Good news for hens as movement away from cages might go global

DOZENS of American restaurant chains, supermarket chains and dining service companies have committed in the last two years to ending their use or sales of eggs laid by caged hens. On Monday, one of the world’s largest food service suppliers, Paris-based Sodexo, upped the ante, saying it would switch to cage-free eggs in all its global operations by 2025.

The announcement by a major international company is a sign that the rapid shift in the United States to cage-free eggs, led by consumers but long championed by animal rights activists, is going more global. It came after talks with animal rights groups, as well as an international animal rights coalition recently formed by The Humane League, a small American farm animal rights organization that has driven several US companies’ pledges to swear off eggs from caged hens.

Sodexo had already pledged last year to use only cage-free eggs and egg products in its US operations by 2020. The new decision will affect both liquid eggs and the 250 million shell eggs the company purchases annually for use at 32,000 schools, hospitals, corporations and other sites it services in 80 countries.

‘Enriched cages’

It’s unclear how many of those eggs already come from uncaged hens; battery cages – small wire enclosures whose floors are smaller than a piece of letter-sized paper – are banned in the European Union, and Sodexo said in a statement that it already uses only cagefree eggs in Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. But about half of egg-laying hens in the EU are housed in larger “enriched cages,” and David Coman-Hidy, The Humane League’s executive director, said Sodexo had agreed to stop purchasing eggs from farms using those systems.

In a statement, Sodexo’s senior vice president of supply management, Michel Franceschi, said the company plans to “support and contribute to the progressive transformation of the whole industry.”

‘Contentious campaign’

He said it would would “take advice” from the Humane Society, Compassion in World Farming and the Humane League “to accompany the conversion and the evolution of the local industry so that by 2025, we will be able to source cage-free eggs from local producers in each country where we operate.”

In February 2015, Sodexo became one of the first large companies to commit to a totally cage-free egg future, expanding a previous policy of using only cage-free shelled eggs to include liquid eggs as well by 2020. That came after what Coman-Hidy described as a “contentious” campaign against the company by his and other animal rights groups, and it was followed by a string of other similar corporate pledges. Aaron Ross, the Humane League’s campaigns director, said this time, Sodexo seemed “excited to be a leader” on the issue globally.

“Our hope is that just like we went industry by industry in the US, we can take the same approach and just shift the global practice away from cages,” Coman-Hidy said in an interview, referring to the Open Wing Alliance, a coalition he said his organisation formed with 12 animal rights groups from countries including France, Australia and South Korea, to focus on taking the cage-free momentum international.