Animal Welfare

Here at Yum!, we believe we have a responsibility to be a good steward of the animals raised for food throughout our supply chain, as is outlined in our Global Animal Welfare Policy. Our commitment to animal health and well-being is steadfast and guided by our holistic, science-based Sustainable Animal Protein Principles. Specifically, we are committed to the Five Freedoms in guiding our overall approach to animal welfare through the supply chain.

Our animal welfare journey began in 2002 with the creation of our first animal welfare program. Since then, we’ve continued to elevate our animal welfare practices across our global footprint, enabling markets to have flexibility to evolve based on customer preferences, cultural needs and expectations and local regulations. Some key milestones on our animal welfare journey include:

Welfare Indicators

In 2020, KFC announced new global chicken key welfare indicators (KWIs) as a critical next step on its animal welfare journey. The KWIs address mobility while chickens are raised, overall chicken health, minimization of medical interventions, chicken mortality and mental and physical stress. These KWIs serve as the foundation for animal welfare metrics across our company. More recently, KFC published its global chicken welfare platform, and we transitioned to quarterly data collection for chicken welfare.

Laying Hens

Making continuous improvements in our animal welfare standards and the way we source food across markets includes our work on cage-free eggs. A number of markets have already transitioned to 100% cage-free eggs including our KFC Western Europe, Pizza Hut U.K. and Taco Bell U.S. and Canada markets.

In 2021, Yum! announced a new cage-free egg commitment, pledging to transition to 100% cage-free eggs across at least 25,000 restaurants by 2026, including the U.S., Western Europe and other markets, across all brands for all menu items and ingredients. In the U.S., we aim to ensure at least 25% of our eggs come from cage-free hens by the start of 2023, 50% by the start of 2024, 75% by the start of 2025 and 100% by 2026.  

Globally, we will work with our suppliers and key partners to increase the availability of cage-free egg sources to transition to 100% cage-free by 2030. In some regions, cage-free supply is currently limited and there is not yet a clear path for the availability of sourcing. Regardless, we are committed to working with our stakeholders to meet this end and will both disclose our progress and update our policy as we move forward so that we may remain transparent regarding both the challenges we face and progress we are able to make.

We will continue to collect data and work with suppliers and industry partners to make progress across the global egg supply chain and share progress updates as a part of our annual Recipe for Good report.

Limiting Antibiotic Use

Our dedication to animal health and wellbeing requires thoughtful, comprehensive health management programs that may necessitate the use of antibiotics to maintain or restore good animal health. We share concerns regarding the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and support One Health, a holistic and multi-sectoral long-term effort to combat AMR by the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Organisation for Animal Health and other key stakeholders. In late 2021, we published an evidence-based report that is reflective of third-party research around the global AMR scenario, and includes our AMR policies and practices.

Over the past several years, KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in the U.S. have met public commitments to reduce antibiotics important to human medicine in their U.S. poultry supply chains and have made new commitments to drive further progress. Pizza Hut’s original commitment applied only to chicken for its pizzas in the U.S., and the brand is on track to remove these antibiotics from chicken used for wings by 2022. Taco Bell is working to reduce antibiotics used in human medicine by 25% in its U.S. and Canada beef supply chain by 2025.