Over 300 food and hospitality companies are committed to going cage-free in Asia by the end of 2025. How many of those companies actually got there — and for the ones that didn't, what was the real reason? Was it supply, conviction, cost, or something nobody talks about publicly?
Due to lack of uniform public reporting, it is hard for us to accurately report on commitment status. That said, many did achieve by their deadlines, and those that haven't are making tangible progress to do so.  

Supply and cost are the two challenges most frequently cited. However, in practice, the barriers are often broader and more operational in nature. What we observe most often is a combination of three factors: 

Procurement alignment: cage-free commitments are often made at the global sustainability level, but translating those commitments into clear regional procurement targets, timelines, and accountability structures takes time. Increasingly, however, companies are beginning to bridge that gap by integrating animal welfare commitments more directly into sourcing strategies and supplier engagement. 

Encouragingly, collaborative initiatives such as GFP’s Impact Incentives program and GCAW’s India working group are helping overcome this challenge by creating stronger coordination between supply and demand.  

What gives me real confidence is that the companies making the most meaningful progress are approaching cage-free sourcing not simply as a reporting obligation, but as a long-term supply chain investment. They are working directly with producers, supporting market development, and helping build the infrastructure needed for sustained change. That shift — from commitment to implementation partnership — is where we are seeing the strongest momentum today. 

The Vietnam transition involved retrofitting an entire farm, retraining staff, and achieving international welfare certification — for a farmer whose entire livelihood is on the line. What does that first conversation actually look like, and what have you learned over fifteen years about what makes a farmer say yes? 

The first conversation is almost never about animal welfare. That might seem surprising coming from an animal welfare consultancy, but it reflects the reality farmers face every day. A farmer whose livelihood, and in many cases whose family’s livelihood, depends on the farm is not primarily asking about hen welfare standards. They are asking: will this work? Can I afford it? Who will buy my eggs? What happens if it goes wrong? 

So the first conversation is about economic viability and risk. What does the capital outlay look like? What does the cash flow look like in year one, year two, year three? Are there buyers who will pay a premium, and will they commit to that before I invest? Is there someone who has done this in a similar context, with a similar farm size, a similar climate, who I can talk to or visit? 

What I have learned over 15+ years is that farmers are far more open to change than many people assume, provided the right conditions are in place. In our experience, there are four things that consistently help farmers feel confident enough to move forward: 

The farmers who have successfully transitioned — and remained cage-free years later — are typically those who had all four elements in place. When hesitation exists, it is usually because one of those pieces is still missing. What is encouraging is that across Asia, we are increasingly seeing companies, producers, and industry initiatives working together to build exactly those conditions for long-term success. 

You have spoken about how industry training in Asia has often shown farmers models from Europe that simply don’t resonate or work in such a different cultural and physical environment. That’s a candid admission that a lot of global sustainability frameworks quietly ignore. What does genuinely Asia-rooted cage-free transition look like — and how much of the Western playbook had to be thrown out?
A significant portion of it had to be rethought, and I say that not as a criticism of western HQ’ed organisations, but as a practical observation about what actually works when you are standing in a shed in Vietnam in July, or advising a producer in Tamil Nadu on flock management in 40-degree heat. 

The European cage-free model was built around temperate climates, specific breeds, mature input supply chains, established retail price premiums, and a regulatory environment that was moving in one direction. None of those conditions apply cleanly in most of Asia. When we showed Asian farmers European aviary systems or management guides written for Dutch or British conditions, the response was polite but clear: this does not reflect my reality. 

What genuinely Asia-rooted cage-free transition looks like, in our experience, involves several deliberate departures from the standard Western framework. Rather than attempting to replicate European or North American production models wholesale, successful transitions in Asia are those that adapt to local climates, production systems, market realities, and farming contexts: 

The broader point is this: global sustainability frameworks are often built around European or North American production models and then applied elsewhere as the default benchmark. But in our experience, successful transitions do not happen through replication alone. They happen through adaptation. 

The science underpinning animal welfare is universal — hens everywhere benefit from the ability to express natural behaviours, move freely, perch, dustbathe, and live without chronic confinement. But the pathway to achieving those outcomes must reflect local realities, including climate, infrastructure, farm size, labour systems, input costs, and market conditions. 

In Asia, the most effective cage-free transitions are not copies of Western systems. They are locally grounded models that apply universal welfare principles through practical, context-appropriate solutions. That distinction is critical if we want cage-free production to scale sustainably and inclusively across diverse global markets. 

Asia accounts for 64% of global egg production, with most of it still in cage systems. The cage-free credit model is an attempt to bridge the gap between companies that want to commit and farms that haven’t yet transitioned. How does that credit system actually work in practice — and is there a risk it becomes a way for companies to claim progress without driving real change on the ground? 

It is a legitimate question and one I take seriously, because the integrity of the credit mechanism is exactly what determines whether it is a genuine tool for change or a sophisticated form of deferrism. Let me explain how it works, and then address the risk directly. 

GFP’s Impact Incentive model is straightforward in its mechanics: one credit represents 1,000 cage-free eggs produced by a verified, third party-certified producer in Asia. When a company purchases credits, the financial premium, above the conventional egg price, flows directly to that producer. The producer receives a payment that materially improves the economics of their cage-free operation, often during the period when transition costs are highest and market returns are not yet fully established. 

The mechanism is not designed to replace direct sourcing; it is designed to accelerate the conditions under which direct sourcing becomes possible. It closes the financial gap during the market development phase; it builds a verified supply base that buyers can then source from directly; and it creates an auditable record of progress that can be disclosed and scrutinised. 

Now, the risk. The risk is real if a company treats credits as a substitute for procurement transformation rather than a catalyst for it, if purchasing credits becomes a way of ticking a cage-free box without changing what their kitchens actually buy. We mitigate this risk in few ways, the 2 most important ones are: 

The hospitality industry — Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Accor — has made cage-free commitments that sound unambiguous. But sourcing responsibly in Asia costs more, sometimes significantly more, than the conventional alternative. When a hotel group is under margin pressure, how do you make the case that this commitment holds — and has she ever seen a company quietly walk it back when nobody was watching?
I’ll take the second part of that question first, because it is an important one. Like many large-scale sustainability commitments, cage-free implementation can face delays when companies are navigating periods of economic or operational pressure. In some cases, timelines are extended or implementation progresses more gradually than originally anticipated. That is a normal part of supply chain transformation, particularly in complex and highly cost-sensitive markets. 

What I find encouraging, however, is that an increasing number of hospitality companies are continuing to move forward despite those pressures. Across Asia, the hotel groups making the strongest progress tend to share one common characteristic: cage-free sourcing is embedded into procurement policy and supplier engagement, not treated solely as a sustainability aspiration. 

When the commitment is in the contract, the conversation with the regional procurement team is different. It is not ‘should we do this?’, it is ‘how do we do this within the available supply?

The business case I make to a hotel group under margin pressure has three components: 

As a result, many companies now view cage-free sourcing not only through a sustainability lens, but also through the perspective of long-term brand trust, supply chain credibility, and risk management. In that context, the investment required to support responsible sourcing often compares favourably to the potential reputational and regulatory risks associated with failing to demonstrate meaningful progress. That is an argument that increasingly resonates at both leadership and procurement levels. 

The companies I have the most confidence in are those where sustainability and procurement teams are working in close partnership, with shared ownership of cage-free implementation across functions. In these cases, the commitment is not confined to a single department, but integrated into how sourcing decisions are actually made on a day-to-day basis. 

That level of cross-functional alignment is often the most important — and sometimes the most challenging — element to establish. But where it is in place, it creates real momentum: commitments translate more consistently into procurement action, and implementation becomes more structured, coordinated, and resilient over time. 

Cage-free is primarily framed as an animal welfare issue, but it sits squarely inside the broader sustainability conversation — land use, feed efficiency, smallholder livelihoods, food system resilience. How do you think about that wider frame, and do you believe the food industry has genuinely connected animal welfare to sustainability strategy — or are they still being treated as separate boxes to tick? 

Largely separate boxes, still and that is a genuine missed opportunity, both for the industry’s strategic coherence and for the pace of progress on both fronts. 

The honest picture is that most corporate sustainability functions have built their frameworks around the issues that are most measurable and most legible to capital markets: carbon, water, deforestation, supply chain transparency. As a result, animal welfare has sometimes been positioned as a parallel workstream rather than as an embedded component of sustainable food system transformation. 

This is changing, and I think the change is driven less by moral argument than by the emerging interconnections becoming impossible to ignore: 

The companies I find most interesting to work with are those that have started to see cage-free not as a welfare chapter in their ESG report, but as an expression of their broader food system thesis, one that connects producer livelihoods, supply chain resilience, environmental footprint, and consumer trust in a single framework. That framing makes the business case considerably easier to sustain across economic cycles, because it is not dependent on any single stakeholder’s priority remaining constant. 

We are not fully there yet as an industry, but the direction of integration is clear.  GFP’s work — connecting producers, buyers, certification bodies, and development of finance into a coordinated market-building effort — reflects a view that this integration is both necessary and inevitable. A key part of our approach is building for that future now, so that when it fully takes shape, the systems, relationships, and infrastructure are already in place to support it.