Posted September 11, 2015
McDonald’s Corp. said it will transition to cage-free eggs for almost 16,000 restaurants in the United States and Canada over the next 10 years, according to a Meat & Poultry article available here. USA Today also published an article available here, NPR hereand Fortune here.
“Our customers are increasingly interested in knowing more about their food and where it comes from,” said Mike Andres, president of McDonald’s USA. “Our decision to source only cage-free eggs reinforces the focus we place on food quality and our menu to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations.”
Since 2011, McDonald’s USA has been buying more than 13 million cage-free eggs annually. The much-anticipated switch is happening as North American egg suppliers are starting to recover after the worst bird flu outbreak in U.S. history, according to Fortune.
The move also comes as McDonald’s, the world’s biggest restaurant chain, is preparing to serve breakfast all day at U.S. outlets in October. McDonald’s buys about 2 billion eggs annually for its U.S. restaurants and 120 million for Canada to serve breakfast items such as Egg McMuffin and Egg White Delight.
An increasing number of large egg buyers are demanding cage-free eggs, including General Mills and Nestle, according to NPR.
Chad Gregory, president of the United Egg Producers, said that farmers who have made the switch are making a pleasant discovery. “They’re finding out that those cage-free systems aren’t as scary as they once feared,” he says.
New cage-free structures allow manure to be removed more easily than in old-style houses, for one thing.
In April, McDonald’s announced that by 2017 it would get chicken raised without antibiotics “important to human medicine,” according to USA Today.
For more information on animal welfare, please visit the National Agricultural Law Center’s website here.
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