Opinion: Loblaw has broken its promise to get hens out of cages, despite windfall profits

Written for Daily Hive by Eduarda Nedeff, who is a corporate campaigns manager with Animal Justice, a national animal law and policy advocacy organization.

The past year has been a tough one for Canadians, with many of us feeling stretched to the breaking point by food inflation and rising costs. But there’s never been a better time to be a major grocery chain.

A report from Dalhousie University shows that the top three Canadian grocers posted higher profits in 2022 compared with the last five years, with Loblaw Companies Ltd. leading the pack by a wide margin.

The grocery chain parent company, which owns Real Canadian Superstore, T&T Supermarket, and SuperValu, among other brands, increased profits by over 30% in the third quarter of 2022, earning $663 million for common shareholders. Fourth quarter numbers released on February 23 show Loblaw earned $529 million in profits, reaching $1.76 per share and beating analysts’ expectations of $1.71 per share. Their revenue went up nearly 10% compared to the same period in 2021.

The company has become the focus of much public frustration. At the risk of piling on, it’s worth noting that the company is falling short in yet another way — its failure to reinvest those massive profits into keeping promises to get cruel cages out of its supply chain for hens and pigs, raised for eggs and bacon.

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In 2016, Loblaw and other major retailers responded to major pressure from the public, promising to stop selling eggs from caged hens by 2025. At the time, consumers were shocked by undercover footage that emerged from investigations of Canadian egg farms, giving people a first glimpse at the suffering that hens endure on modern egg farms.

Hidden behind closed barn doors, hens on egg factory farms face some of the most egregious forms of cruelty in the Canadian food system, with birds packed into wire cages so small they can’t move freely or even spread their wings. Wire-floored cages, with little space and no stimulation, are standard practice for the egg industry in Canada. Each hen suffers immensely, trapped in a tiny space roughly the size of a sheet of paper for her entire life.

Loblaw also agreed in 2013 to stop selling pork from systems where mother pigs are brutally confined in gestation crates — cages that are almost the exact size of a pregnant pig. Pigs can stand up or lie down but can’t turn around, socialize with other animals, or fulfill any natural urges.

But a decade after first committing to improving animal welfare, Loblaw has backed away from promises to get hens and pigs out of cages, and announced they will fail to meet their 2022 deadline to move away from gestation crates, and their 2025 deadline to sell only cage-free eggs. And instead of being transparent and publicly sharing their progress or a new timeline for going cage-free, Loblaw has clammed up. Instead of using their superior market position to drive food system reform, Loblaw is trying to shift responsibility onto farmers for not supplying enough cage-free products.

Perhaps they’re hoping that Canadians won’t notice, or that we’ll all be so distracted by grocery inflation that we won’t care. I doubt it.

Dozens of Torontonians gathered in front of the Maple Leaf Gardens Loblaws last weekend at a protest organized by Animal Justice to ask the grocer to keep its promise and go 100% cage-free by 2025. Many Loblaws customers were shocked to learn about the broken promise, and horrified that hens are still kept in tiny cages. Around 100 customers signed postcards directed to Loblaw’s president Galen Weston, demanding the company go cage-free.

Consumer research consistently shows that people do care about the welfare of animals on farms. But with broken promises and a lack of transparency on animal welfare from grocers and the farming industry, it’s no wonder that public trust in the food system is on the decline — with people citing lack of transparency and profit-driven systems as key reasons.

Canada has fallen behind on regulating the welfare of animals on farms — something our federal and provincial governments refuse to do so. This means that grocers have a special obligation to lead the way in getting some of the cruellest practices out of the food system.

At a time when Loblaw and other grocers can hardly afford to lose further support, fulfilling cage-free promises to shoppers isn’t just a matter of morality — it’s also a matter of good business.