Yeah both statements are true. The US Better Chicken Commitment lacked a list of approved breeds for many years due to delays at the Global Animal Partnership, which was in turned delayed by a study on breed welfare outcomes at the University of Guelph. My understanding is that a lot of those delays were due to attempts by the Guelph researchers to address concerns from the breeding companies about how to ensure the fairness of the study’s methodology. Of course the breeding companies dismissed the study’s results—finding welfare problems wit their fastest growing breeds—anyway.
My understanding is that most US companies with BCC pledges are yet to make any progress on adopting higher welfare breeds in their supply chains. I suspect that’s mostly because it’s the most expensive change in the BCC, since higher welfare breeds grow slower and have a worse feed conversion ratio. But it doesn’t help that most major US chicken producers have refused to even meet their corporate customers’ requests to raise higher welfare breeds.
As usual, things are going better in Europe. The Danish and Dutch retail sectors now sell almost entirely chicken from higher-welfare breeds, while I think French retailers are making solid progress. Still, there’s a lot more work to do!
From ChickenWatch’s Commitment Tracker, it seems like there’s a decrease in the number of BCC and in total commitments
Year
Better Chicken commitment
Total commitments
2023
11
149
2022
19
253
2021
35
329
2020
60
364
2019
53
494
2018
26
480
2017
77
389
(I simply counted descriptions that included “Better Chicken” as a substring, and haven’t double-checked for errors)
[It doesn’t necessarily mean that things are getting worse. ChickenWatch could be missing more stuff, maybe larger commitments are bundled together, commitments could generally be getting larger in their ask or the target corporate, etc.]
Yeah both statements are true. The US Better Chicken Commitment lacked a list of approved breeds for many years due to delays at the Global Animal Partnership, which was in turned delayed by a study on breed welfare outcomes at the University of Guelph. My understanding is that a lot of those delays were due to attempts by the Guelph researchers to address concerns from the breeding companies about how to ensure the fairness of the study’s methodology. Of course the breeding companies dismissed the study’s results—finding welfare problems wit their fastest growing breeds—anyway.
My understanding is that most US companies with BCC pledges are yet to make any progress on adopting higher welfare breeds in their supply chains. I suspect that’s mostly because it’s the most expensive change in the BCC, since higher welfare breeds grow slower and have a worse feed conversion ratio. But it doesn’t help that most major US chicken producers have refused to even meet their corporate customers’ requests to raise higher welfare breeds.
As usual, things are going better in Europe. The Danish and Dutch retail sectors now sell almost entirely chicken from higher-welfare breeds, while I think French retailers are making solid progress. Still, there’s a lot more work to do!
From ChickenWatch’s Commitment Tracker, it seems like there’s a decrease in the number of BCC and in total commitments
(I simply counted descriptions that included “Better Chicken” as a substring, and haven’t double-checked for errors)
[It doesn’t necessarily mean that things are getting worse. ChickenWatch could be missing more stuff, maybe larger commitments are bundled together, commitments could generally be getting larger in their ask or the target corporate, etc.]