Chickenomics – the rise of the £52 bird
Chickens now sell for less than the price of a pint, but it is time to support our farmers and pay for quality, says Eleanor Steafel
Achicken, much like a diamond, can be anything you say it is in 2022; from a £4.99 Sainsbury’s bird to a £52 “slow-grown” chicken, reared on essential oils and various wild plants. Each fowl will weigh the same, they’ll yield exactly the same number of portions, but the difference in price and flavour will be astronomical.
It’s par for the course in the confusing world of chickenomics where, for some years now, the gap between what you might spend on the cheapest scrawn-bag of a chicken and a premium bird has been growing wider and wider.
Ever since the noughties ushered in the era of the organic chicken, poultry has been political. Britain had just about got to grips with the notion of buying free-range when suddenly everything had to be organic. Now “regenerative” is the buzzword of the moment in farming, and a chicken wouldn’t necessarily be considered high-end and ethically sound unless it had been slow-grown and herb-fed.
It means that at one end of the scale, prices have been creeping up – you could now legitimately order a single chicken costing more than £50 from a specialist supplier. Meanwhile, at the other end of the market, prices have fallen so much, you could buy a carcass for less than the price of a pint.
At the lower end, the price per kilo of a standard chicken was higher in 2011 than it is today. Experts say an increase in demand globally forced producers to operate on a larger scale which made them more efficient and, in turn, softened the price. In 2011, a standard chicken cost about £3.24/ kilo. Today, it’s more like £2.93/kilo.
But all that could be about to change. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) warned last week that the price of chicken in the UK will rocket in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s warmongering. Ukraine, dubbed the breadbasket of Europe, is a major exporter of wheat globally. Environment Secretary George Eustice said on Tuesday that the price of wheat, on which the poultry industry relies for feed, had doubled since war broke out last month.
In Britain, we are relatively self-sufficient, producing about 80 per cent of our own feed. But the invasion has put pressure on supply chains around the world, and the impact of a spike in wheat prices is sure to have ramifications here too.
Britain’s biggest poultry supplier, 2 Sisters Food Group, say the crisis in Ukraine has “added extra pressure on cost”, which means consumers “will pay more” for their chicken. But the industry was already facing crippling rises in input costs even before war broke out. Inflationary pressures abound at every stage of production. A spokesman from 2 Sisters says the cost of packaging is up 20 per cent year on year, CO2 (used to stun the birds prior to slaughtering) is up 350 per cent, feed is up 50 per cent. Meanwhile, its energy costs had already soared by more than 450 per cent in 2021 from a year earlier – with prices set to rise again this spring.
“Overall, input costs have risen 50 per cent, year on year,” says a spokesman. “Food inflation overall was expected to rise to eight per cent pre-war. That figure is now likely to be more like 15 per cent. Clearly, there comes a point when the consumer will see the effects of all this with higher prices.”
Labour shortages have also had a catastrophic impact on the poultry industry. One farmer, Rod Adlington, told the BBC in October he’d had to raise the price of his chickens by eight per cent as a result of staff shortages in his factories. “We’ve never ever had to put through a price rise before,” he said, “but if we don’t make these changes, we just won’t be here in six months.”
Inflationary pressures aside, some say it’s high time we started to pay more for our chicken. “How can it be right that a whole chicken costs less than a pint?” 2 Sisters founder Ranjit Boparan (dubbed “the Chicken King”) asked the BBC.
He isn’t wrong – while the current price for a “standard” 2kg chicken hovers around £3.10-£3.50, a pint of beer outside London averages £3.80-£4.
The days of low prices are, quite simply, “coming to an end”, said Boparan, adding “transparent, honest pricing” was now needed in the face of rising costs. Jane Howorth, founder of the British Hen Welfare Trust, says if we want to support British farmers and encourage ethical production methods, we need to pay more for our chickens and eggs. “In the UK, we don’t value our farmers and the food they produce highly enough,” says Howorth.
The past year has been particularly hard on poultry farmers, she says, as a fierce outbreak of avian flu meant they were forced to keep 35million hens indoors for fear of losing entire flocks. Defra ordered the hens into lockdown in November after the “largest ever” bird flu outbreak in the UK. Poultry farmers were permitted to continue calling the eggs they produced free-range for 16 weeks, even though the hens were inside. But since last Monday, the eggs had to be marked “barn eggs”. Farmers had hoped the lockdown would end this week – but Howorth says Defra are “still very hesitant” as new cases are still being found, causing many to speculate if we might be at the beginning of the end for British free-range eggs altogether. Last year, almost two-thirds of the 11billion eggs produced in the UK were free-range (up from 27 per cent in 2004). But if year-round bird flu outbreaks threaten to keep hens inside more permanently, free-range chickens and eggs may be a thing of the past.
“It’s been a very unfortunate year for the entire country,” says Howorth. “[...] There’s no doubt that the free-range sector does not want to keep its birds inside. But they are doing so for their own good, because avian flu is so lethal, and because it’s not good for business.”
Vaccines, she feels, could provide an answer: “Birds already have a whole gambit of vaccinations against salmonella and others. That is par for the course, [and] avian flu is devastating.”
France, which has suffered nearly 1,000 outbreaks this winter, has been trialling a jab. But, much like with Covid-19, the numerous variants of avian flu makes it difficult to vaccinate against. Covered outdoor areas have also been floated as a possible solution, though it might be a hard sell for consumers who tend to have an image of free-range birds frolicking over rolling pastures. “There are some farmers that do it brilliantly,” says Howorth. “I’ve seen hens in cherry orchards, and it’s heaven.”
Whether your Sunday roast this afternoon features a £4 bird or a £50 one, spare a thought for the poor hens. They’ve been in “cluckdown” almost as long as we were in 2020.
The days of low prices are, quite simply, ‘coming to an end’ in the face of rising costs