They are finding they cost too much more and increase carbon emissions making It more difficult for them to meet their environment goals.
The animal activists’ called th eir campaign the “Better Chicken Commitment{ which called for more expensive housing similar to demands the Whole Foods retailer imposed on its suppliers.
It also bans genetics that result in the fastest chicken growth rates.
But as companies began to figure out, this chicken isn’t “better” from an environmental perspective. One restaurant brand reported that their carbon footprint for poultry would double if it transitioned to “better chicken.”
Meanwhile, a big-picture analysis found that transitioning to slower-growing chickens would result in the need for billions more chickens to be produced to meet demand, which in turn would require millions of acres to grow additional feed, billions of gallons of water, and a way to manage billions of pounds of waste.
In the United Kingdom some companies, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken have reverted to conventionally-raised chickens.
But for those who invested in new housing, such as pork producers abandoning gestation crates and egg producers changing from cages to aviaries, the investment, management and operating costs remain.
Meatingplace Magazine said the activists are clucking mad, but the facts are the facts: Less efficient practices have a worse environmental footprint.
More broadly, this basic truth could provide more opportunities to push back against activist campaigns against modern agriculture — whether they come from the animal rights crowd, or others, it wrote.
The New York Times ran an opinion piece in 2024 arguing that modern, large-scale farming practices are the most environmentally practical. “
It said “the inconvenient truth is that factory farms are the best hope for producing the food we will need without obliterating what’s left of our natural treasures and vaporizing their carbon into the atmosphere,
“So we’ll have to make more food per acre instead of using more acres to make food. And that’s what industrial agriculture does well.
Meatingplace Magazine said many companies made pledges to transition to cage-free eggs by 2025, but by our count, about 90 per cent of them ended up not meeting this deadline.”
Price is one reason retailers and restaurants have reconsidered pledges they’ve made to appease animal activists. Lack of consumer sentiment is another. The average consumer doesn’t make purchasing decisions based on the sow housing or chicken genetics of a restaurant’s supplier.
And now concern for the environment is making companies re-evaluate the demands made by radical animal activists.
The biggest barrier has always been that companies, especially public companies, don’t want to deal with the inevitable harassment that comes from saying “no” to animal rights activists. But the news out of the UK shows that, armed with a proper framework and safety in numbers, companies are now willing to do just that, Meatingplace wrote.
So why did the giant restaurant and supermarket chains not do some research into agriculture and farming before caving to sanctimonious bullies?
Certainly farm suppliers should be miffed.
