KFC, Nando’s, Wagamama, and Burger King drop pledge to improve the welfare of chickens

Nothing unites the chicken industry like a race to the bottom

In what I am sure will come as little to no surprise for many of you reading, major food companies in the UK, including KFC, Nando’s, Wagamama, and Burger King, have dropped their pledge to improve the welfare of chickens.

The pledge in question is the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), a six-point welfare initiative that corporations can voluntarily sign up to implement. Arguably, the most notable parts of the pledge are the creation of a maximum stocking density of 30kg/m² or less, compared to the current UK standard of 39kg/m², and the transition to slower-growing breeds of broiler chickens. Obviously these changes would not make chicken farming ethical, nor would they mean the farming wouldn’t still be intensive, but the BCC pledge would lead to the birds having almost 25% more space while growing around 25% slower than the broiler chickens conventionally used.

For businesses, these changes represent something important. Increased costs. If you are producing fewer chickens and it is taking you longer to do so, clearly that has an impact financially. The hope is that businesses place value on the increased welfare and accept the increased costs, especially as those costs are often going to be incurred by the consumer, meaning the companies maintain similar profit margins.

Then again, trusting corporations to make decisions based on ethics and values is like trusting an arsonist with a box of matches.

One of the major issues that frustrates me with these pledges is that they can provide businesses easy PR wins with no accountability. A company like KFC can get free press talking about their commitment to welfare, and then when they don’t follow through it doesn’t matter at all. In fact, give it five years, they can make the commitment again and have everyone singing their praises once more.

It should also be noted that the decision for these companies to drop their pledge was made at the same time. This was a concerted effort involving companies and businesses that are normally competitors with one another. This wasn’t something that came out of nowhere, which is why the announcement was broken in collaboration with an industry trade group called UKHospitality.

So, how is the industry framing this U-turn?

Well, this is where it gets even worse, because alongside dropping the BCC pledge, these same companies have banded together to create something called the Sustainable Chicken Forum. That’s right, they’re using sustainability as the reason why they can’t improve the welfare of chickens.

In the words of UKHospitality:

‘Hospitality businesses have clear responsibilities to reduce their water and carbon footprint and deliver against net zero commitments. Increasing the proportion of slower-growing breeds within supply chains would counter this.’

Now, remind me, which diet is the best when it comes to reducing our water and carbon footprint?

It’s also strange how they really care about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and water usage when it also just so happens to boost their profit margins, but I guess that must just be some crazy coincidence.

It’s also notable how they fail to mention that in the UK, chicken farming is the number one user of soya beans imported from South America. So they can’t give chickens a fraction more space because of sustainability, but deforestation in South America is of no concern.

Sorry, I stand corrected, KFC and Nando’s, among others, have signed up to the industry-led UK Soy Manifesto, so they’ve actually pledged that their aim is to source 100% of the soya they use from sustainable sources. Well, if they’ve signed a pledge, I guess that means they’re definitely going to do it.

UKHospitality would counter the argument about South American soya by saying that slower-growing breeds would need more feed, making the problem worse, except that argument only applies if South American soya was the only feed option available and the same number of chickens needed to be farmed. And here’s where we hit the real problem.

There is a direct correlation between welfare and sustainability, with beef farming usually being higher welfare while at the same time being the worst for the planet, and chicken farming usually being the most sustainable but the worst for welfare. The simple truth is that there is no way to produce the same quantity of meat that we currently do while also improving welfare and sustainability at the same time.

Animals who live longer use more resources, and if you want to produce the same number of animals but give those animals more space, you need to create more land for farming. This is another argument UKHospitality makes:

‘Planning applications for the larger farms required to accommodate the same volume of birds at lower densities, or slower-growing breeds, are frequently being rejected.’

The reason they’re being rejected is because the answer is not to build larger farms, it’s to farm fewer chickens (or no chickens). But the chicken industry doesn’t want to farm fewer chickens, they don’t even want to farm the same number of chickens, they want to farm more chickens. More chickens, more money.

There is only one way to make our food more ethical and more sustainable. Stop eating animal products.

UKHospitality also states that ‘Avian flu outbreaks across the world, particularly in the UK and Europe, have led to millions of birds being culled’. Interestingly, they conveniently fail to mention that it is the intensive farming of chickens which is the number one cause of bird flu outbreaks. Avian flu outbreaks are not a reason for intensive chicken farming, they’re another reason why there shouldn’t be any at all.

But the chicken industry doesn’t view avian flu from the perspective of it having the ability to cause the next pandemic, one which could be significantly worse than the one we just had, they view it from the perspective of impacting their business. Although, it should be noted that the UK government compensates farmers for healthy chickens that are culled to contain outbreaks of avian flu. So not only do we the taxpayers have to cover the costs associated with avian flu, the industry uses avian flu as a justification to keep farming chickens intensively, even though it is this system of farming that causes the most outbreaks of avian flu.

If the chicken industry chooses to farm animals in this way, surely the absolute basic minimum is that they should have to cover the costs incurred with the system of farming they choose?

Beyond all of the sustainability talk and PR nonsense, the real reason they’re dropping the pledge is because chicken consumption in the UK is increasing and they want to capitalise off of it. At the end of the day, corporations exist for shareholders, and it is for shareholders that they make decisions. This is why we need strong legal governance, because relying on corporations to make decisions based on ethics is a fool’s errand.

The pig industry in the UK didn’t voluntarily decide to stop using gestation crates, they were forced to do so because the law was changed. And likewise, KFC, Nando’s, and the chicken industry in general, isn’t going to improve their welfare standards because they start getting cold feet about all of their profits coming from abject and horrific suffering.

This is why we need a system of robust checks and balances, meaning corporations are properly regulated and held accountable. This is why we also need to get rid of the corporate lobbyists who infiltrate our governments, mercenaries for hire who don’t care one iota about animals, the planet or humans that don’t have vested interests in the industry or company they represent.

This situation perfectly encapsulates how corporations and industries move with the times, reacting to the current social and political zeitgeist as a means of positive PR, not because their performative pledges or ‘commitments’ come from sincere intentions.

If there’s one positive take home from this it’s that it shows how animal welfare changes are important when it comes to financially impacting the animal farming sector. If the UK government brought in welfare changes that aligned with the BCC initiative, and local councils continued to refuse planning applications for larger farms, this would force the chicken industry into a situation where they would have to farm fewer chickens.

From an animal welfare campaign perspective, this looks like a roadmap for achievable change that would also be hugely significant.