Major food companies in the UK, including KFC, Nando’s, Wagamama, and Burger King, have dropped their pledge to improve the welfare of chickens.
The pledge in question is the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), a six-point welfare initiative that corporations can voluntarily sign up to implement. Arguably, the most notable parts of the pledge are the creation of a maximum stocking density of 30kg/m2 or less, compared to the current UK standard of 39kg/m2, and the transition to slower-growing breeds of broiler chickens.
What implications does this kind of thing have for the cost-effectiveness estimates of charities like The Humane League where putting pressure on corporations to sign pledges to improve welfare is a large part of their work? How common is it for companies that sign these pledges to bail on them, actually?
(this post made from a temporary throwaway account)
6+ years as a THL volunteer here, so I'm an informed source but not an official one. I don't think the BCC will affect THL's efficiency much directly, since we've mostly been focusing on cage-free campaigns for the past couple years. Those have largely been going well. The BCC has been hard to get more traction on and probably requires mobilization on a larger scale than we currently have.
Companies reneg with some frequency (at least enough frequency to keep us busy), which prompts us to run campaigns to get them to recommit to their pledge. Those have mostly been successful. I'd estimate somewhere around 70-80% success rate with recommitting, but of course actual data would be nice.
Is there any reason to believe this is pretty common? My understanding is that backing down from a pledge is exceedingly rare (New Report: 92% of Global Cage-Free Egg Commitments Fulfilled, Signaling a Tipping Point for Farm Animal Welfare | Ethical Marketing News). Of course, the above-mentioned news is tragic given the size of the companies involved.
Indeed! I asked the same questions in a recent LinkedIn post and am planning to address this topic in a new substack post soon (so now I'm wondering if we know each other 🥷🏽).
To answer your last question - pretty common. The majority I think, though estimates differ.