McDonald's Corp. announced on Wednesday that the world's largest fast-food chain is planning to serve cage-free eggs in their 16,000 restaurants in the United States and Canada by 2025. The announcement came after it unveiled its two-year plan in March to phase out poultry products taken from chickens living in caged conditions, which are usually raised with antibiotics to fight human infections.
Since McDonald's Corp. is preparing to serve breakfast all day in its U.S. branches in October and consuming about 2 billion eggs in the U.S. and 120 million for Canada, the company decided to switch to antibiotic-free chickens, grass-fed beef and cage-free eggs. The move also aims to restore the company's decreasing sales, Channel NewsAsia noted.
Aside from McDonald's, Burger King is also committed to use only cage-free eggs by 2017. Other large companies including Starbucks Corp, General Mills Inc, Nestle, Sodexo Inc and Aramark are also in the process of switching.
Meanwhile, the long-awaited shift is happening as eggs suppliers and retailers are slowly mitigating the impact and rebuilding flocks after the deadly avian flu, which was the worst bird flu outbreak in U.S. history, killing millions of laying hens this year.
Despite the increase in the prices of cage-free eggs, McDonald's Supply Chain Management Senior Vice President Marion Gross believes that the impact of the company's decision for a change as well as the similar moves by other companies would help lower down the price of cage-free eggs.
"We believe over time that, with our scale, we will be able to mitigate cost impact on our system," she said, as per NDTV Food.
Furthermore, McDonald's new CEO Wayne Easterbrook also explained that the shift is intended to position the fast-food chain as a "modern, progressive burger company." Since it is plagued by declining sales earlier this year which resulted to the closure of 700 branches worldwide, the move is also an attempt to remain significant in an industry that gradually builds animal welfare into its marketing plans, The Vancouver Sun has learned.
With the increasing demand of cage-free eggs from McDonald's and other companies, can farmers produce an adequate supply of organic poultry products?
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