Why sell free range eggs but not free range chicken?

[Wildflowerwonder]

Waitrose make a bit of a song and dance about ONLY selling free range eggs, and yet the interesting ready meal or marinated etc chicken isn’t free range at all. Why is this? Why is it all ‘oh dear God we couldn’t’ when it comes to free range eggs, but they’re quite happy to pump out any old nonsense when it comes to chicken (oh yes I know they say it’s ’higher welfare’ but nobody actually believes that do they. ‘Higher than what?’ I always ask myself.

And Waitrose is different from other supermarkets. To shop there you have to have spare cash. Enough spare cash to give the poor chicken some outdoor space, surely?

That really isn’t how it works.

Chicken for eggs and chicken for meat are entirely separate

To improve chickens’ quality of life, I think organic farming is best. It limits how densely chickens can be packed together and reduces the need for antibiotics. Overcrowding increases stress and allows disease to spread more easily, so lower stocking densities are better for both animal welfare and health.

You usually can buy free range chicken but I've not seen it much in last couple of years, I think it's down to bird flu

Meat chickens are kept in conditions more like barn egg chickens. It’s not a good life, but it is marginally better than eggs from caged hens, which spend their (thankfully short) miserable lives in a cage with less space per bird than an A4 piece of paper and no ability to preen themselves, move about or show any kind of normal behaviour. Meat chickens which aren’t free range don’t go outside or have much of a life but they are usually provided with very basic enrichment such as bales to perch on and they are at least not in cages, although they are very crowded.

I’m not defending these conditions - I don’t buy this kind of chicken myself. But I can see why eggs from caged hens are more cruel.

I know this isn't how it works but I still absolutely love your logic and this comment 😂👌💯

I don’t have an intellectual disability, layers being different breeds to chickens for meat which is something most people are aware of. Why you think they’re the same breed is odd, and why you think it relates to supermarkets is bizarre.

Waitrose sell organic chicken which has to be free range to be organic. UK law allows regular chicken to be sold as well, so Waitrose sells that too. But they don’t buy the cheapest chicken legally able to be sold in the UK and they only buy British chicken:
https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/content/sustainability/animal-welfare/chickens

this is because they are not a budget grocery store. If you want yellow sticker priced chicken that is off or about to go off, go to Aldi.

Free range eggs are required by UK law (they are only not free range when caged during avian flu outbreaks for their own safety- chicken lockdown like we had the human lockdown during Covid).

That’s true in the USA 🇺🇸, but not in EU or UK.

Booths is the same.

I asked chatGPT if you are right and it agrees with all your points - depressingly. The factory farming industry is horrible

I suspect the answer is partly money. Eggs, even free range are relatively cheap. Free range chicken isn't. I wish more ready meals etc used free range. If I'm cooking from scratch I always do. And as you say, Waitrose isn't about price.

We only buy free range and it’s disappointing the range is so limited. It’s like they decided to have strong morals, until they seemed like a hassle and suddenly they couldn’t be arsed applying those morals.

I don’t buy organic. Not since a neighbour who was a post-doc researcher in animal welfare and said organic meat is cruel as it just results in otherwise healthy animals dying in fields from easily treatable illnesses.

There are organic chickens available but they are much more expensive than the ones you see in the supermarket.

For chicken to grow to a medium size naturally(1.6 kg) it takes at least 6 months.
The ones in the shops are anywhere between 8-12 weeks.

Go figure. Time is money(just like the rest of food)
Organic chicken allowed to roam and grow naturally would be about £30(that’s hom much they went for at local farm a couple of years ago).

There are different breeds of chickens,some are better for egg production,some are better for meat and a few in between.

We import 80,000 tons of chicken from Thailand every year, it would be quite hard to compete with those numbers with pricier free range broilers.

Cost. Whilst people who choose to shop in Waitrose may broadly have more money, many (most?) ultimately don’t care quite enough about the welfare of their chicken that they’d routinely pay the cost of true free range chicken. Barn raised chickens are intended to put on weight in a short space of time, their lack of movement contributes to that, and if you’re growing chickens in limited space in a shed you can grow more chickens per footage of land. If your chicken is gallivanting all over the place, it uses more energy, eats more feed, takes longer to grow, and you need to allocate more land whilst getting a lower yield. All £££.

Waitrose know they’d ultimately lose customers to more affordable supermarkets if their produce was priced significantly higher. They also know that customers for whom animal welfare is paramount still aren’t likely to buy meat from a supermarket labelled free range because of (justifiable) concerns about transparency in the production chain - so those customers would still go elsewhere for their chicken anyway, just as plenty of people buy farm direct rather than supermarket eggs, regardless of how they’re labelled, because they know there’s free range and “free range.”

Sounds pretty chicken and egg to me.