ASPCA Grades Grocers’ Progress on Farm Animal Welfare Commitments
The ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) has released the latest ASPCA Supermarket Scorecard, a ranking of grocery retailers in the United States on various farm animal welfare issues.
The scorecard is part of the ASPCA’s Shop with Your Heart program, introduced in 2016 to make consumers, food businesses and lawmakers aware of solutions created to improve the lives of animals raised for food. Building on last year’s first-ever scorecard, which evaluated supermarkets on three key animal welfare issues in their supply chains — cage confinement of laying hens, crate confinement of pregnant pigs, and the treatment and breed health of chickens raised for meat — the second annual report assesses more retailers and looks at whether companies are eliminating certain inhumane farming practices from their own private label programs.
According to this year’s findings, some retailers have made progress on their promises to eliminate inhumane practices from store shelves and are incorporating higher-welfare products into their private lines, with several chains offering private label products at lower prices than independent brands that use such industrial practices as caging. For the second consecutive year, Whole Foods Market and Sprouts Farmers Market scored highest in this area.
Additional insights included the following:
- Four Supermarket Chains Have Made Progress Since Last Year: Albertsons, Key Food, The Kroger Co. and Safeway all advanced on their promises to eliminate confinement in their supply chains, either improving their farm animal welfare policies or reporting progress since last year.
- Eggs Lead Higher Welfare Private Label Options: All evaluated stores except Piggly Wiggly offered cage-free private label eggs, while nine operators also carry at least some store-brand pork products that are gestation crate-free.
- Four Grocery Retailers Lag Behind: The aforementioned Piggly Wiggly, along with Save A Lot, Trader Joe’s and Winn-Dixie, has made no storewide commitment to address key farm animal welfare issues in the future.
According to the results of a national public opinion survey, 91% of consumers want companies to address the treatment of farm animals and the environment as a part of their corporate sustainability programs, with most willing to switch supermarkets if they discovered that theirs didn’t offer more humane alternatives to factory-farmed food. Progressive Grocer’s 2024 Consumer Expenditures Study found that one-third of shoppers are buying more store brands and consider ethical sourcing to be very important, making higher-welfare private label products a prime opportunity for supermarkets to earn and retain customer loyalty.
“Stores that hope to appeal to the growing number of consumers who are concerned about animal welfare can no longer ignore the plight of farmed animals ― and for those supermarkets, there’s no better place to start than their own private labels,” asserted Nancy Roulston, senior director of corporate policy and animal scientist, ASPCA Farm Animal Welfare. “By choosing which products fill their shelves, supermarkets determine the welfare of billions of animals and the survival of higher-welfare farms across the country, so it has never been more urgent that they set strong animal welfare policies and reliably offer shoppers more humanely raised products.”
The ASPCA scorecard aims to encourage supermarkets to source from the growing number of egg, pork and chicken brands that have invested in higher welfare standards, including the hundreds of products that appear on the New York-based organization’s Shop With Your Heart Grocery List.
Whole Foods Market (Amazon), Kroger, Albertsons/Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Sprouts Farmers Market, Save A Lot, Key Food are Nos. 2, 4, 9, 33, 51, 58, 68, respectively, on The PG 100, PG’s 2024 list of North America’s top retailers of food and consumables.
