The real reason all of your eggs still aren’t cage-free

Nearly half of the eggs sold in the US today come from cage-free farms. That’s an astounding turn, considering that in the early 2000s, just a few percent did.

But according to pledges made by many of the country’s largest food companies — from McDonald’s to IHOP to Starbucks — most of the 94 billion eggs sold each year in America were supposed to be cage-free by now. What happened?

To be sure, there’s been bird flu, spikes in egg prices, and broader shifts in consumer priorities. But most critically, one group of key players in America’s food system largely haven’t made good on their promises to go cage-free: grocery stores.

More than half of US eggs are sold in supermarkets, so if the US egg industry is to get anywhere close to ending the confinement of laying hens in cages, it must have the backing of the nation’s grocery chains. Which is why it’s big news that this week, one of the nation’s largest grocery companies recommitted to its cage-free goal.

The news may seem small — one grocery company changing one of its thousands of products. But it’s a major animal welfare success story in that it will reduce the suffering of millions of chickens. And it demonstrates the power of small but concentrated advocacy work even in the face of massive, multinational companies, giving animal welfare activists even further leverage to get other food giants to keep their own cage-free promises.

Grocery stores are why we don’t have a lot more cage-free eggs

Over the last year, many of the largest US animal welfare groups have directed their activism at a Dutch company you’ve probably never heard of: Ahold Delhaize. But, especially if you live on the East Coast of the US, you’ve probably shopped at one of their more than 2,000 grocery stores. The European company owns Food Lion, Stop & Shop, Giant, Hannaford, and Martin’s.

A decade ago, the grocery giant — the fourth-largest in the US — had promised that its egg supply would be cage-free by the end of 2025. Hundreds of other food companies had made a similar commitment after pressure from animal activists who urged them to banish cages from their egg supply chains.

It was a David-and-Goliath scenario — nonprofits with budgets in the millions going up against food corporations worth billions.

At the time, the vast majority of America’s 300 million or so egg-laying hens were perpetually confined in cages, which are so small the birds can hardly move around or flap their wings for their entire lives. Animal welfare experts consider cage confinement in egg farming to be a particularly cruel practice.

But at the end of 2024, with the cage-free deadline fast approaching, Ahold Delhaize pushed its deadline back seven years to 2032, citing supply issues from the bird flu outbreak, lack of customer demand, and high egg prices. Activists cried foul because some of its competitors — most notably Costco and Trader Joe’s — had switched to selling almost entirely cage-free eggs.

On top of extending its deadline so long, Ahold Delhaize also didn’t commit to sharing periodic updates on its progress. These shifts rankled animal welfare groups like the Accountability Board, which was founded a few years ago to execute on its name: hold food companies accountable to their animal welfare policies.

So, over the last year, the Accountability Board and other animal activists trained their focus on the company. Groups organized intense protests at the company’s international headquarters outside Amsterdam and ran Super Bowl ads in New England where its US stores are concentrated, among other tactics.

Eventually, it paid off. While Ahold Delhaize is retaining its new 2032 deadline for selling only cage-free eggs in its stores, this week the company set two-year benchmarks to hit to reach its cage-free goal on time and said it’ll share its progress annually, in addition to posting signs in the egg aisles of its stores to spotlight its cage-free cartons.

“Ahold Delhaize USA has reached an agreement following a constructive dialogue” with animal advocates, a company spokesperson wrote in an email to Vox. “We appreciate the partnership and collaboration as we shared more detail about our previously announced plans that we aim to achieve as part of our goal to become cage-free by 2032.”

The increased transparency may seem insignificant on the surface, but to Josh Balk, CEO of the Accountability Board — who has negotiated with hundreds of companies to improve animal welfare — it’s a “night and day” difference. (Disclosure: From 2012 to 2017, I worked at Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the United States, where Balk also worked.)

As Balk told me: “It’s literally doing nothing [then], compared to now, this is the strongest policy of any conventional grocery store in the country.”

How half of our eggs became cage-free

The company’s policy is something of a watershed moment for the US animal welfare movement and the future of the egg industry. To understand why, it’s helpful to briefly trace how the US egg supply has shifted over the last two decades.

The swift change from such little cage-free production to now accounting for nearly half of the country’s stock in under two decades was the result of two interlocking campaigns: persuading corporations to switch to cage-free eggs, and getting a dozen states — one of which I worked on — to pass cage-free laws.

To be sure, cage-free doesn’t equate to cruelty-free; exposés of cage-free egg farms have also revealed cruel conditions, but it represents a major improvement from perpetual cage confinement.

It’s unclear now, though, how much further this momentum will take the cause. Nearly all of the states that have passed cage-free laws have implemented them, and few other states seem like good prospects for new laws in the near future. And many of the companies that didn’t meet their 2025 deadline don’t seem too motivated to follow through, with some even quietly removing their pledges from their websites.

This is why the Ahold Delhaize push was seen as a must-win for animal welfare activists; it served as a sort of test case as to whether the tried and true method of pressuring corporations to treat animals less cruelly could still work.

“The major reason why we’re at roughly 48 percent cage-free, and not 80 percent cage-free, is because of the grocery sector,” Balk said. The other major egg-buyers, he said — such as fast food chains and companies that operate university cafeterias — have “moved in a very good direction.”

What it’ll take for America’s egg industry to be fully cage-free

Some grocery stores, like Costco, Trader Joe’s, and BJ’s Wholesale, have mostly fulfilled their cage-free pledges, while others have made moderate progress, like Sam’s Club, Meijer, and Target. Some are far behind their goals, including Kroger, Publix, and Walmart, or are not making their progress public, like ALDI, Wegmans, H-E-B, and Albertsons, which owns Safeway, Jewel Osco, VONS, and other grocery chains.

When I reached out to these companies for details on progress toward their cage-free pledges, only two responded.

A Target spokesperson directed me to the company’s sustainability report, which didn’t answer any of my questions. A Meijer spokesperson told me the company’s egg supply is now majority cage-free but didn’t share a percent, and explained the challenges they’ve faced in reaching their goal: consumer demand and “highly publicized issues in the poultry industry,” which I took to mean the bird flu, which has resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of hens in recent years, reducing the US egg supply and leading to higher prices.

These explanations make sense to some degree, but can also fall short under scrutiny, especially in light of some of their competitors reaching their 2025 deadlines.

For one, the pledges companies made to go cage-free weren’t necessarily based on consumer demand. Most consumers oppose caging hens, but only a small share call the corporations they buy food from and demand more humane policies. Rather, the cage-free promises were based more on the social good of reducing animal cruelty and pushed through by the advocacy groups.

While the bird flu has constrained the US egg supply in recent years, during some periods it disproportionately hit cage farms and at other times, disproportionately hit cage-free farms, so theoretically, supply shouldn’t be too much of an issue but more of a short-term obstacle.

On the affordability question, cage-free eggs cost egg companies about 19 cents more per dozen — or 1.6 cents more per egg — to produce compared to cage eggs, price hikes that grocers and most consumers would hardly feel.

Against the backdrop of America’s brutal animal factory farming system, which confines, mutilates, and subjects some 10 billion animals to terribly cruel conditions, incremental cage-free progress can feel so insufficient. And it is.

But there’s also another way to look at it. The last two decades should provide anyone agitating for social change some hope — that even a small movement, operating on a tiny budget against a giant and politically powerful industry — can move humanity and fellow animals in a better direction. We’ll see if it’s still moving even further in that direction come 2032.