A photo taken by an animal rights activist investigator purportedly shows the conditions of hens laying eggs at an Oakville farm.
Eggland’s Best, a national egg supplier, has announced it will transition to completely cage-free eggs by 2025.
”Eggland’s Best is setting a goal of working with our suppliers and customers to transition to 100 percent cage-free eggs by 2025,” the company stated in a July 22 press release on its website. “We will work closely with our suppliers to make this change in a way that ensures the great taste, nutrition and freshness that consumers love and expect from Eggland’s Best eggs. We will not compromise food safety or animal welfare in working toward this goal.”
In June, an animal rights group announced it had documented abuse at Briarwood Farms in Oakville and Rochester. The investigation alleged that Eggland’s Best was distrubuting eggs from Briarwood Farms.
An Eggland’s Best spokesman denied the company distributed those eggs.
“To the best of our knowledge, those eggs were not distributed by Eggland’s Best,” Bart Slaugh, director of quality and assurance told The Vidette on July 25. “The time period they were in there, none of that acitivity was going on in those houses. None of the eggs shown in the investigation were produced under our management and animal care requirements.”
And while the company is confident they hadn’t shipped eggs from the facilities shown in footage from the investigation, the animal rights group, Mercy For Animals, sent out its own short press release email with the subject, “undercover investigation prompts Eggland’s Best to dump the cage.”
Slaugh said the investigation wasn’t the only reason the company decided to go cage free, but the investigation did have some impact on when to announce the company’s plan.
“(The investigation) didn’t change our course, but it encouraged us to make the announcement,” Slaugh said.
Going cage free has been the company’s aim for some time, he added.
“A lot of major supermakets and restaurants have pledged to use only cage-free eggs by 2025 — our objective is to stay alligned with the industry,” Slaugh said. “Our general pattern is to do the action and then talk about what we did after it’s done.”
The announcement to go cage free was praised by the animal rights group that had led the investigation.
“Eggland’s Best has taken a significant step forward in improving the lives of animals,” Mercy For Animals president Nathan Runkle said in a press release. “The company’s cage-free egg commitment will reduce the suffering of millions of hens each year and hopefully inspire other egg distributors to do the same.”
In June, Briarwood Farms issued a media statement that said it had reviewed the investigation footage and “noted several instances of hen mishandling in the video.”
“This behavior is inconsistent with our expectations for hen care,” the statement read.
The company said an independent on-farm audit was underway and a poultry specialist from Oregon State University was expected to make a separate site visit.
