cage-free eggs

Mammoth retailer Walmart, also the largest U.S. grocer, said it will shift to cage-free eggs "based on available supply, affordability and customer demand by 2025." The transition applies to Walmart and Sam's Club stores and was the latest in a string of announcements by food chains.

The supermarket chain Kroger says 15 percent of the eggs it sold in 2015 were cage-free. "As our customer base has been moving to cage-free at an increasing rate, Kroger’s goal is to transition to a 100% cage-free egg supply chain by 2025," the grocer said in an announcement.

Dunkin' Donuts joined fast-food companies McDonald's and Taco Bell in announcing a switch to cage-free eggs. Dunkin' said it will use only cage-free eggs in the United States by 2025 and will explore the feasibility of going cage-free in all its operations worldwide, said Reuters.

Foodmaker General Mills says it will use only cage-free eggs in its U.S. operations by 2025, the first time the maker of packaged foods has set a timeline for the switch, said Reuters.

Fast-food chain Taco Bell said its “more than 6,000 U.S. corporate and franchise-owned restaurants will exclusively serve cage-free eggs by December 31, 2016."

Producers in Iowa, the No 1 egg state, "say they are looking to house more of their hens in cage-free barns to meet growing demand from big buyers like McDonald's," says the Omaha (Neb) World-Herald. Rembrandt Farms, based in Spirit Lake and one of the largest producers of processed egg products, will shift to an all cage-free model.

Post Holdings Inc., of Saint Louis, hit hard by bird flu in the Midwest earlier this year, is buying Willamette Egg Farms, "one of the Pacific Northwest’s leading egg producers and a leader in the industry’s adoption of cage-free hen housing," said Capital Press.

The largest U.S. egg industry group says it will "educate the lawmakers, voters and consumers" in Massachusetts about the merits of cages for hens ahead of a potential 2016 referendum on animal-welfare rules, reports Politico.

Fast-food giant McDonald's, which buys two billion eggs a year, equal to 4 percent of U.S. egg production, "will begin phasing out the use of eggs from hens housed in cages," said the New York Times, "a move that has significant implications for American and Canadian egg producers."

Family-owned Perdue Farms, one of the major U.S. poultry processors, is buying Niman Ranch, a producer of antibiotic-free meat and cage-free eggs, said Meating Place.

The Humane Society of the United States and its allies launched a drive for a statewide referendum in the 2016 general election that would require that any animal raised or sold for consumption in Massachusetts be able to lie down, stand up, fully extend its limbs, and turn around freely, says Civil Eats.

Foodmaker General Mills announced it will stop buying eggs that come from caged hens, says CNN. The company did not say when it would make the switch.

Egg farmers in California are converting their laying houses to comply with a state law taking effect on Jan 1 that mandates more freedom of movement for the hens, notes a Christian Science Monitor story on humane treatment of livestock.

Two new laws take effect in California on Jan 1 - a requirement for egg farmers to give laying hens more room to move around and a ban on import of eggs from outside California if the hens are not given similar freedom of movement.

California's new humane-treatment rule for egg-laying hens takes effect on Jan 1 and is having an impact on producers as far away as Pennsylvania, says Bloomberg.

Nestle, one of the world's largest foodmakers, said it would require higher animal welfare standards at the hundreds of thousands of farms worldwide that supply it with dairy, meat, poultry and eggs.