigns, recently called them “in terms of influence on the industry … likely the most successful campaign in animal rights history.” I’m inspired by that success — much of it achieved by readers of this newsletter — and I hope you are too.
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy my recent appearance on Liv Boeree’s Win-Win podcast:
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Lewis, this piece nails the big picture. It lays out both the momentum and the messy challenges still ahead by making sense of a pivotal moment for animal welfare. It clearly triangulates where we stand on the road to change. Thank you.
Thank you for this fascinating overview. Your arguments and support cases for negating justifications by corporate bigwigs for not fulfilling commitments are perfect and we can use them in our upcoming communications. A great piece.