The Food Business team at Compassion has recently produced a set of comprehensive tables comparing various welfare schemes with Compassion’s criteria for higher animal welfare.

Animal Welfare Assurance Schemes, Certification Bodies, Private Standards and labels promoted by the government should all contain standards that demand higher animal welfare.

There are several initiatives around the globe. Some of these are global, such as the Global GAP Animal Welfare Add-on, some are at a country level, such as RSPCA Assured in the UK, some are at a regional level, such as Agriqualita in the Tuscany region in Italy, and finally, some belong to a specific food company, such as Jumbo++ for broilers in the Netherlands.

These initiatives all have standards addressing farm animal welfare, but do they meet Compassion’s higher welfare standards?

Compassion analysed 34 initiatives, across 10 countries and 4 species (broiler chickens, laying hens, sows and meat pigs and dairy cows and calves) to understand which ones meet Compassion’s criteria for higher animal welfare.

Read the comparison welfare tables here for:

Certain welfare schemes meet or go beyond Compassion’s farm animal welfare criteria, for example: RSPCA Assured for broiler chickens in the UK; and Label Rouge for laying hens in France, and we fully support these initiatives. However, to help drive farm animal welfare forwards we need to encourage all welfare schemes to clarify their standards, or raise their baseline, especially for pigs and dairy cattle.

How does Compassion’s welfare criteria compare to other welfare schemes?