Better for Animals: The Evidence Behind Corporate Outreach for Welfare Improvements

17 minute read

Animal Charity Evaluators’ Better for Animals: Evidence-Based Insights for Effective Animal Advocacy resource is an ongoing project to distill key research on different animal advocacy interventions to help us evaluate their impact in different contexts. We have made this research publicly available to support informed decision-making about how to help the most animals. You may read more about the methodology in our recent announcement, and access ACE’s Better For Animals resource.

 

This is a living document and we want to make it as helpful and accessible as possible, so please feel free to reach out with feedback! To keep up to date with ACE’s research and the work of the amazing organizations that we support, be sure to sign up for our mailing list.

 

To help make this information more accessible to a wide range of audiences, we are now excited to launch a series of social media and blog posts spotlighting one intervention each month. This month—for the first edition—we are focusing on the evidence around corporate outreach for welfare improvements.

Intervention Spotlight #1: Corporate Outreach for Welfare Improvements

What is this intervention?

This category refers to outreach or campaigns to encourage food companies (e.g., retailers, producers, or restaurants) to commit to improving animal welfare standards throughout their supply chains. Unlike ‘farmer collaboration’, which involves directly engaging with farmers and producers to adopt better practices on the ground, this approach targets the organizational policies and commitments that drive supply chain changes. This includes work such as corporate commitment campaigns; outreach to certifier programs; and efforts to track, encourage, and support companies’ implementation of welfare commitments. A common example of corporate outreach is cage-free egg campaigns targeted at retailers. 

What is our overall assessment of this intervention? How confident are we in this assessment?

• Corporate outreach for welfare improvements has a strong track record of success, playing a crucial role for hundreds of millions of animals’ wellbeing. However, reports highlight the need for thoughtful implementation and a focus on long-term strategy if these efforts are to translate into sustained, systemic change.   

• We found significantly less evidence for the producer outreach subcategory than for the impact of corporate outreach as a whole. We expect this is partly because NGOs have not typically prioritized producer outreach, given that producers are less well known to the public and present fewer opportunities for public campaign actions. While we think it is likely that conducting outreach efforts to actors across the supply chain (not just retailers) will significantly increase the likelihood of securing new welfare commitments and ensuring their implementation, we were unable to find robust evidence backing this up.
• Overall, we think that corporate and institutional outreach for welfare improvements appears to be a very promising intervention, due to the relative wealth of evidence for impact at least in the shorter term. This is a broad, preliminary assessment and we expect the effectiveness of any intervention to vary significantly depending on the context and the approach taken—see below for further details.
• This intervention is probably stronger where/when:
  • Retail market concentration is high and firms compete on reputation.
  • Advocates target large consumer-facing companies that care about their public reputation and have few or no prior animal welfare pledges.
  • Public concern about animal welfare already exists.
  • The welfare ask is simple, tangible, and auditable (e.g., cage-free).
  • Producer concentration is low (meaning no small group of powerful suppliers dominates the market) which limits their ability to coordinate and resist welfare improvements.
  • Sales run mainly through formal, auditable channels where transactions can be tracked and welfare commitments independently verified.
  • Per-capita consumption of the targeted product is high and growing.
  • Logistical or knowledge barriers to implementation are low.
  • Advocates have strong local relationships and cultural fluency.
• Conversely, the intervention is likely weaker where/when:
  • Markets are fragmented or largely informal, making sales difficult to track and welfare pledges hard to verify.
  • A few producers control most supply, allowing them to coordinate and resist change.
  • The product enjoys political protection or strategic importance, giving it backing from government or state interests.
  • Public, media, or institutional actors show fatigue after repeated welfare campaigns.
  • Most high-profile, easy-to-target companies have already committed, leaving only smaller or less reputation-sensitive firms.
  • The welfare ask is complex or difficult to audit, or implementation faces significant logistical barriers.
• Our confidence in this assessment is moderate. While there is a relative wealth of research on this intervention, it is mostly limited to welfare improvements for egg-laying hens in the United States (and, to a lesser extent, broiler chickens in the U.S. and both egg-laying hens and broiler chickens in Western Europe), and we remain uncertain about its generalizability to other contexts. Some of our conclusions—particularly about the conditions that make campaigns more or less effective—draw partly on theoretical reasoning and expert opinion rather than direct empirical evidence. Further research would be particularly helpful concerning the effectiveness of corporate outreach for welfare improvements across a broader range of animal groups and geographic regions.

What does the research say about how effective this intervention is?

Impact on animals’ experiences

• There is much uncertainty around the extent of positive and negative wellbeing of egg-laying hens and broiler chickens throughout their lifetime (including how different forms of physical and mental suffering compare to each other). However, it appears highly likely that transitioning to cage-free systems (for laying hens) and Better Chicken Commitment standards (for broiler chickens) translates to significant improvements in wellbeing. Negative impacts on wellbeing—such as the higher rate of mortality in cage-free systems, at least while farmers grow accustomed to the transition, and the fact that slower-growing breeds of broiler chicken have longer lifespans and therefore spend more time in intensive farming conditions—appear to be significantly outweighed by the positive impacts, such as greater freedom to move and express natural behaviors).¹
• Likewise, it appears likely that transitioning sows out of gestation crates brings about significant net improvements to sows’ wellbeing.²
• Evidence for the impacts of corporate outreach on other species is thinner. For fishes, for example, researchers highlight the importance of implementing robust stunning and slaughter methods as an alternative to air asphyxiation, though the commercial performance of electrical stunning currently appears mixed.³ For shrimps, groups are beginning to secure corporate commitments for electrical stunning and eliminating the practice of eyestalk ablation, interventions expected to prevent large amounts of acute suffering even though robust empirical data is still limited.⁴

Short-term impacts

• Progress on cage-free commitments:⁵
  • As of September 2025, over 2,750 cage-free commitments for egg-laying hens have been made globally, and over half (1,400) of these have been implemented. This is considered a major contributor to the fact that 150 million fewer American, European, and British hens are caged today than a decade ago.⁶
  • 2025 is a pivotal year for corporate welfare commitments: Over 40% of all cage-free policies were made with a 2025 deadline.⁷ As things stand, most companies are not reporting their progress toward meeting their commitments, and it seems likely that many will not be met.⁸ As of September 2025, 1,116 cage-free commitments had been made with an end-of-year deadline. (These figures are expressed in terms of number of commitments rather than companies, as a single company can make multiple commitments.) Of these, companies were not reporting some progress for 643 (58%) of them, reporting on progress for 298 (27%) of them, and reporting 175 (16%) of them as fulfilled.⁹
• Progress on broiler welfare commitments:
  • As of September 2025, companies had made 653 Better Chicken Commitment welfare commitments.¹⁰
  • Of these, companies were not reporting on progress for 413 (63%) of them, reporting some progress for 225 (34%) of them, and reporting 15 (2%) of them as fulfilled.¹¹
• One 2016 report assumed that advocates’ corporate cage-free campaigns would bring forward cage-free transitions by five years compared to the counterfactual scenario (i.e., when companies would have introduced changes anyway due to legislation or broader market pressures), though we note that this assumption was likely very conservative and also fairly arbitrary.¹² More recently, external experts we consulted provided unpublished estimates that the corporate outreach work is likely bringing welfare improvements several decades sooner.¹³
• One researcher suggested that producer outreach (as opposed to retailer and restaurant outreach) could become more important as retailers’ welfare pledge deadlines draw nearer, to help ensure that retailers have sufficient supply of higher-welfare animal products.¹⁴ However, such outreach has been explored less, and for this preliminary review we found no evidence relating specifically to producer outreach. Some experts we spoke to noted that targeting major retailers is likely the most effective means of ensuring that producers change their practices, at least in markets where individual retailers hold significant influence over producers.

Long-term impacts

• In the long term, the balance of evidence indicates that corporate welfare reforms can be expected to drive up the costs of producing animal products, which will ultimately be borne either by consumers or elsewhere in the supply chain. This will also—in principle—make the sector less appealing for new entrants (which could be advantageous, but could also bring the risk of increased industry consolidation).¹⁵ While demand for animal products is considered relatively price inelastic (i.e., consumers reduce their purchases only slightly in response to price increases), increasing the price of animal products does seem to decrease consumption, though the evidence is fairly limited and such decreases appear slight.¹⁶ As such, in theory, raising costs for the animal agriculture industry should make it less profitable and sustainable, especially given that it already tends to operate on very thin profit margins.¹⁷ This can also bring risks: If farmed animal welfare improvements start to make it tangibly harder for consumers to afford animal products, public support for such improvements may wane. It could, therefore, be important for the movement to also support efforts to make it easier for consumers to purchase plant-based food, such as Denmark’s 2023 Action Plan for Plant-Based Foods.¹⁸
• The available empirical evidence on the effects of welfare reforms on public attitudes toward animal welfare suggests that such effects are either negligible or slightly positive—i.e., such reforms tend to promote pro-animal attitudes rather than promote complacency about animals’ existing welfare standards.¹⁹
• There are also other intuitive, though less empirically-based, arguments for the sustained positive effects of welfare reforms beyond their direct, short-term impacts. This includes their role in: maintaining public and media interest in animal welfare issues; encouraging more ethical consumer choices (e.g., increasing the likelihood that people purchase higher welfare products after learning about welfare issues through public campaigns); and building the global animal advocacy movement by uniting organizations behind common concrete goals, developing skills in campaigning and negotiations, and driving a productive sense of morale and accomplishment.²⁰
• It also seems likely that corporate campaigning could pave the way for beneficial legislation. This has been voiced by several leaders in the movement, such as in a published conversation between ACE and David Coman-Hidy, and was reiterated in more recent discussions with external experts. Cage-free state legislation in the U.S. and the European Union’s previous proposed legislation banning cages have been cited as specific examples of this.²¹
• Overall, while we expect corporate outreach efforts to have significant long-term benefits, we think this should not be assumed automatically. In principle, positive changes from corporate outreach efforts could be entirely offset by increased public complacency, providing big animal agriculture industry players with positive PR, and diverting funding and support from programs aimed at more fundamental change. Organizations should seriously consider how to address such risks and be ready to adapt their approaches to best fit the specific context they are working in. 

Cost effectiveness

• According to various quantitative cost-effectiveness estimates:
  • A dollar spent on egg-laying hen campaigns could affect 12–160 hen years,²² 0.7 Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs)²³ or 1.7 Animal Quality-Adjusted Life Years (AQALYs).²⁴
  • A dollar spent on broiler chicken campaigns could affect 0.2–90 chicken years²⁵ or 4.6 AQALYs.²⁶
  • A dollar spent on electrical stunning advocacy for shrimps helps on average between 1,100 and 2,200 shrimps²⁷ or 639 DALYs²⁸.
  • A dollar spent on future farmed fish corporate commitments for humane stunning prior to slaughter in France, Italy, and Spain could benefit between two and 36 animals.²⁹ (However, the actual welfare improvements for each fish could be considered quite minor given the short duration of slaughter, and more recent evidence suggests that current electrical stunning for some fish species may be less beneficial than originally thought³⁰.)
• Some of these estimates are likely to already be outdated, and all of them are subject to considerable uncertainty. For example, Šimčikas highlights that his estimates are based on historic campaigns and may not hold for future campaigns.³¹ As noted above, there is also much uncertainty around the long-term impacts of corporate outreach campaigns.

Strength of evidence

• There is much more evidence regarding this intervention than most others we covered in our “Better for Animals” project. Most usefully, this includes qualitative reflections from campaigners and funders in the space, records of the number and status of commitments secured, and informative (albeit still highly uncertain) cost-effectiveness estimates. However, our confidence in the research is reduced by the following evidence gaps:
  • Most evidence pertains directly to the U.S. and Europe, meaning we are much less certain about the applicability of corporate outreach efforts to other countries, especially those that are significantly culturally distinct from the U.S. (for example, where there is less of a history of animal activism, or where food is largely bought in informal markets rather than from large retailers).
  • There is much less evidence on the effectiveness of corporate outreach for animals other than chickens.
  • Evidence about the cost effectiveness of past corporate campaigns cannot be assumed to be indicative of the cost effectiveness of future campaigns. While there is some reason to believe that future campaigns are likely to be more cost effective (for example, because upfront costs have already been made in setting up animal welfare organizations to do this work and building expertise and momentum around it), future campaigns could also be less cost effective (for example, because campaigns have already secured the easiest wins, and targeting other industry players, animal groups, or geographic regions could be less cost effective).
  • There is inevitably much less evidence on the long-term impact of such campaigns than on the short-term impact. While on balance we think it is more likely that campaigns will have a positive long-term impact overall, there is a significant risk that some corporate campaigns will end up harming more animals in the long run by tacitly promoting and/or increasing the profitability of companies that make incremental welfare improvements.
  • There is also potential for measurability bias, since corporate campaigns are among the easier advocacy interventions to track and quantify. This means their impact may appear larger or more certain compared to other interventions that are harder to measure, even if the true differences in effectiveness are smaller.
  • We also found very little evidence relating to welfare outreach campaigns targeted toward institutions (such as schools and hospitals), which likely reflects limited use of this approach to date.

Under what conditions is this intervention more or less effective?

• Based on reports from Animal Ask and Rethink Priorities, and conversations with external experts, advocates expect corporate outreach to be particularly cost-effective in contexts where:³²
  • There is a high level of competition between firms in the targeted industry.
  • Reputation is important to competition.
  • Retail market concentration is moderate‑to‑high (so persuading a handful of powerful retailers covers a large share of sales).
  • There are companies proclaiming values that they can be reasonably shown not to uphold.
  • The product does not provide significant benefits to a state or ruling party.
  • There are no significant logistical or knowledge barriers for producers to implement the welfare improvement being sought (for example, the necessary equipment, animal husbandry knowledge, or supply of higher-welfare inputs is readily available).
  • Producer concentration is sufficiently low that they are unable to coordinate to resist pressure from retailers.
  • The public, media, and key institutional actors are not yet fatigued by repeated welfare asks. This ‘oversaturation threshold’ is likely to vary depending on the region; for example, the success of repeated corporate campaigns in Europe suggests the threshold there may be quite high.
  • The ‘low-hanging fruits’ among sectors and companies have not yet been picked: I.e., where there remain large, brand‑sensitive companies with high market share and no (or few) prior commitments relating to animals where there is considerable public concern. 
  • A high formal‑to‑informal market ratio means most sales flow through auditable retail or food‑service channels.
  • There is existing public concern and a history of animal activism that has already laid movement foundations (e.g., media relationships, grassroots networks).
  • Per‑capita consumption of the targeted animal product is both high and projected to grow, so each win benefits many animals.
  • There is a specific, tangible ask that is readily understood by the public and key stakeholders. This is one reason why most corporate campaigns have focused on cage-free commitments to date, and why some advocates are more skeptical about the likelihood of many companies implementing the Better Chicken Commitment, which is less immediately tangible and straightforward to communicate. Cage-free commitments may also be easier to enforce, given that they depend on the presence or absence of physical infrastructure, whereas the Better Chicken Commitment asks are less visible.³³
• The talent and local knowledge of the advocacy team are also crucial: Skilled negotiators with strong relationships and cultural fluency can secure commitments even in less favorable market conditions.³⁴

Our priorities for improving this evidence review 

• To improve future iterations of this evidence summary, we plan to:
  • Search for more evidence on how similar tactics can be, and have been, used for institutions as well as companies.
  • Explore the extent to which a supply of higher-welfare products is a genuine bottleneck for retailers in different contexts.
  • Explore the contexts in which producer outreach appears more or less effective, including analysis of statistics showing the implementation of welfare commitments made by producers specifically.
  • Conduct a more comprehensive review of the evidence particular to specific animal groups.
  • Explore in more detail the robustness of the cost-effectiveness estimates that we cited.
  • Include an analysis of company-producer relationships, i.e., what drives producers to change their standards.

 

Last updated September 16, 2025

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1. See Welfare Footprint (n.d.) for laying hens and Welfare Footprint (n.d.) for broiler chickens; Khire and Ryba (2024) 

2. For example, see Farm Animal Welfare Committee (2015) 

3. Schuck-Paim et al. (2025) 

4. Rethink Priorities (2025) 

5. For up-to-date statistics on the number and status of corporate welfare commitments, refer to:

   • Cage-free commitments
     • Chicken Watch
     • Cage Free Tracker (Asia and Latin America)
     • EggTrack (published annually)
     • OWA Cage-Free Fulfillment report (published annually)
   • Broiler chicken welfare commitments
     • Chicken Watch

    

6. Bollard (2025) 

7. Open Wing Alliance (2024) 

8. See for example Mercy For Animals (2024); Ro (2025) 

9. Chicken Watch (2025) 

10. Chicken Watch (2025) 

11. Chicken Watch (2025) 

12. Bollard (2016) 

13. As these were shared in confidence, we are unable to share further details. 

14. Šimčikas (2019) 

15. Anthis (2020) 

16. See for example Andreyeva et al. (2010), Font-i-Furnols (2023), and Sentience Institute (2020). 

17. Wulderk and Anderson (2023) 

18. Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Fisheries of Denmark (2023) 

19. Harris et al. (2022); Anderson and Lenton (2019); Anthis (2020) 

20. See for example Cotra (2017). Feedback from external experts supported the validity of these arguments. 

21. Animal Ask (2022); Cage Free Laws (n.d.), noted in feedback from external experts; Coman-Hidy (2017)  

22. Šimčikas (2019) 

23. Rethink Priorities (n.d.). In this context, DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years) represent years of healthy life averted by suffering, adjusted for severity across species. 

24. Grilo (2024). In this context, AQALYs represent years of life adjusted for their quality, combining both the length of life and the degree of wellbeing experienced during that time. 

25. Šimčikas (2019) 

26. Grilo (2024) 

27. Shrimp Welfare Project (2024) 

28. Grilo (2024) 

29. Shah (2024) 

30. See, e.g., Saraiva et al. (2024) and Schuck-Paim et al. (2025) 

31. Šimčikas (2019) 

32. Animal Ask (2023); Šimčikas (2019); unpublished conversations with trusted grantmakers in this space 

33. Bollard (2024) 

34. This point was heavily emphasized by several external experts that we consulted. 

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