I thought that cage-free campaigning was about getting commitments, though I had heard that it was also important to make sure companies stuck to them. What I didn't realize was:
- Basically all big groceries in the U.S. committed in 2016 to selling only cage-free eggs by 2025.
- Follow through in groceries has been quite varied, with a couple that are basically 100% cage-free and some that do not to report progress.
- The ones that do not report are not who I would've suspected!
- Most big fast food chains committed in late 2015 or early 2016 to using only cage-free eggs by around 2025.
- Fast food is a mixed bag, too.
Grocery commitments
Here are the grocers I chose to focus on. I tried to select the most numerous stores. Other numerous retailers have made commitments, like CVS and Dollar General, but I would guess that it's uncommon for people to consistently buy groceries there.
Exceptions from my list of grocers:
- Whole Foods sold only cage-free eggs by 2004 or 2005
- Costco, as far as I know, never made a firm commitment to cage-free but announced its interest in selling more cage-free eggs in 2007
- Save a Lot was sold after its former parent company made a commitment and doesn't seem to have a commitment now
- Ahold Delhaize is a merger of Ahold and Delhaize, which made commitments in 2016 to be cage-free by 2022 and 2025, respectively
- Publix made a commitment in 2016 to be 100% cage-free by 2026
Here are my sources that relate to the grocery commitments.
What they sell now
Compassion in World Farming receives reports from companies about their progress and publishes these numbers in their EggTrack publications. This data is from EggTrack 2024: USA & Canada (under "Company Reporting" then "Company Progress").
I was surprised to see that Trader Joe's and Aldi are not reporting! I think of Trader Joe's as a crunchy specialty grocery, similar to Whole Foods. Aldi is really cheap, and is known for its quarter-locked carts, small stores, speedy checkout, and lack of grocery bags.
Fast food commitments
I tried to select large fast food chains that seemed to serve a decent amount of egg dishes.
Here are my sources that relate to fast food commitments.
What they use now
This data is from EggTrack 2024: USA & Canada (under "Company Reporting" then "Company Progress").
Cage-free hens over time
There is a previous dataset described here and available here that was compiled by Samara Mendez. I added some more recent data. Here's the dataset I used to make this graph, and I included a tab that describes where I found the raw data.
Closing thoughts
Maybe I'm especially naive, but I was under the impression that animal advocacy in the US was still getting commitments for cage-free eggs. Not only is that not the case, but most big commitments were accomplished in quick succession in 2015 and 2016. Now, we're in the year 2025, when many of these commitments were supposed to be fulfilled by. I can imagine various ways that people may have predicted these campaigns would go: an edgelord saying that a company motivated by profit would never change even if they made a commitment or a hopeful onlooker thinking that the US would be cage-free by 2025. Instead, things are complicated.
Interestingly, companies who have followed through on their commitments don't seem to be jumping at the opportunity to publicize their slight moral superiority. Why did they put in effort if not to get customers to see them more positively? I would guess that follow through is much more about avoiding negative publicity than gaining positive reputation. Plus, bragging can result in bad press from animal groups; Chipotle's "Food with Integrity" marketing campaign was met with pushback from DxE. Gloating or not, it's nice to see that some of these commitments have panned out and others might continue to.
Related:
- This fabulous article by Christine Ro
- This fabulous blog post from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter
- Mentions that these commitments were accomplished by fewer than 50 full-time advocates
- Chicken Watch Progress Tracker
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Thanks Elijah! Great summary. To your question "Why did they put in effort if not to get customers to see them more positively? I would guess that follow through is much more about avoiding negative publicity than gaining positive reputation." This is basically right. Some companies have been more proactive, even fulfilling their pledges early. Some drag their feet and it takes public pressure for them to move. Groups like The Humane League (which I work for, as a disclaimer) have been running the same types of campaigns used to get the original commitments to ensure that companies actually implement those pledges. These have been successful, but avian flu in the US is a major complicating factor.
As for gaining new commitments, this is now focused outside the US, so maybe that's where your impression came from? For more context, Asia, where the majority of hens live, is focused on getting new commitments. Latin America is a mix of securing new commitments and working on accountability. Parts of Europe are widely cage-free with other parts still advancing this. Africa is securing new commitments, as well as convincing company to stay cage-free as a lot of farming is less industrialized, but companies elsewhere want to export their cages there.
This is very helpful and interesting, thank you for the information! Would most/all of the follow-up campaigns that THL have done be findable online? For instance, when I search stores like "Trader Joe's cage free" I don't find much besides things from 2016, and I assumed that meant that there weren't follow-up campaigns. Is that impression probably right?
I'm glad it was helpful! No, the follow-up would not necessarily be online, unfortunately. It's something we track internally for our own strategic purposes and impact assessment. But a lot of progress is made through behind-the-scenes negotiations—we only launch public campaigns if companies don't make progress during the negotiation phase. And if there is a public campaign, sometimes part of the final negotiation is that we agree to take all our public materials down in exchange for the company publicly reporting its progress.
Trader Joe's is a bit of a weird example—it seems like they are making progress (they have lots of in-store signage, for example) but they haven't publicly reported their cage-free progress. But since we suspect they're already making progress, they wouldn't be a particularly meaningful campaign target. So your suspicion about Trader Joe's is right, there haven't been follow-up campaigns, but you couldn't generalize that to other companies.
Caroline highlighted the work of the Open Wing Alliance well (we both work for The Humane League). In Asia for example, a maximum of 2-3% of eggs are likely to be cage-free, so we are using (and contextualising) the tactics that have worked in the US and Europe in Asia and other places - around 60% of the world's caged hens are in Asia so getting new commitments and building momentum there is a key focus for us. We made some good progress last year with Kewpie, a flagship Asian brand.
Your question on why companies don't highlight their slight moral superiority is interesting. Public reports comparing fulfilled commitments Vs laggards work well, so I do think the avoiding negative publicity pull is strong. I used to work with supermarkets in the UK and the high-end, prestigious one once told me that highlighting that they e.g. don't allow beak trimming in their laying hens would potentially raise questions and anger in consumers - "you USED to trim the ends of hens' beaks off!?". It was why it was hard to get them to move on issues like not culling male chicks, as it wasn't something they particularly wanted to highlight ever doing.
Thanks for the interesting post on this topic!
I never thought about the "we used to do bad things" part! Thank you for this comment!
Great follow up and love the clear, concise writing! That graph of cage free percent eggs is incredible, from 5% in 2015 to 40% - this must be one of the biggest 10 year changes in farming practises on record? What an incredible achievement. Going to share it with a bunch of people.
Maybe a weird question but what percent of that do you think EA funding/work might be responsible for? More like 1%? 10%? 20%?
Thinking about it for 5 minutes from a global perspective,[1] EA funding would be >85% responsible. It's hard to say what "work" means here, but most of the strategy was created by The Humane League,[2] not effective altruism.
But counterfactuals here are hard, people who pushed for this could maybe find new donors, but back then animal advocacy wasn't too excited about cage-free work. So it could take some effort to find funding and most of the current funding would definitely not be found. A good way to think about it is that if Open Philanthropy disappeared now I think there would be no one to step in and fill the gap. And this despite it being 2025 and despite how tractable we now know this work is.
In my very personal take, EA was crucial for modern animal advocacy to achieve what it achieved. I wrote more about it here - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GCaRhu84NuCdBiRz8/ea-s-success-no-one-cares-about
Note that I may be not answering your question, because I think you are asking specifically about USA.
Although, to be fair, in early 2000s similar approach was applied in policymaking in Austria by Martin Balluch.
I agree in the large change in a short amount of time. Small thing, my colleagues at THL recently wrote a blog on an update on USDA numbers which slightly changed the data.
Edit (forgot to add the link)
And I agree with Jakub's take.
Thank you so much!
I don't know! But from putting some things together, to me it doesn't seem clearly related to EA funding?
It seems to me that the first cage-free funding from OP was a million dollars to THL in Feb. 2016. So, there were many fast food commitments before that. Many grocery commitments happened that month and in the next couple months:
February - Target, Trader Joe's, Ahold
March - Safeway, Kroger, Delhaize, Save a lot, Aldi
April - Walmart
June - Grocery Outlet
July - Publix
Someone else would have to say if those were due to changes from the new funding..?
As for quick changes in farming, I think of factory farming as developing pretty fast, but I don't know much about the history! I feel like there's gotta be some other practice that went from 0 to > 50% in less than a decade somewhere at some point :P Thanks again!
In writing this, I was reminded of the possibility of a pretty different corporate ask: pressuring large food companies to invest in animal welfare research or alternatives to animal-derived foods. I'm curious if there's been any recent thinking or doing related to this idea. Procter & Gamble is an example of this outside of the food industry, pressured in part by Henry Spira. In Peter Singer's biography of Henry Spira, Singer catalogues P&G's subsequent efforts to progress non-animal safety testing, which were quite extensive and successful. I don't really understand why P&G kept that going and invested so much into it. Inertia? Pride? Predicted efficiency gains? I don't know, but it seems like it could be good to have in food.
Working with many food companies on their commitment to transition to a cage-free egg supply. I have seen the following happen, staff gain internal buy-in, publicly state it on their website, in some cases the first time the company has a tangible stated animal welfare position.
I've rarely encountered people at a company who don't care about animal welfare, I think the challenge for them is understanding how they can operationalise it. I think the cage-free work has helped many companies, and staff within them, to move forward and builds inertia.
An example I like of this is Carrefour's work on cage-free for chickens and then moving forward to create cage-free systems for quail.
I'm curious where the non-cage free eggs are going. From my naive position, it seems like the grocery stores and restaurant chains listed here should cover a majority of egg use, and are well above 40% cage-free in aggregate. Do non-chain restaurants explain the difference? Hotels? Food manufacturers? Schools and other public places with cafeterias?
I understand that in total corporate commitments cover about 70-80% of the US egg market.
The remainder 20-30% is more or less what you identify, non-chain restaurants and non-chain companies in other industries, where the time to do corporate work is probably not worth it and would be expected to shift following law making.
Many schools and cafeterias use third party catering companies like Sodexo, Compass, Aramark etc, that have cage-free commitments and are making solid progress on their commitments.
If you're calculating the 40% aggregate by assuming that all the companies have equal market share, that can skew what is happening. The largest in each sector normally have the largest piece. And sector by sector by market share it is grocery stores, restaurant chains/caterers, manufacturing and then hotels.
Interesting point! I was kind of thinking along the lines of ASuchy, like, I would guess that a big portion of people shop at Walmart? I like your thinking!
Regarding why companies don't publicize following through on their commitments, this study suggests that most consumers don't care much about these commitments. So companies may not see much incentive in doing so.
Wait now - I thought cage-free chickens suffered as much or more than caged? I heard the claim a long time ago but never looked in to it closely.
Welfare Footpring Institute, gives a nice overview of the pain reduced moving from cage to cage-free environments here.