The Headache of Cage-Free Eggs

More restaurants and manufacturers are switching to eggs from free-roaming chickens, but the process takes planned time and logistics.

March 04, 2016

MIDWEST, America – Companies from McDonald’s and Wendy’s to General Mills and Albertsons have stated their intention to only use eggs from free-roaming chickens, making cage-free eggs an extremely popular trend, Wired reports. However, that’s not as simple as it sounds, with many of these businesses taking years to accomplish the changeover.

The reason is because raising laying hens has been a big business for years. Asking chicken farmers to change how they keep their birds overnight is often unrealistic or impossible. As Wired put it: “It actually took farmers a really long time to figure out how to put the bird in the cage—and it’s going to take a while to figure out how to get it back out.”

Two years ago, the United States produced close to 100 billion eggs—$10.2 billion business. That mass production relies almost entirely on caged hens, which allow farmers to pay close attention to very minute details about the bird’s life. That system has kept eggs available and inexpensive.

But caged chickens, while efficient, don’t have a very good life, and that’s troubling to many people today. Thus the trend of cage-free eggs, which cost more and require more labor and money on the part of the farmer—hence the wholesale reluctance to switch methods.

“In the industry as a whole, people felt like they were doing the right thing (with conventional cages),” Rick Brown, an analyst who has followed the egg industry for three decades, said. “We got away from cage-free in the 1950s for a whole host of reasons. People felt that the cages were better for the birds.”

Today, egg suppliers are being forced to convert to cage-free methods or to stop selling eggs to many of their former clients. “The chicken itself has to learn how to be in the environment and deal with things that they may not be used to in a caged environment,” said Jonathan Spurway of Rembrandt Foods, a U.S. egg supplier.

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