Liz Fergus
Two of America’s biggest grocers are making real progress on their promises to end animal cruelty. Others should take note.
In the span of just a few weeks, two of the country’s largest supermarket retailers have published serious, detailed, transparent plans for ending the extreme confinement of hens. In the American grocery industry, that kind of momentum is worth paying attention to.
First came Ahold Delhaize.
The sixth largest grocer in the United States—and the company behind Stop & Shop, Food Lion, Giant Food, and Hannaford—made history in March with a commitment to end the use of cruel battery cages across its entire supply chain. The pledge came with concrete action steps, interim milestones, and annual public reporting. The company also committed to introducing clear in-store signage across more than 2,000 locations so that customers can make informed choices about the kinds of eggs they’re choosing. For approximately 5 million hens, that commitment is life-changing.
Then came Target.
America’s fourth largest supermarket retailer has published one of the most detailed cage-free roadmaps we’ve seen from a major US retailer: a firm 2030 deadline, year-by-year benchmarks, and transparent progress reporting by unit volume. More than 600 of its stores already offer exclusively cage-free eggs. At least 200 additional stores will convert to a fully cage-free egg assortment by October of this year. All national brand eggs sold at Target will come from cage-free sources by the end of 2026. And for the first time, Target is reporting its progress by units sold rather than by revenue—a clearer measure, since cage-free eggs typically sell at higher prices and revenue figures can obscure how far a company actually has to go.
Together, these two updates are raising the bar for what a credible cage-free commitment looks like—and other retailers will find that bar increasingly difficult to ignore.
Why transparency matters as much as the timeline
It would be easy to focus only on the numbers: percentages, SKUs, store counts. But what’s most significant about both of these updates is that they exist at all, and in this level of detail. Public, verifiable plans are how promises to animals become real. Without them, a pledge is just words on a page.
Ahold Delhaize’s commitment to annual reporting and in-store signage. Target’s year-by-year benchmarks and clear unit-volume reporting. These details make it possible for anyone, whether a shopper or an advocate, to track whether a company is actually doing what it said it would do.
A hen in a battery cage lives in a space roughly the size of a sheet of paper. She can’t spread her wings, perch, or do much of anything that matters to her. More and more people, whether they eat eggs or not, agree that these animals don’t deserve to suffer. Retailers like Ahold Delhaize and Target are demonstrating that they understand that. The retailers who don’t are increasingly out of step with their own customers. Grocers like Kroger and Walmart made cage-free commitments a decade ago. The clock is ticking, and what a credible commitment looks like has just been defined—clearly—by their peers.
The work continues
The era of caged eggs is ending. Nearly half of all egg-laying hens in the US live in cage-free housing. Retail giant Amazon has offered exclusively cage-free eggs since 2022. Now, two of America’s biggest grocers are showing what moving in the right direction actually looks like. The rest of the industry is watching—and so are we.
