Perdue raises the ante in antibiotic-free poultry
THE floors are spotless in Hatchery 3 on the sprawling Perdue compound in Salisbury, Maryland. Doors have been rehung to open out, and temperature control and ventilation systems have been upgraded, all to minimise the potential for airborne contamination.
The 1.5-million eggs that arrive here each week to begin the process of becoming the company’s chicken supply are also clean, with none of the traces of faeces or feathers that were common in the past.
They will move into chambers that are disinfected daily with hydrogen peroxide during the 21-day incubation-and-hatching cycle, a more rigorous programme. No human hand will touch the eggs during those three weeks.
It took Perdue roughly a decade to perfect the raising of chickens without antibiotics of any kind, and now it has reached a tipping point: more than half of the chicken it sells can be labelled “no antibiotics ever”, a first for a major poultry company.
American competitors such as Tyson and Foster Farms are moving to eliminate the use of antibiotics important to humans from their chicken operations as their customers, including McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A, demand it.
THEY continue, however, to use ionophores, antibiotics not used in human medicine — a point Perdue is trying to hammer home in new ads featuring Jim Perdue, the CEO and the grandson of Perdue’s founder.
“Some of my competitors plan to reduce their use of antibiotics over the next few years — but what are you having for dinner tonight?” Perdue asks in one ad highlighting the company’s “no antibiotics ever” chicken.
A spokesman for Tyson says the company uses antibiotics as little as possible. “We’re working with our research partners on antibiotic alternatives. However, until they’re available we currently plan to continue using ionophores,” Gary Mickelson, says. “We’re not going to compromise animal wellbeing for marketing reasons.”
Foster Farms did not respond to a request for comment.
Antibiotics have long been used in the diets of farm animals to promote growth, control illness and reduce costs. But for several years, US public health officials have expressed concern that consumption of meat raised with antibiotics — particularly those used in human medicine — could contribute to antibiotic resistance.
There is scant scientific evidence to suggest that ionophores threaten human health, says Jonathan Kaplan, director of the food and agriculture programme at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Nonetheless, Kaplan says, Perdue is raising the bar for the poultry industry.
“Here is Perdue taking what has traditionally been a niche product and making it mainstream,” he says. “That’s a milestone in this industry.”
It is not the first time Perdue has raised the ante for its competitors. Frank Perdue, son of the company’s founder, took to the airwaves to point out that, unlike Perdue chickens, other chickens were skinny and had scrapes and feathers still attached.
Jim Perdue insists he is not trying to change his competition.
“We try to lead in things,” he says in an interview at the farmhouse where his grandfather, Arthur Perdue, started the business. “It has more to do with our name being on the package than with any effort to move the industry.”
The new ads, he says, are an effort to teach consumers about antibiotics and distinguish Perdue from its competitors.
“There’s a lot of confusion around antibiotic use that needs to be unravelled,” he says. “I don’t think the consumer really knows what it means when people write ‘human antibiotics’ or ‘antibiotics important for human medicine’ — what other kind are there?”
The answer is ionophores, which are antibiotics used in animals — but never humans — to promote growth, prevent disease and lower costs.
“Consumers think when you say no antibiotics, you mean no antibiotics ever, not that you mean these antibiotics, but not these other ones,” Jim Perdue says.
IN FACT, the only meat that can legally be labelled “antibiotic-free” under US federal regulation is from animals raised with neither human antibiotics nor ionophores, and many poultry companies have niche product lines that meet that standard.
Tyson, for instance, sells such chicken under the NatureRaised Farms brand, but that currently accounts for what a spokesman described as a “small” portion of the company’s overall chicken sales.
Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of nonprofit groups fighting to reduce antibiotic use in animal husbandry, says it is impossible to know how extensive the use of ionophores is in the US industry, which is not required to report antibiotic use to regulators.
Perdue will use the phrase “no antibiotics ever” on its Harvestland and Simply Smart brands of chicken products, and on Perdue Perfect Portions. Depending on consumers’ response, the company will continue to reduce its use of ionophores.
The effort to eliminate antibiotics at Perdue began more than a decade ago. In 2007, the company began selling products that met the requirements for an “antibiotic-free” label under the Harvestland brand.
Without any advertising support or the name “Perdue” on the label, Harvestland took off. In taste tests at the company’s innovation centre, consumers consistently said Harvestland chicken tasted better than Perdue products.
Harvestland’s success was a validation of the company’s efforts to rid its operations of antibiotics. In 2011, FPP Family Investments, which owns Perdue, bought Coleman Natural Foods, a producer of organic and “natural” meats, overnight adding pork and beef to its product lines for the first time. Today, Harvestland is a $200m business for Perdue.
“We learned a lot from Coleman,” says Bruce StewartBrown, senior vice-president for food safety and quality and live operations at Perdue.
When Perdue began eliminating antibiotics from its production, mortality rates rose a bit — and costs rose more.
“It has taken us 14 years to reduce the cost of doing it this way,” Stewart-Brown, a veterinarian, says. “It’s still a little more expensive today, but the cleaner we are here, the more benefits there are for the chickens when they get to barns.”
Even as Perdue works to eliminate antibiotics, the company remains a target of critics. Last year, Compassion in World Farming, a group that advocates for better animal welfare on farms, released a video showing birds raised for Perdue living in tight quarters on top of their own faeces with raw, inflamed bellies.
THE farmer in the video, Craig Watts, whose family has raised chickens under contract to Perdue for many years, later took issue with the company’s antibiotics policy. The chicks, he said in a lawsuit against Perdue, were arriving at his farm with bacterial infections because of inadequate sanitation in the company’s hatcheries.
Perdue would not allow him to treat sick birds with antibiotics and other medications, he said. (Perdue administers human antibiotics only to flocks with sick birds, meaning 95% of its chickens never receive such drugs.) Perdue said in a response at the time that Watts had not followed the protocols it had for its growers and put him on a “performance improvement plan”.
“What you think is humane treatment of an animal and what I think is humane treatment can be different,” Jim Perdue says when asked about the video.
He says the US agriculture department had verified Perdue’s process for ensuring its birds are treated humanely.
Stewart-Brown recently visited Europe to learn more about animal welfare standards there, which are typically more stringent than those in the US. He says he saw several different housing systems, including ones that allow outside light into barns through opaque windows.
“A person at Oxford has a simple concept of caring for chickens,” he says. “She asks are they healthy, do they get what they need and do they get what they want?”
Perdue growers already follow a new protocol for handling “litter”, bedding that covers floors in chicken barns, and Jim Perdue says it is exploring ways to improve living conditions for its birds.
So will Perdue’s next attempt to change the game in the poultry business be an evolution in its standards for raising its chickens? Jim Perdue says, “We need happier birds.”
Consumers think when you say no antibiotics, you mean no antibiotics ever, not that you mean these antibiotics, but not these other ones