Beware: Hannaford’s Food Standards are Worse Than Fast Food Chains’

If you’ve been to Hannaford recently, you know it’s hard to miss the company’s decline: prices are skyrocketing, and quality is slipping. You also don’t have to look far to find scandal after scandal, from data breaches to recalls to (accidentally?) having Nazi propaganda on its shelves. Yeah, you read that last one right.

What you might not know, thanks to clever marketing on Hannaford’s part, is that the company is still selling products from some of the most inhumane, controversial farms out there. Even after it promised to stop! Let’s look at two staple items, pork and eggs, and uncover the secrets Hannaford is hiding from its customers.

In the case of eggs, Hannaford sources many of them from out-of-state factories –– in part because these factories use a controversial practice that has been banned in much of New England. That practice is the use of battery cages: metal enclosures about the size of a microwave that confine up to eight egg-laying hens each. They are so small that the birds can’t walk or spread their wings.

The animal welfare implications of this are a given: Animals confined to battery cages endure extreme suffering. The close confinement and sharp metal bars cause major injuries, like lesions and sores, as well as severe psychological distress. Driven to desperation, hens in these cages sometimes peck each other to death.

But there are major quality and food safety concerns too. When thousands of birds are crammed into each battery cage facility and denied individual veterinary care, diseases can spread rapidly, and workers often can’t clear out sick and dying birds fast enough. Dead animals are left to rot among the living, posing a food contamination risk. And because the wire cages are stacked on top of one other, excrement from birds in higher cages accumulates on those laying eggs in lower rows.

Unsanitary is an understatement. That’s why the Center for Food Safety doesn’t mince words: “The use of battery cages creates a serious but preventable risk to public health,” it says. “Eggs from caged hens are simply more dangerous than their cage-free counterparts.” Considering Hannaford’s long legacy of food safety recalls, it makes sense that the company would be willing to source eggs from such filthy facilities.

Hannaford’s pork supply is no better. Hannaford sources pork from facilities that could not legally operate in Maine or much of New England. That’s because they use gestation crates: tiny metal cages that enclose mother pigs for the majority of their lifetimes. The cages are so small that the pigs can’t turn around or lie down comfortably. For animals smarter than dogs, these conditions are unbearable.

What Happened to Hannaford’s Promise?

Nearly a decade ago, Hannaford’s now parent company, Ahold Delhaize, promised to be 100 percent cage- and crate-free by 2025 in the United States (it had long since completed the transition in its home country, the Netherlands). But Hannaford and Ahold Delhaize have broken this promise and failed to meet their goal, telling customers that they would need seven more years to make the switch.

That’s seven more years supporting a practice animal welfare experts call “barbaric.” Seven more years allowing practices that are illegal in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and other states across the country –– as well as in the entire European Union.

There isn’t just legal momentum; over 3,000 companies globally are on their way to being 100 percent cage-free in their supply chains. Even McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Subway refuse to use battery cage eggs. If they draw the line at these low quality products, why can’t Hannaford do the same?

A study even found that 85 percent of Ahold Delhaize’s own shoppers support a ban on cages. But as we know, Hannaford doesn’t care about its customers the way it used to.

Why Care about Cages?

In the What Happened to Hannaford? campaign, we’ve focused on affordability and quality because these issues have real, tangible impacts on consumers every day. But we aren’t willing to overlook other problems: Hannaford’s treatment of workers, animals, the environment, and its communities. Hannaford’s negligence in all of these areas speaks to one core concern: the company is cutting corners everywhere, and we are all paying the price.

The same greedy corporate mindset that leads Hannaford to buy from filthy battery-cage and gestation-crate factories is the mindset that produces spoiled produce, moldy meat, weak quality control, and higher prices at the store. These aren’t separate issues but symptoms of the same decline. When a company is willing to look the other way as animals suffer in conditions so extreme they’re illegal in Maine, it’s not surprising that it also looks the other way on food safety, worker mistreatment, data security, and customer trust. 

If Hannaford is willing to tolerate rock-bottom standards deep in its supply chain, why would it treat its shoppers any better? That’s why cages matter here. They reveal just how far Hannaford has drifted from the community-minded grocer it once claimed to be –– and why Mainers are right to demand better.