US trend moves away from caged production

Jim Dwyer, President and CEO of Michael Foods
Jim Dwyer, President and CEO of Michael Foods

The boss of a major food products business has said that the trend in United States egg processing is towards cage-free production.

Jim Dwyer, president and CEO of Michael Foods, said during the September conference of the International Egg Commission (IEC) that the process would take time, but that a number of major companies were now moving away from cage eggs. He said the trend was to jump to cage-free rather than moving from traditional battery cage eggs to enriched cages.

“I don’t have any figures to show what is happening, but you have only to look at some of the recent announcements by major companies to see what is happening,” he told the Ranger during the conference, which took place in Berlin. “It has started to change. Customers have started to think more about animal welfare.”

As we have reported elsewhere in this edition, the fast food giant McDonald’s has just announced that it is to switch to using only cage-free eggs in its United States and Canadian restaurants over the next 10 years. “Our customers are increasingly interested in knowing more about their food and where it comes from,” said the company when it made the announcement. Other companies, such as Burger King, are heading the same way, as animal welfare continues to grow in importance amongst US consumers. Nestle, Sodexo, Aramark, Heinz and Compass Group have also committed to cage-free. Starbucks announced earlier this year that it would stop using cage eggs in its coffee shops.

Britain’s biggest egg company, Noble Foods, took its high welfare happy egg brand of free range eggs across the Atlantic in 2012 and it has repeatedly increased the size of its US flock since doing so. It says that American consumers are increasingly demanding more humanely produced food.

Jim Dwyer said that the trend to higher welfare eggs was also being seen in the processing industry. His company, Michael Foods, is a multinational producer and distributor of food products to the foodservice, retail and food ingredient markets. Its principal products are specialty egg products, refrigerated potato products, cheese and other dairy products.

He told delegates at the IEC conference that more customers were looking to source cage-free egg. It would take time, he told the Ranger, because farmers could not change the type of production overnight. But he said the move was taking place and, as a company, Michael Foods would simply offer customers the type of egg they wanted.

Although the trend was away from cage, Jim Dwyer said that much of the cage-free eggs would be barn eggs rather than free range. Although happy egg reports growing demand, free range eggs are still a very small part of the US egg market.

However, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has welcomed moves to cage-free by McDonald’s and other major companies. It has said that the future of egg production in the United States is now cage-free.