Like many food and beverage products and ingredients increasingly found under a cultural spotlight, consumers want greater transparency about the animal proteins they purchase today. The reasons for greater public scrutiny on the backstory of where animal proteins come from (and how they are raised) are multidimensional, relating to beliefs about diet, ethics and the environment.  As a culture, we’ve also been thinking about animal welfare for at least a century: Upton Sinclair sounded an alarm about both animal and worker welfare with the publication of “The Jungle” in 1905. “The Jungle” raised awareness about the mistreatment of workers and faults in the American meatpacking industry and created tensions that eventually influenced the development of the Food and Drug Administration.
Today, animal welfare is no longer a niche issue for consumers most active in the worlds of sustainability or organic and natural; it is a topic becoming very familiar to an increasing number of mainstream consumers helped along by recent books like David Kirby’s “Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment” and “The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food” by Ted Genoways.
Consumers are increasingly drawing connections between their own health and the conditions in which animals are raised. Our latest sustainability report, Transparency 2015: Establishing Trust with Consumers, finds that definitions of sustainability increasingly relate to responsible agricultural and natural resource practices, while concerns for fair treatment of both animals and workers are on the rise. Almost half of consumers (47 percent) say they support companies that avoid inhumane treatment of animals (up 6 points from 2013).  Similarly, they’d like information about how a company treats animals used in its products (44 percent) and are interested in knowing more about:
  • Use of hormones or antibiotics
  • The use of animals in product safety testing
  • Sustainable fishing practices and knowing that catches do not harm species (such as dolphins)
Consumer desire to know more about inhumane treatment of animals is up 6 percentage points in 2015 from 2013. Question: Which of the following aspects of animal welfare practices would make you more likely to buy a product? Key areas of concern include assurance that other animals were not harmed, that animals were raised humanely and not used in product testing. Source: Transparency 2015 Report, The Hartman Group, Inc.
Consumer desire to know more about inhumane treatment of animals is up 6 percentage points in 2015 from 2013. Question: Which of the following aspects of animal welfare practices would make you more likely to buy a product? Key areas of concern include assurance that other animals were not harmed, that animals were raised humanely and not used in product testing. Source: Transparency 2015 Report, The Hartman Group, Inc.