THL UK’s reflections on the Sustainable Chicken Forum and implications for our work

By Molly Archer-Zeff, Gavin Chappell-Bates @ 2026-04-13T14:32 (+19)

Introduction

Following the launch of the Sustainable Chicken Forum (SCF), in which several major UK hospitality companies signalled a move away from the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), we, at The Humane League UK (THL UK), have been reflecting on what this means for our impact and strategy. 

This development has understandably raised questions about the impact of corporate welfare campaigns and the tractability of broiler chicken reforms. 

Our team appreciates your patience during a busy time, especially as many of you have supported our work. In this post, we aim to share our current thinking, and we hope this will answer some of the questions you may have.

We welcome comments and will do our best to respond, although we can’t promise to answer everyone due to capacity constraints. 

Disclosures: This post was written in my capacity as the Philanthropy Lead at The Humane League UK and reflects a collaborative response to the SCF. All substance is from the team’s work, but Gemini was used for stylistic and format improvements. 

Key/ definitions:

Poultry industry: Refers to the production of broiler chickens raised for meat. There are approximately 1.2 billion chickens raised for meat each year in the UK, with around 90% of these being fast-growing breeds. The industry generated 2.4 billion pounds in 2022. 

Egg industry: Refers to the hens raised specifically for egg production (layer hens), with different breeding, housing, and welfare practices than those of meat production. There are approximately 7 million laying hens still in cages in the UK, and approximately 14.5 billion eggs are eaten in the UK in 2025. 

Cage-free campaigns: Cage-free campaigning began in the UK in the 1960s. When THL UK started work in the UK in 2017, only 52% of egg-laying hens were in cage-free systems. Today, approximately 83% of UK egg production is cage-free. Our biggest success was against the UK’s largest egg producer, Noble Foods, which spared 4.3 million hens from cages. 

Better Chicken Commitment (BCC): a science-based pledge created in 2017 asking food companies to improve broiler chicken welfare. There are now 110 commitments to the BCC (changed post SCF news) that impact the UK and many more with a global impact.

The ‘Sustainable’ Chicken Forum 

In February, a group of 8 influential hospitality companies, including  KFC, Nando’s, Burger King, wagamama, Pizza Hut, Loungers, banded together to form the industry-led Sustainable Chicken Forum (SCF).

The group stated that its aim is to advance chicken welfare while “balancing environmental sustainability, carbon reduction and supply pressures”. In doing so, they are stepping away from the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC), particularly its requirement to transition to slower-growing breeds of chicken.

While, as an organisation and broader animal welfare movement, we were aware that progress on breed has been minimal, this move signalled a much firmer rejection of slower-growing breeds than we’ve seen before, and a willingness in the industry to collude in order to free themselves of their animal welfare responsibilities. 

As for the claims the SCF have made regarding welfare, environmental sustainability and carbon reduction, we found many of these to be inaccurate and based on flawed interpretations of evidence. We have responded to these claims in detail in our recent report, Sustaining Suffering: The truth behind the ‘Sustainable’ Chicken Forum.

Where we got things wrong 

The formation of the SCF came at a time when we were already reviewing the progress of our BCC work. However, this development prompted us to take a bigger step back and more critically assess the limitations of our approach, particularly in relation to securing transitions to slower-growing breeds. In particular, we now believe we were mistaken in the following areas:

• We were overly optimistic about the speed at which progress on broiler welfare, especially breed, could be achieved
• The poultry industry is a very different beast to the egg industry, and we should have been more cautious about using our successful cage-free work as a like-for-like template for our BCC work
• Corporate commitments can be fragile when they are not supported by sufficient public awareness and backing

Our strategy for the BCC was heavily informed by our successful cage-free campaigns, where corporate commitments translated relatively quickly into implementation. However, broiler reforms have been more challenging for several reasons: 

1. Public awareness of broiler welfare, especially issues related to fast-growing breeds, is much lower than awareness of cages. The problem itself is also more complex, making it harder to understand.
2. Our cage-free campaigns benefited from decades of advocacy going back to the 1960s; there is no such existing foundation of campaigning and awareness to help facilitate corporate progress for broilers.
3. EU law meant that Method of Production labelling became mandatory on eggs in 2004, making consumers more informed about what they are buying and more able to vote with their wallets. This does not exist for broilers and it is notoriously difficult to determine how chickens have been raised based on labels, which are often misleading.
4. Cage-free reporting is easier, as it is just one criterion that is easy to answer and gather data on, but there was more complexity of having 6 BCC criteria (and 4 sub-categories of enrichment). Many companies had never really reviewed their chicken supply before, and some of them found that they didn't really know where their chicken actually came from. As a result, while BCC accountability was in the plans, it would have been more helpful for us to start this much earlier in the process.
5. The broiler industry is significantly larger and more powerful than the egg industry. It has a budget around three times that of the egg industry and a highly influential trade body, the British Poultry Council.

These factors created a challenging environment for BCC work and we overestimated how quickly corporate commitments - especially promises to transition to slower-growing breeds -  would lead to change, particularly in the absence of widespread public pressure.

What this means for the BCC and our impact

Although the SCF represents a setback, we do not believe it negates the substantial welfare improvements that have already occurred as a result of BCC campaigning, nor does it fundamentally undermine the case for corporate advocacy. 

The BCC was designed in 2017 to raise the minimum level of welfare across the board, rather than to represent a gold standard. Since then, there have been significant improvements across the poultry industry. Most major UK supermarkets have shifted to lower stocking densities (30kg/m²), affecting approximately 900 million chickens annually. Environmental conditions have also improved substantially, with most chickens now having access to natural light and enrichment. There has been some, albeit limited, progress on shifting to slower-growing breeds. 

In comparison to the situation for chickens in 2017, in 2026 the situation is such:

Unfortunately, in the time THL UK has been operating, chicken consumption has risen in the UK, from just under 1 billion in 2016 to over 1.2 billion now. This growth has been driven by shifting consumer preferences and marketing that positions chicken as a healthier, leaner, more affordable, and more environmentally friendly option. We believe our work has prevented a significant degree of suffering, as without BCC work, not only would the number of broilers farmed have increased, but they would be, for the most part, raised in higher stocking densities.

While many BCC commitments are still incomplete, despite 2026 deadlines, these changes still represent a meaningful reduction of suffering for millions of chickens. Our view is that this is unlikely to have occurred without sustained corporate campaigning and accountability work.

Implications for our ACE recommendation 

THL UK has been rated by Animal Charity Evaluators as part of The Humane League. 

The SCF news has prompted questions about our ACE review and cost-effectiveness estimates and we’d like to share some of our thinking on this.  Please note that we cannot speak on behalf of ACE or how they may interpret this news; the following reflects our own interpretation rather than official commentary on their review.

In ACE’s most recent evaluation, the UK-specific analysis focused only on our BCC accountability work. We would like to highlight that the review considered the overall potential risks with corporate advocacy, including implementation and backsliding. The review states, “However, we view this as emphasizing the importance of accountability work and ongoing movement pressure, rather than undermining the case for corporate reforms themselves.” 

The timelines used in ACE’s modelling already extended beyond the original 2026 BCC deadline and were also assigned with a level of uncertainty. 

It was estimated that our work is likely to help 46 broiler chickens per dollar through driving a transition to farming systems compliant with the BCC, equating to 30 suffering adjusted days averted per dollar. 

This is based on a cost-effectiveness analysis, which took into account “expected probability of companies meeting their commitments at all” and “companies' expected implementation date (years from now)”. Both of these were assigned a ‘high’ level of uncertainty:

“The figures indicating the number of years it will take companies to implement their commitments, compared to when they would have done so if not for THL’s accountability campaigning, were extremely rough estimates based on the limited evidence available.”

Our interpretation is that ACE explicitly recognised risks related to uncertainty, delays, and backsliding, and incorporated these into their analysis. We believe that the base risks posed by the development of the SCF are broadly consistent with the risks already incorporated into the review. 

The key bottleneck: public awareness 

The SCF news has confirmed what we suspected and now see as a major bottleneck: low public awareness and salience of broiler welfare.

In January, we ran a survey with 754 nationally representative UK respondents. The results suggest that while a large majority of the public reports that chicken welfare matters to them, far fewer people are aware of fast-growing breeds or take this into account when making purchasing decisions. 

• 37% of people said they're aware of the issue of fast-growing chickens. This likely overstates the true number.
• 30% of people say they try to avoid buying fast-growing chickens at the supermarket. This figure is likely significantly inflated. A more realistic estimate, derived from further analysis (which excluded people who previously stated they were unaware of the issue) is 17%. Even this revised number is probably an overstatement of the true proportion of shoppers who explicitly look to avoid fast-growing chickens.
• On the other hand, 83% of people indicated that chicken welfare is important to their purchasing decisions. 

Here is a link to the questions asked.

While the results suggest a large audience who are open to our message, they also demonstrate that shoppers are assuming their chicken purchases align with their values when they don’t. There is a significant gap between values and understanding. Many consumers assume that the products on supermarket shelves already meet acceptable welfare standards, thereby reducing pressure on companies to follow through on more ambitious commitments.

What this means for our strategy going forward 

In light of this, we think that achieving further progress on broiler welfare, and particularly the issue of breed, will require making it a more salient public issue. Corporate advocacy remains necessary, but it is unlikely to be sufficient on its own. We need to make selling fast-growing breeds a significant reputational issue for retailers. This will require a change in awareness, concern, and buying behaviour in the long term. We’re aware that this work will not happen overnight.

One of our primary goals for the year ahead will focus on growing the public profile of broiler breed issues using a combination of media engagement, partnerships, and other efforts to reach broader audiences, alongside continued corporate and accountability work.

Conclusion

Overall, our current view is that corporate welfare advocacy continues to be a high-impact strategy, but its future success, and the success of the BCC, relies on increased public awareness and salience of the issue of breed. 

The SCF does not change our belief that our campaigns so far have led to significant welfare improvements for hundreds of thousands of chickens. However, it does suggest that further progress will depend heavily on the success of our work to increase public awareness and concern. 

We are continuing to assess the implications of this development and refine our strategy accordingly. This has included organising several Leadership Team workshops to review our strategic priorities and vision, as currently stated in our strategy, and examining new threats and opportunities. For this, we brought in external support and have, and will continue to, consult other organisations and key funders. 

Immediately after the news, we also set ourselves targets for short-term reactive work focusing on preventing the spread of misinformation about the welfare of fast-growing breeds and mounting a visible response to the SCF. We are continuing to monitor the situation and will continue reacting when required. SCF is now a new player in our work, and we will be considering them as part of our planned broiler strategy update. 

We are grateful to everyone who has supported our work so far, and we aim to post further updates as our efforts to raise the public profile of broilers progress. 

If you would like to follow our campaigns and support us through digital action, I suggest signing up to our mailing list. If you are interested in supporting our work through a donation, you can give via our website or contact me at marcherzeff@thehumaneleague.org.uk.