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Costco’s organic chicken isn’t what it seems

A disturbing new investigation reveals how easy it is for farms to subvert organic rules — and hide animal cruelty.

Organic chicken costs on average more than twice as much as conventional chicken, and people buy it in part because they believe that the animals are given a much better life.

Consumers expect animals on organic farms to be treated better, but a new investigation found a Costco organic chicken supplier severely neglecting and abusing animals.

The investigation illustrates how easy it is for farms to flout organic rules, and how at every step of the supply chain, animal cruelty can appear to slip through the cracks.

Animal advocacy groups have called for companies like Costco to raise their standards, for the federal government to improve organic oversight, and for consumers to eat less chicken.

If you’re one of those people, maybe you envision a small farm where flocks of healthy birds split their time between green pastures and spacious barns. When a chicken gets sick or injured, you might picture a veterinarian tending to them, and if they can’t be saved, they’re humanely euthanized. While the chickens aren’t pets, you’d assume that they’re at least not abused.

These are reasonable expectations, given how organic farming is marketed. And organic chicken certification does, on paper, legally require better animal welfare than conventional rearing: more space, fresh air, outdoor access, and other improvements.

But a new undercover investigation reveals that these expectations may often be far from reality.

Earlier this year, an investigator with the nonprofit Mercy For Animals worked at an organic North Carolina farm that raises chickens for Pilgrim’s Pride, a major supplier of conventional and organic chicken. Pilgrim’s Pride then slaughters the chickens and sells them to Costco and other brands. The farm is also certified as humane by the nonprofit American Humane Society. (Disclosure: I worked at Mercy For Animals prior to joining Vox in 2020.)

Costco’s inflation-proof $4.99 rotisserie chicken, explained

During his roughly 2.5-month stint at the farm, the investigator documented unsanitary living conditions, along with severe neglect — like birds with twisted necks and open wounds — and disturbing cases of outright abuse, including the farm manager leaving birds to die slowly in deadpiles, and euthanizing birds by bludgeoning them with PVC pipes and rakes.

“It was every day that the manager would be bludgeoning chickens to death or burying them alive,” the investigator, who goes by the pseudonym Sam due to the covert nature of his work, told me.

But many of those in the industry don’t seem to want to talk about it. The farm could not be reached for comment. Hiland Global Certifications, a certifier of organic foods that audits the farm, declined an interview request for this story and did not respond to detailed questions. Costco didn’t respond to an interview request and detailed questions. Pilgrim’s Pride declined an interview request and didn’t answer specific questions.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Pilgrim’s Pride said that it is “deeply disturbed by the conduct” at the farm, that it has dropped it as a supplier, and that it will initiate additional third-party audits at its supplier farms.

However, when chicken companies — or supermarkets, for that matter — drop farms as suppliers, they shouldn’t expect that whatever farm they supply from instead will be extraordinarily different; such cruelty has been found over and over and over again in the US poultry industry, including numerous past investigations of farms that supply........

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