Sales of factory-farmed chickens have slumped since a high-profile campaign raised awareness of the cruelty at the heart of the poultry industry and implored consumers to pay more to improve the animals’ welfare.0228 07
In a victory for campaigners who have fought to expose the short and brutal lives of broiler birds, shoppers have bought millions more free-range and organic birds while leaving mass-produced chickens on the shelves.
Sales of free-range poultry shot up by 35 per cent last month compared with January 2007, while sales of standard indoor birds fell by 7 per cent, according to a survey of 25,000 shoppers by the market research company TNS.
Supermarkets have been stripped of free-range birds, prompting complaints from frustrated shoppers keen to embrace the movement away from intensive farming.
The rise in sales would have been even higher if poultry producers had been able to keep up with demand. Many suppliers in the £2bn-a-year poultry industry are now expected to convert cramped chicken sheds into more spacious accommodation.
Tesco, the country’s biggest retailer, has doubled its order for higher-welfare chickens while Sainsbury’s has been flabbergasted by the “unprecedented” spurt in demand and forced to import free-range birds from France.
In the weeks after the chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver launched a high-profile campaign on Channel 4, supermarkets had stated that sales of “standard” chickens had held up, and even increased.
But the new national sales data suggests that shoppers’ priorities have shifted dramatically. If the TNS data was extrapolated to the rest of the UK, it suggests sales of factory-farmed chickens dipped by 10 million, while shoppers bought 4.4 million more free-range chickens. Overall, chicken sales were down by 4.8 per cent, perhaps because many people, when faced with an absence of free-range chicken, simply bought no chicken.
The campaign against mass-produced poultry, of which a quarter have difficulty walking as a result of wading around in their own waste, is to be intensified. Fearnley-Whittingstall intends to produce a new television show on chickens later this year, updating viewers on the campaign and urging more people to join what he hopes will turn into a free-range revolution. “We are going to keep the pressure up and we are going to do everything we can to make sure that this is not a flash in the pan,” he said…