Burger King Promises 100% Cage-Free Eggs and Pork by 2017
The movement by U.S. food companies toward more humane treatment of animals experienced a whopper of a shift Wednesday when Burger King announced that all its eggs and pork will come from cage-free chickens and pigs by 2017.
The decision by the world’s second-biggest fast-food restaurant raises the bar for other companies seeking to appeal to rising consumer demand for more humanely produced food.
“So many tens of thousands of animals will now be in better living conditions,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, which has been pushing Burger King and other corporations to consider animal welfare in purchasing policies. “Numerically this is significant because Burger King is such a big purchaser of these products.”
The decision by Burger King, which uses hundreds of millions of eggs and tens of millions of pounds of pork annually, could have huge repercussions in the egg and pork supply business as a huge new market has opened for humanely raised food animals. Already 9% of the company’s eggs and 20% of its pork are cage-free.