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Free-range chicken sales make front page news 28 Feb 08
http://tinyurl.com/23ayep
The welfare of chickens continues to be front page news as consumers
become increasingly concerned about how standard chickens are raised.

The front page of The Independent clearly highlights how more and more
shoppers are switching to free-range chicken since discovering the
reality of cheap chicken production.

According to The Independent,
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...on-788557.html
research carried out by market research company TNS shows sales of
intensively reared chickens have fallen by 7% since January’s high
profile campaign, while free-range chickens are selling out due to
increased demand. Further research by G2 Data Dynamics has shown how
nearly two fifths of consumers have switched to free-range chicken
since last month's media coverage.

The growing ethical trend arose after a series of Channel 4 chicken
programmes showed celebrity chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and
Jamie Oliver highlighting the many welfare implications associated
with intensive chicken farming.

In intensive chicken sheds, meat chickens live in barren and crowded
conditions. Selectively bred to reach slaughter weight in less than 40
days, scientific research shows that these unnaturally fast growth
rates results in millions of chickens suffering from painful leg
disorders and millions dying of heart failure each year.

Compassion in World Farming's Food Policy Manager, Rowen West-Henzell,
said: "This is great news. Consumers were shown the reality behind
cheap chicken production and are now making more informed choices."

The switch to free-range hasn't just been good for chickens.
Free-range poultry farmers have seen a real increase in demand that
appears to be lasting. Poultry farmer Peter Colema, of Creedy Carver
Chickens said to The Grocer that there has been a 15% increase in
demand for free-range birds. He said: "There has been a significant
upturn in demand for free-range birds... and we have gained a number
of new customers. We thought it was speculation and would drop back...
but it didn't."

Although the general trend is towards buying free-range, the survey
also found that 36% of people are currently committed to intensively
produced chicken and will be for the foreseeable future. In a quote
given to The Grocer by Grampian Country Food Group, Alasdair Cox
reported that the increase in free-range chicken sales had not been
'to the detriment of standard chicken sales'. Miss West-Henzell
commented: "We hope to help all consumers see the value of buying
free-range - both by continuing to give them the facts about cheap
chicken production and by working with supermarkets who want to help
all their customers make more ethical choices."

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where you shop and what you buy. Your choices matter to millions of
farm animals and they're counting on you to make the compassionate
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Compassion in World Farming

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http://tinyurl.com/2cw5v5
Independent.co.uk

The campaign that changed the eating habits of a nation
Boycott of battery chickens forces supermarkets to think ethically

By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Thursday, 28 February 2008


Sales of factory-farmed chickens have slumped since a high-profile
campaign raised awareness of the cruelty at the heart of the poultry
industry and implored consumers to pay more to improve the animals'
welfare.


In a victory for campaigners who have fought to expose the short and
brutal lives of broiler birds, shoppers have bought millions more
free-range and organic birds while leaving mass-produced chickens on
the shelves.

Sales of free-range poultry shot up by 35 per cent last month compared
with January 2007, while sales of standard indoor birds fell by 7 per
cent, according to a survey of 25,000 shoppers by the market research
company TNS.

Supermarkets have been stripped of free-range birds, prompting
complaints from frustrated shoppers keen to embrace the movement away
from intensive farming.

The rise in sales would have been even higher if poultry producers had
been able to keep up with demand. Many suppliers in the £2bn-a-year
poultry industry are now expected to convert cramped chicken sheds
into more spacious accommodation.

Tesco, the country's biggest retailer, has doubled its order for
higher-welfare chickens while Sainsbury's has been flabbergasted by
the "unprecedented" spurt in demand and forced to import free-range
birds from France.

In the weeks after the chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie
Oliver launched a high-profile campaign on Channel 4, supermarkets had
stated that sales of "standard" chickens had held up, and even
increased.

But the new national sales data suggests that shoppers' priorities
have shifted dramatically. If the TNS data was extrapolated to the
rest of the UK, it suggests sales of factory-farmed chickens dipped by
10 million, while shoppers bought 4.4 million more free-range
chickens. Overall, chicken sales were down by 4.8 per cent, perhaps
because many people, when faced with an absence of free-range chicken,
simply bought no chicken.

The campaign against mass-produced poultry, of which a quarter have
difficulty walking as a result of wading around in their own waste, is
to be intensified. Fearnley-Whittingstall intends to produce a new
television show on chickens later this year, updating viewers on the
campaign and urging more people to join what he hopes will turn into a
free-range revolution. "We are going to keep the pressure up and we
are going to do everything we can to make sure that this is not a
flash in the pan," he said.

During his Hugh's Chicken Run shows, residents of the Devon town of
Axminster were invited to see free-range and intensive systems running
alongside each other in a shed; many left in tears. According to
separate polling by ACNielsen, half of the four million viewers who
saw the shows said they would buy better chicken.

The cruelty inflicted on broiler birds was also exposed in secret
footage from a farm, reported last month in The Independent. Earlier
this month – to the disgust of the National Farmers' Union and animal
welfare groups – Tesco announced a week-long offer of a £1.99 chicken.
The move is believed by welfare campaigners to have been an attempt to
shift unsold standard birds.

"If the growing consumer demand for free-range, organic and
higher-welfare chicken continues, availability in store could
certainly become an important barrier to consumer choice, at least in
the short term," said Maria Carrol, ACNielsen's consumer insight
manager.

Compassion in World Farming, a campaign group which shot undercover
footage inside a chicken shed in Herefordshire, was jubilant. "It
seems to me that there is a swath of people who have been moved by the
programmes and it seems to be a lasting move, a definite move away
from standard to free-range," said its food policy officer Rowen
West-Henzell. "That's great. But what we need to do is to work with
the people who still buy standard and we are 100 per cent committed to
giving consumers the facts about poultry production and letting them
make their own minds up. With the programme they were exposed to that
reality."

About 800 million chickens are bred in the UK every year. About 92 per
cent of them are still of the "standard" variety, despite the increase
this year.

"I am thrilled but I am still a little bit cautious," said
Fearnley-Whittingstall. "I am delighted we have helped create this
change and I am delighted that, two months after the show, there
appears to be no letting up.

"I just hope the British retailers and the industry are talking to
each other, making sure that new free-range farms are built and new
RSPCA Freedom Food farms are built to cater for a growing demand for
high welfare chicken."