Originally appeared in meatingplace
What happens when animal rights corporate campaigns run afoul of corporate sustainability initiatives? In a case of a stoppable force meeting a comparatively immovable object, the sustainability initiative wins.
Following egg and pork campaigns, animal rights activists launched a pressure campaign over the kind of poultry that restaurants, supermarkets, and foodservice companies purchase.
Called the “Better Chicken Commitment,” the campaign demands these companies pledge to serve chicken from farms that use alternative production systems similar to a Whole Foods supplier. This includes a prohibition on the use of modern breeds of broilers, instead requiring the use of slower-growing chickens.
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.
And so in the UK, a number of major brands including KFC, Popeyes, and Nando’s recently dropped out of the activists’ Commitment. Instead, these food companies formed their own initiative called the Sustainable Chicken Forum and will continue to buy conventional poultry.
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.
The New York Times ran an op-ed in 2024 arguing that modern, large-scale farming practices are the most environmentally practical. “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,” the author, an environmental writer, described. “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.”
While I object to the use of loaded phrases like “factory farms” and “industrial agriculture,” the author makes a valid point.
Companies that have made pledges to appease animal rights activists who are harassing them are open to changing them. Many companies made pledges to transition to cage-free eggs by 2025, but by our count, about 90% 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.
Jack Hubbard is the executive director at the Center for the Environment and Welfare