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 here
and 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.
