Americans Want Antibiotic-Free Chicken, And The Industry Is Listening

On a recent reporting trip to eastern North Carolina, my colleague Dan Charles found that all of the contract growers for Perdue in the region were already raising chickens without antibiotics.

The wave of naturalness is also hitting restaurants. Just last week, chicken-and-waffle-fry purveyor Chick-fil-A announced it will completely phase out the use of chickens raised with antibiotics within five years. With some 1,800 retail outlets nationwide, the restaurant bills itself as the country' s largest chicken chain by domestic sales volume, which makes Chick-fil-A's decision big news in the industry.

"The Chick-fil-A move does signal an important market change in responding to what consumers have been demanding for some time — that we stop feeding healthy animals daily antibiotics," says Urvashi Rangan, director of the food safety and sustainability group at Consumer Reports.

Indeed, while antibiotic-free chicken is still a relatively small fraction of the market – accounting for about 9 percent of all fresh chicken sales in 2013 – it's a "fast-growing sector," says Joe Kolano with IRI/FreshLook, which tracks retail sales of perishable groceries.

Driving that growth is concern about the risks associated with routine use of antibiotics in farm animals, says Bob Martin, director of food systems at the Center for Sustainable Living at Johns Hopkins.

As we've reported in our series Pharmed Food, use of antibiotics in livestock – especially in the low doses used for growth promotion – could lead to more antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals and, eventually, in people too. Last fall, the Food and Drug Administration released long-awaited voluntary guidelines that are intended to end the use of medically important antibiotics to fuel growth or improve feed efficiency within three years.

"It's easier to make the switch" away from antibiotics with chickens, Martin notes, because the animals have a relatively short life cycle: A broiler can reach market weight in less than two months, while hogs and cattle take a lot longer.

"I think it is good for public health that the industry is switching from antibiotic use," Martin says, "because we consume a lot more chicken than any other meat."

One of the challenges of raising chickens free of antibiotics comes while the birds are still just eggs at the hatchery. As Tom Philpott reported recently for Mother Jones, eggs that will go on to become broiler birds (the kind raised for their meat) are routinely injected with a small dose of the antibiotic gentamicin before getting vaccinated against a common, deadly herpes virus that attacks chickens. The idea is that the antibiotic sterilizes the vaccination site. And guess what? Under USDA rules, even eggs that will go on to be sold as organic chickens can receive this dose of antibiotics on their first day of life.

That's one reason why "it takes more effort than people realize" to raise broiler birds completely free of antibiotics, Perdue spokeswoman Julie DeYoung tells The Salt. Over the last five years, she says, Perdue has converted about 80 percent of its hatcheries to be completely antibiotic free.

In another year or so, all of Perdue's hatcheries will be antibiotics-free, DeYoung says. While most of those birds will go on to be sold as conventional chicken – they will receive antibiotics if a flock is sick or at risk – they will at least start off antibiotic free, she says.

Of course, raising birds without antibiotics doesn't address all of the issues that critics raise with industrial chicken production. For instance, Consumer Reports' Rangan notes, it doesn't necessarily mean that chickens will be kept in cleaner or roomier houses.