Paris-based Sodexo, one of the world’s largest food-service suppliers, pledged to sell only cage-free eggs worldwide by 2025, reports the Washington Post, signaling that the movement “long championed by animal rights activists, is going more global.”
Sodexo was one of the first major companies to make the cage-free pledge for its U.S. operations, in February 2015. This new announcement builds on that pledge, and will affect liquid and shelled egg sales in the 80 countries where Sodexo sells — though it’s already gone cage-free in Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. “In a statement, Sodexo’s senior vice president of supply management, Michel Franceschi, said the company plans to ‘support and contribute to the progressive transformation of the whole industry,’ the Post reported.
Sodexo’s announcement came after talks with an international coalition of animal-rights groups, led by The Humane League, a small, U.S.-based group. David Coman-Hidy, the League’s executive director, said, “Our hope is that just like we went industry by industry in the U.S., we can take the same approach and just shift the global practice away from cages.”
Still, renovating chicken houses to remain cage-free is “insanely complicated,” writes Wired, and can cost a farmer more than $500,000 to update a single barn that will last a maximum of 20 years: a brand new barn can set a farmer back about $4 million for the price of a little extra pecking room.
The Post says that, due to the “logistically mammoth” shift is “unlikely to happen by 2025, corporate commitments notwithstanding. … Currently, less than 10 percent of eggs sold in the United States are laid by cage-free or free-range hens.”
“There should be no illusion that these animals live great lives. They’re still on factory farms,” Coman-Hidy said. “But this is such a meaningful improvement that we feel strongly it’s worth fighting for.”