It Only Takes 50 Cents: How Your Support Spares Birds from Cages at Scale

It can spare two individuals from life in a cage.

That’s not an exaggeration. That’s the result of nearly a decade of negotiations and protests, petitions and open letters, brainstorms and breakthroughs. From 2015 to 2024, people like you powered corporate campaigns with a clear goal: get food companies to commit to ending the use of cages on factory farms, and then make sure they follow through. When we lined up the costs next to the progress we’ve made for animals, the picture was encouraging.

Your dollar moves the food industry beyond cages, changing policies—and lives—at scale.

Why corporate campaigns are such a powerful lever

Changing one person’s purchasing habits helps one, or maybe a few, or maybe a dozen animals. Changing a company’s policy helps every single animal in that company’s egg supply—this year and every year after that. Your support creates a ripple effect:

• A single policy from a market leader (like McDonald’s) sets a new norm competitors feel pressure to meet.
• Farms retool their systems to meet new demand, making it easier and faster for the next company to switch.
• Holding companies accountable keeps momentum alive long after the headlines fade, so progress doesn’t backslide.

These aren’t one‑off wins. They’re systemic changes to “business as usual.” Just think of the scale of a single corporate decision. When a national brand like McDonald’s or Walmart or The Cheesecake Factory changes its egg policy, that choice touches every omelet station, every factory line, every product across hundreds or even thousands of locations. One policy can affect hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of hens each year, and billions of hens over the course of a decade.

Twenty years ago, cage-free felt like a long shot. Today, more than four in ten hens in the US are out of cages, and global brands are moving their supply chains to match. That shift didn’t happen on its own. You funded the investigators who surfaced facts, the negotiators who sat across from executives, the campaigners who built public pressure, and the steady accountability that turned corporate commitments into real‑world change for animals. Policies don’t appear on their own, and they don’t complete themselves. Real change shows up when people like you apply steady pressure and then stick around long enough to make sure businesses actually deliver on their promises.

The model behind “two hens per dollar”

We built a clear, conservative equation so you can see how THL’s corporate cage-free campaigns translate into outcomes. Here’s the formula our team developed to measure our impact:

Hens spared from cages per dollar spent = (Hens covered by corporate commitments × the share of those commitments actually fulfilled × THL’s share of the credit) ÷ (All costs to win those commitments + all costs to hold companies to them)

Let’s break down what these variables mean:

• We started with the number of hens impacted by corporate commitments: For each food company we’ve partnered with or pressured to end cages, we needed to estimate how many hens are in that company’s egg supply. When companies share their purchasing data (for example, with the USDA), we use those numbers. When they don’t (because restaurants, grocery stores, and other food businesses don’t always publicly disclose how many eggs they use), we build our own reasonable estimates based on sector benchmarks and known data. All this number crunching means we have rough estimates of the amount of eggs each company uses every year. And knowing that a battery cage hen lays, on average, 281 eggs per year, we can extrapolate the number of hens in each company’s supply chain.
• Then we figured out the share of those commitments actually fulfilled: We track fulfillment—how close each company is to being 100% cage‑free—based on company reporting and our own internal verification. If a company hasn’t reported progress, we count it as 0% until we can verify otherwise. That pushes the overall figure down, but it keeps our estimate on the conservative side.
• Then we factored in THL’s share of the credit: The farm animal protection movement is inherently collaborative, and progress comes not only from holding companies accountable but also from legislative progress like country and state laws banning cages. In determining this variable, we went with 50% as a conservative estimate to reflect that we have played a bigger role in some wins and a smaller role in others.
• Finally, we accounted for every relevant dollar: We added up everything it cost THL, between 2015 and 2024, to win cage‑free commitments and to make sure those commitments are met—research, negotiations, public campaigning—plus proportional overhead. We excluded costs from other programs (like work to protect chickens raised for meat or broader movement‑building), so the result reflects this program alone, not an overall assessment of THL’s cost-effectiveness. And we made sure to adjust for inflation.

Add it up, and the math lands at roughly two hens spared from cages per US dollar invested in THL’s corporate cage‑free campaigns over that period. For a more detailed look at our methodology, head over to the Effective Altruism Forum.

Where your next dollar goes

The cost-effectiveness of our cage-free campaigns isn’t a fixed thing. It’s a snapshot in time. As more companies fulfill their commitments, the remaining holdouts might require more time and resources to end the use of cages. Some regions may get tougher. But others might unlock big wins quickly. Through those shifts, we strongly believe corporate campaigns remain one of the most efficient ways to spare hens from cages.

Alongside THL’s movement-building programs and other campaigns, your support pushes the next company to commit and stay on track. It pays for research, negotiations, public campaigns, and the rigorous follow‑ups that turn promises into realities: hens actually out of cages. That’s how ordinary dollars do extraordinary good.