The cost of free range\
The battle between ethics and economics is being fought out in supermarkets’ egg aisles across the country, writes Ewan Sargent.
The beanie-wearing man pulls a carton of caged eggs from the Pak ’n Save egg shelves, hesitates, then slides it back.
"I’m having a bit of a guilty conscience,’’ he says. ‘‘I feel I should do the right thing, you know, those battery hens, but ...’’
It’s the price, isn’t it? ‘‘Well, yeah, it’s hard but you need everyone on board to make a change,’’ he says, staring at the shelves. But when he thinks I’m not looking, he plucks out the caged eggs and walks off.
Caged-egg producers say Kiwis should have this choice. Animal rights campaigners say the issue is bigger than money.
At any supermarket egg section you’ll see this battle of ethical versus economical in wildly different prices and packaging.
At this Pak ’n Save, a dozen Farmer Brown free-range mixedgrade eggs work out at 58 cents each. Colony-cage eggs are 30c each, while standard caged eggs cost just 25c each.
Cage-free eggs take up at least half the space at most supermarkets and in some it’s much more more even, although twothirds of supermarket egg sales are caged eggs.
That’s because caged eggs are doomed.
The egg world is in turmoil at the moment as caged-egg producers struggle with the idea that, even though they can give us cheaper eggs, we either don’t want them, or the biggest sellers, supermarkets, don’t want to sell them.
All major supermarket chains – Foodstuffs (Pak ’n Save, New World, Four Square) and Progressive (Countdown, Fresh Choice, Super Value) – have set dates after which they won’t sell eggs from caged hens.
For Progressive it is North Island 2024 and South Island 2025; for Foodstuffs it is 2027.
You can imagine a huge collective ‘‘what the . . .’’ from caged-egg farmers when supermarkets made the call. They sell about 55 per cent of the about 1.1 billion eggs laid each year, so what they do matters a lot.
Farmers would have thought they were on the right track when, in 2012, the rules were changed to make egg farming more hen friendly.
The then government said old-style battery-hen cages had to go and accepted colony cages as a replacement. This gave hens more room – up a couple of hundred centimetres per hen to 750 square centimetres – plus some perching, nesting and scratching areas.
It was a completely new system and expensive to move to, and egg farmers have their own transition period, with old cages swapped for new colony cages by 2022.
Egg Producers Federation executive director Michael Brooks says moving to colony cages is partly about good animal welfare and partly about being able to keep supplying affordable eggs.
He says colony cages solve welfare worries and quotes the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, which says they ‘‘provide equivalent or superior overall welfare’’ compared with barn and free range.
‘‘The decision by supermarkets five years later, in 2017, to change their purchasing behaviour was done with limited notice and knowing many longstanding suppliers had spent millions of dollars converting to colonies,’’ Brooks says.
Changing to barn and freerange businesses is complex and expensive. Free-range farms mean new sites, they need more land, and they have more labour
costs compared with cage farms.
‘‘As a result, we have seen farmers who had advanced quite some distance down the colony route having to completely rethink their options,’’ Brooks says.
Egg farmers believe the continuing popularity of cheap eggs shows public opinion isn’t as set against cages as is often claimed.
‘‘We would argue that the decision of the supermarkets to take away consumer choice is not based on credible welfare science or a dramatic drop in public purchasing of cage or colony eggs,’’ Brooks says.
Supermarkets say they are going cage-free because it’s what shoppers want.
Antoinette Laird, of Foodstuffs, says their in-house Pams brand has been cage-free for 10 years. She says cage-free egg sales in all supermarkets have climbed from 33.3 per cent to 36.7 per cent over the last three years. A decade ago it was 20 per cent cage-free.
While the increase is slow, ‘‘it is most definitely on the rise’’.
Countdown’s Nikhil Sawant says animal welfare increasingly matters to customers, which is why free-range eggs and chickens and free-farmed pork are on the rise.
‘‘We’re seeing our shoppers wanting to better understand where their food was farmed and how animals are cared for.’’
Countdown would like to go cage-free earlier but it has to wait for free-range egg farmers to crank up production.
Safe’s (Save Animals From Exploitation) Hans Kriek claims a change of tactics helped win the supermarket move. ‘‘They [big caged-egg producers] lobbied very, very hard when the Government was finally looking at getting rid of standard battery cages to have that in favour of colony cages because the main reason was it was a lot easier for them to convert their existing shed to a colony shed.’’
Safe decided to go to the supermarkets instead of relying on lobbying the Government. It asked the supermarkets to ask customers what they thought.
‘‘The supermarkets did that. They found that people found battery cages unacceptable and it was time to move. And the same for colony cages, which is just another battery cage.’’
Kriek says egg farmers made a big mistake pushing for colony cages. ‘‘We told them that right from day one. Don’t go to a colony-cage system because it’s just another cage and consumers are not going to like it. And a future government is going to ban it anyway. They were saying ‘no, no, no, it’s an acceptable system’, but unfortunately quite a few people invested money in it and now their market is disappearing.’’
It seems the urge to back free range is strongest when people are confronted by what eggs they are buying.
In 2016, McDonald’s also bypassed the colony-cage option, moving to free-range eggs throughout the country. New free-range egg farms have been built to fill all those Egg McMuffins.
A McDonald’s spokesman says it made the move because customers supported it and so did franchisee holders and egg suppliers.
Wholesaler and distributor Capital Eggs is a big supplier to the Wellington hospitality industry.
General manager Laurie Watkins says the move to free range has been a dramatic shift.
His business is now about 50:50 free-range eggs to caged eggs, with free range perhaps slightly ahead.
But there’s also a big split depending on where the eggs are going.
Restaurants and cafes want free range so they can tell customers that’s what they use, ‘‘but your ordinary bakeries, they just want to have caged eggs. They just want eggs they can bake with. So there’s still a significant demand for that.’’
This sounds a bit like what is out of sight is out of mind, and even Kriek admits that.
‘‘Look at any survey and you will fnd 8 out of 10 people say [caged eggs] should be banned. Yet many of those people when they go shopping just don’t think, and buy the cheapest egg.’’
The higher cost is just the cost of not having a cruel system and eventually it won’t matter, he says.
‘‘There are supermarkets around the country that haven’t been selling caged eggs for years because the managers themselves have said they don’t want to contribute to cruelty, and interestingly enough it hasn’t impacted on sales.
‘‘People buy the cheapest egg and that happens to be a barn egg. For some people, if the dirtcheap eggs aren’t available they simply buy the next dirt-cheap egg, whatever that might be.’
Safe still wants an official ban on colony cages even though Kriek’s says he’s heard from industry people that nobody dares invest in colony cages given half the market has disappeared. ‘‘You would be pretty dumb to invest in colony cages now.’’
In the egg aisle of a Countdown supermarket, a shopper says she is back here after living in South Australia where caged eggs were banned years ago.
‘‘New Zealand is lagging way behind,’’ she says.
So she buys free-range eggs, right? Um, she says, looking away. She buys the cheap ones in New Zealand.