A Fast-Food Breakfast Favorite Is on Its Way to Becoming More Humane

Six months after announcing that it would phase out antibiotics from the birds its chicken meat comes from, McDonald’s is making big changes on the egg side of its poultry supply chain: The chain is going cage-free.

The change will take 10 years to complete and will apply to the U.S. and Canadian markets, which will follow locations in the European Union, which are already cage-free. A percentage of McDonald’s U.S. egg supply—13 million eggs annually—has been cage-free since 2011.

“Our customers are increasingly interested in knowing more about their food and where it comes from,” Mike Andres, president of McDonald’s USA, said in a press release Wednesday. “Our decision to source only cage-free eggs reinforces the focus we place on food quality and our menu to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations.”

The chain currently buys more than 2 billion eggs annually—a number that will likely climb when it expands the hours of its breakfast service—which requires the laying efforts of some 8 million hens. Save for those hens that are already cage-free, the birds have a living space that’s equivalent to a letter-size piece of paper.

Once the changes are implemented, “these eight million animals will be able to walk inside a barn, spread their wings, perch, lay their eggs in nests, and engage in other important natural behaviors denied to caged hens,” Wayne Pacelle, the president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, wrote in a blog post.

McDonald’s announcement follows promises from cereal maker General Mills to go cage-free—and public backlash over Costco’s failure to follow through on its commitment to end poultry confinement. While other major food companies, including Starbucks and Nestlé, have pledged to change their supply chains as well, we’re a long way from upending the industry norm of battery cages: There were 291 million laying hens in the U.S. in 2013, according to the Iowa Egg Council, and just 5.7 percent of those birds were cage-free. Removing McDonald’s 8 million birds from their cages will only bump up that number by 2 percent.

Still, the chain is a major buyer, and history has shown that when McDonald’s adopts new standards, others follow. Take gestation crates: When McDonald’s announced that it would stop using the tight confinements for its breeding sows three years ago, Pacelle noted, more than 60 other food companies soon did the same.