We want to change the lives of 6.7 million birds. Here’s how.

The global food system operates at a massive scale. Every year, the food industry forces billions of animals to suffer through life on factory farms, enduring countless forms of abuse. Among the worst of these abuses is the use of battery cages—tight, wire mesh crates that don't even give hens enough space to stretch their wings.

Animal welfare experts agree that battery cages are disastrous for hens' physical and psychological well-being. These experts also agree that chickens are intelligent, curious, emotional, and social animals. Every one of the hens suffering in our food system is an individual being with her own personalities, thoughts, and feelings. And every one of these hens deserves better than a life in a cage.

That's why we fight relentlessly to bring an end to the use of cruel battery cages. At The Humane League, we publicly pressure top food companies to protect hens from the most extreme forms of confinement. From bakeries to restaurants, from grocery stores to caterers, we're pushing corporations across the food industry to make—and share—their progress and plans towards eliminating cruel cages from their supply chains.

And, thanks to compassionate people like you, our efforts are paying off. In 2008, "cage-free" was far from the norm in the United States. In a matter of just 15 years, between 2008 and 2023, the percentage of hens confined to life in a battery cage dropped from more than 95% to less than 70%. As of March 2023, over 38.3% of the US egg-laying flock lives in cage-free housing—that's over 119 million hens. In just a decade, the size of the caged flock has shrunken by over a third. That's a huge number of hens spared from acute and unnecessary suffering.

With the momentum on our side, we've set an ambitious goal. This year, we want to spare 6,700,000 birds from extreme confinement.

6,700,000 represents the approximate number of hens that our top company targets collectively rely on for millions of eggs each year. If, together, we can persuade these corporations to follow through on their own pledges to do better for animals, then an estimated 6,700,000 hens could one day be spared from the worst forms of confinement. 

And this change will reverberate through our entire food system. With every company we influence, we move closer and closer to a tipping point: that pivotal moment when corporations finally realize there's a new normal. One that doesn't involve an inhumane and archaic form of animal abuse: the battery cage. With this goal to spare 6,700,000 hens from one of the most extreme forms of confinement in modern agriculture, we're making a real difference for the birds in our food system.

To note, we are aware of the limitations of this calculation and it is our best estimate under current circumstances. We welcome advice on how to improve this estimate.

Why we set this ambitious goal

Year to year, we frame our goals in terms of the number of food companies we hope to influence. This year, we wanted to understand our goals in terms of the number of hens whose lives could be impacted by our corporate work. Because, at the end of the day, we do what we do for the animals. We change how companies do business so we can change the lives of animals.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to put a number to just how many animals our work has impacted. We knew it was a big number—in the multiple millions—but the nuances of supply chain issues, sales data, and welfare policy timelines made it hard to know the actual number of individual hens who stood to benefit from any one company's commitment to go cage-free, let alone all the companies we pressure each year. 

Part of the problem is that most of these companies don't share any information about the number of hens in their supply chains. Chances are, they don't even keep track. Some companies share the number of eggs they use annually, which we can use to approximate the number of hens laying those eggs. But the truth is that the vast majority of companies don't publicly disclose their annual egg usage. Which means that food corporations aren't just secretive about their factory farms and slaughterhouses and the status of their pledges to end cages. They're also secretive about the sheer number of individual animals their practices exploit every day. In this way, companies condemn the hens in their supply chains not only to agony but also to oblivion: nameless, faceless, numberless. It makes it easier to get away with animal abuse on a mass scale.

In spite of the food industry's glaring lack of concrete data, our team at The Humane League set out to put a number to the suffering. Because these individuals are at the very heart of all of the work we do. We wanted to be able to understand our impact in terms of the animals themselves—not just in terms of the companies complicit in their harm.

How we calculated the number 6.7 million

6,700,000. What does this number actually mean? 

Imagine if our highest-priority corporate targets released all their caged hens today. 6,700,000 hens would fully extend their wings for the first time. This number estimates the total potential impact we could have if every single one of these companies removed battery cages from their supply chains—right this second.

Realistically, it will take years for companies to fully eliminate battery cages. With our 2023 goal, we wanted to be thinking big-picture, and in the most aspirational terms possible, about the total potential impact of our work. At the same time, we're also always keeping track of the important incremental progress these companies are making as they transition their supply chains from 0% to 100% cage-free. Our data spreadsheet tracks both the total potential impact and incremental progress in terms of the number of hens.

To get to the number 6,700,000, we took a look at the companies we're targeting this year through public campaigns. Our corporate engagement experts identified hundreds of companies, across various sectors of the food industry, that have promised to stop confining hens to battery cages—but that have failed to share any progress towards fulfilling those promises. This year, we're focusing our efforts on holding these companies accountable to make good on their commitments to animals. So, 6,700,000 reflects the high-priority corporations we're publicly pressuring over the course of 2023. 

Of course, at The Humane League, our outreach to companies extends beyond just those that we're influencing in public. Our team is continuously reaching out to companies behind-the-scenes, too, to push them to spare animals from abuse. If every single company we reached out to this year followed through, we could make an impact in the lives of 250,000,000 hens. 6,700,000 represents a more realistic—but still ambitious—goal, based on the companies we'll be pressuring most aggressively. So, as we persuade corporations to make progress, we'll factor all the hens at all these companies into our running tally towards our goal. Because every hen protected is a hen protected. Together, we're going to do everything we can to reach 6,700,000 hens—and hopefully surpass it. Every action you take moves us closer to achieving this goal. For the animals.

These are the challenges we faced in estimating impact

Food companies don't make the numbers easy to track down. Here's how we pulled it off.

For each company on our list, we found published sources that outline their locations, annual revenues, and—whenever possible—the number of eggs that pass through their supply chains each year. These sources include: company press releases, official websites, and United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) databases on egg market trends. 

But, all of this is information hinged on the number of eggs. What we really wanted was the number of hens—sentient, individual animals—who are currently trapped in cages in each company's supply chain. So, we took all of the publicly available information and did our own calculations based on the rule of thumb that hens lay 281 eggs per year. As we went, we populated our spreadsheet.

Here's what our math looked like:

Scenario A: we knew how many eggs a company used each year

We divided the # of eggs by 281 eggs per year at Company A, which yields the # of hens impacted per year at Company A. (On average, hens lay 281 eggs per year.)

For example, we know from a press release that McDonald's uses approximately 2,000,000,000 eggs per year. Dividing that by 281 eggs per year yields 7,117,438 hens impacted per year at McDonald's.

Scenario B: we didn’t know the # of eggs per year used by a particular company, but we did know the # of locations that the company operated

We calculated the # of eggs per location for a similar company, Company A, and used that number to estimate the # eggs at Company B. 

Then, we divided the # of eggs by 281 eggs per year at Company B, which yields the # of hens impacted per year at Company B.

For example, we might not know the # of eggs per year that Burger King uses. But we do know that Burger King operates 8,600 locations (in the US). We also know that McDonald's operates 14,000 locations (in the US), and that it uses 2,000,000,000 eggs per year. So, assuming that each location uses the same amount of eggs, we can estimate that McDonald's uses 142,857 eggs per location. Assuming that Burger King uses a similar amount of eggs as McDonald's, we can multiply Burger King's 8,600 locations by McDonald's 142,857 eggs per location to approximate that Burger King uses 1,228,570,200 eggs per year. Dividing that by 281 eggs per year yields approximately 4,372,136 hens impacted per year at Burger King. This figure is fairly accurate, as we do happen to know, via USDA AMS Agricultural Analytics, that Burger King uses an estimated 1,200,000,000 eggs per year, or approximately 4,270,463 hens.

Scenario C: we didn’t know # of eggs per year used by a particular company, and we didn’t know the # of locations that the company operated, but we did know the company’s annual revenue

We calculated the # of eggs used per $1 million spent for a similar company, Company C, and used that number to estimate the # of eggs at Company D.

Then, we divided the # of eggs by 281 eggs per year at Company D, which yields the # of hens impacted per year at Company D.

For example, we didn't know the # of eggs that Sterling Spoon Culinary Group or Southern Foodservice Management had in their supply chains each year. But we do know the annual revenue for those two food service providers. So we looked for a food service provider, with a similar annual revenue, which did have data on the # of eggs per year: Revolution Foods. Revolution Foods uses around 3,000,000 eggs per year, so we divided the # of eggs per year by annual revenue, which told us that it uses about 69,767 eggs per 1 million spent each year__. Assuming that a company with a similar revenue uses a similar amount of eggs, we took the __annual revenues__ of Sterling Spoon Culinary Group or Southern Foodservice Management and multiplied them by __69,767 eggs per 1 million spent to estimate the # of eggs per year used by each of those companies. Then, by dividing those numbers by 281 eggs per year, we estimated the # of hens in their supply chains.

Reflecting on our estimates

Once we got through all these calculations, we could finally estimate the number of hens that stand to be impacted if we successfully hold our high-priority campaign targets accountable for following through on their cage-free commitments. And that number is 6,700,000.

Inevitably, these numbers and approximations aren’t perfect—but they represent our best estimate based on the data we have access to. Along the way, we encountered various limitations and made a handful of assumptions.

Here’s where we ran into challenges, and how we solved for them:

Definitions: Different companies use different quantities of eggs, in different forms (shell, liquid, and ingredient), and they talk about these quantities and forms in different ways.

• Each of these points varies by the type of company and sector. For example, a company might report using 25% shell eggs, 15% liquid, and 80% ingredient eggs.
• Another company might not use any shell eggs. When we didn’t know a company’s overall egg usage, we focused on its shell egg usage if that number was available.

Data hygiene: The accuracy of companies' self-reported egg usage statistics vary from company to company.

• There is no industry standard, let alone requirement, that companies publish the number of eggs they use annually. In the absence of companies' self-reported data, we turned to available public data from the USDA. We took companies' and public data at face value and sought to find the most up-to-date information whenever possible. The USDA data, however, is based on estimates from 2018 and may be outdated. 
• For example, unless otherwise noted in Column U of our spreadsheet, all of the restaurants' and retailers' locations data is from the USDA data set from 2018. Our goal was to keep the data consistent with our estimation of eggs per year. As a result, the locations data may be slightly out of date.

Calculations: Our calculations are limited by a scarcity of information.

• We relied heavily on self-reported data, which may contain inaccuracies, and public data, which are estimates.
• We assumed that, on average, hens lay 281 eggs per year, but this number may fluctuate depending on breed, age, nutrition, and health.
• In cases where we extrapolated one company’s egg usage based on another company’s information, we didn’t take into account the differences in menus. For example, eggs may comprise 50% of McDonald’s menu but only 35% of Burger King’s menu. Our calculations assumed that McDonald’s and Burger King operated similarly enough—in terms of general offerings and business scope—that their egg usage would also be similar. In other words, we assumed that location, revenue, and egg usage are proportional for each company, and between companies.

Our goal: We are choosing to articulate our goal in terms of the total potential impact of our work, not in terms of the actual number of hens walking free as a result of our work right now.

• The figure 6,700,000 represents the potential impact of our work with high-priority food companies this year. If all these companies completely followed through on their pledges to eliminate battery cages from their supply chains, then we estimate that 6,700,000 hens could one day be spared from battery cages.
• Of course, not all companies will become 100% cage-free by the end of this year—some are currently reporting that they’re 5%, 20%, or 75% of the way there. As of the end of March, 2023, we estimate that 502,190 hens in our target companies’ supply chains are actually living free from battery cages.

6,700,000 may not be a perfect number, but it represents our best educated guess at the number of hens we might be able to impact through our efforts this year.

How we’ll achieve it

As of 2022, over 300 million hens lay eggs in the US food system, and roughly 200 million hens live in battery cages. The sheer immensity of this suffering is overwhelming, mind numbing, and heartbreaking.

At The Humane League, we believe that institutional change can make a profound difference in reducing the suffering of animals—until, eventually, we end the abuse of all animals raised for food. This kind of sweeping change to how our food system functions—to how food companies in particular do business—will take time. And it’ll take incremental progress, over years if not decades. But we’re in it to win it. And we’re absolutely committed to playing the long game.

So we’re going to keep doing what we do best—pressuring companies to eliminate cruel cages from their supply chains. Alongside compassionate consumers and our community of changemakers, we’ll sign petitions, make phone calls, organize protests, and negotiate with companies to demand better for animals. We’ve already seen progress from many corporate giants, and we’re leveraging that momentum to influence bigger targets—even entire sectors of the food industry. All of these efforts translate into real progress for birds, as companies follow through on their commitments to end the use of cruel cages. And that progress translates into a kinder, more compassionate future for all animals.

Right now, the futures of 6,700,000 hens are on the line. We’re taking on the world's biggest and cruelest companies to help them—and we need you on our side to see it through. Will you change the lives of chickens with us?