Animal rights charities are crying ‘fowl’ over the launch of the Sustainable Chicken Forum – and they may have a point, as the phrase ‘welfare-washing’ springs easily to mind.
The SCF was unveiled on Thursday by eight companies, which between them own or franchise 18 brands, all claiming they want to “balance” chicken welfare with sustainability, net zero and long-term supply resilience.
At the same time, those 18 brands also withdrew from the Better Chicken Commitment – a six-point welfare policy created to address problems caused by breeding chickens for fast growth and high yield. The group – which includes heavyweights such as KFC and Burger King – argues the BCC is no longer fit for purpose, claiming that using slower-growing breeds threatens their environmental goals.
“This demand comes at a time of acute chicken supply pressures,” the group said. “Operators rightly have to ensure consistent and secure supply chains, while continuing to improve welfare standards and cut their environmental impact.”
Mais – pardon my French – it all has a faint air of ‘merde’. As one colleague at The Grocer put it, the move is right up there with Donald Trump’s Board of Peace.
Marking your own homework
The SCF’s founding flourish leans heavily on ADAS data, which claims slower‑growing breeds generate over a quarter more greenhouse gas emissions and require 34.5% more water than standard broilers. ADAS also raises fears the European poultry industry could collapse, warning the extra space needed to house slower-growing birds could slash production by as much as 44%.
That would all be fine – or at least arguable – were it not for decades of selective breeding by Big Chicken, which has seen the average weight of the most common chicken breed balloon from 0.9kg in 1957 to 4.2kg in 2005 (at 56 days old).
For its part, the Better Chicken Commitment can point to at least three studies which show that faster‑growing breeds “require around three to nine times more antibiotics than slower‑growing breeds” – an environmental trade-off the SCF narrative rather conveniently glosses over.
While the notion of chicken doping might have made the East German Olympic committee proud, antibiotics are demonstrably bad news for the environment. A September 2025 study noted that “effluents from healthcare facilities, agricultural runoff and pharmaceutical industries contribute heavily to environmental antibiotic contamination”.
And all that’s before welfare even enters the conversation. Faster-growing birds have consistently worse gait scores, feather coverage, slower reactions, display less perch use, as well as higher mortality and cull rates.
As The Humane League’s campaigns manager Claire Williams told The Grocer, the continued use of slower-growing breeds will result in “the continued use and abuse of hundreds of millions of birds who grow so big, so fast that often their legs are wracked with lameness, their organs collapse in pain, and their bodies are burned black with excrement”.
A balancing act
Ultimately, there must be some sympathy for the devil. Consumers (especially in the UK) want higher chicken welfare and cheaper prices, but the two cannot co-exist without an unprecedented production expansion.
At the same time, farmers are facing increased input costs and, despite the government’s best attempts at reforming the National Planning Policy Framework, the UK’s restrictive planning system means it’s still pretty difficult to build a poultry shed. As Minette Batters said in her farm profitability review, “the existing planning system is not fit to deliver government objectives for land use, the environment, or food production”.
Richard Griffiths, CEO of the British Poultry Council, points out that “businesses are balancing welfare, environmental stewardship, and food security at a time of huge uncertainty, rising production costs, and planning barriers”.
“If we want to move faster and go further, we need to support investment, not layer on costs and expectations that make progress impossible.”
Ultimately though, the industry can only move as far, and as fast, as consumers are willing to pay.
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