News

Chicken commitment

During 2023, BM Caterers engaged with our chicken suppliers to better understand their awareness of and compliance to the European Chicken Commitment (ECC). To survey our full supplier base, we engaged with our major volume supplier, co-developing a questionnaire with them.

To date, we’re pleased that we’ve had engagement from most suppliers, representing circa 80% of our total annual spend on chicken.

Whilst awareness of the ECC is good, full compliance is currently challenging for some of our suppliers and we are working with them to find ways to drive compliance.

However, through our initial conversations, we’re pleased there is strong evidence of growing supplier understanding, focus and commitment to improve.

More than half of the suppliers who responded state that they are certified against externally recognised welfare standards with their own animal welfare policies in place, some of which are partly compliant to the ECC requirements.

The areas with highest compliance are adoption of higher welfare breeds, adoption of controlled atmospheric stunning or effective electrical stunning without live inversion and thinning not being practiced.

The major challenge for organisations of our size is that suppliers are more focused on securing larger customers for their higher welfare breeds, such as the national supermarket chains.

Many smaller suppliers in the UK are still working to align their standards with the ECC and there is not enough current availability for a wider supply chain.

Outside of these challenges, there have also been lots of supply chain disruptions in recent years such as avian flu and the pandemic, both of which have hampered the speed of progress.

We will continue to engage with our suppliers with the aim of increasing the availability of and our usage of ECC compliant chicken and improve data collection.

Our goal, through better data collection, improved supplier focus and understanding, plus where necessary a consolidation of suppliers, is that by 2026, 100% of the chicken used within BM will be aligned with the standards of the ECC.

We have also been working with egg suppliers to ensure that we use the most ethical eggs available to us.

In this area, we have had much better progress and now 91% of the eggs we use at BM are RSPCA accredited and the remaining 9% are free range. This means that none of the eggs we buy are from caged birds and our goal is for 100% of our eggs to be RSPCA accredited this year.

We are seeing progress across the supply chain, but more work needs to be done.