Whole Foods Made a Big Promise About Chicken Welfare. Ten Years Later, It’s Gone.

In 2016, Whole Foods Market made headlines with a sweeping commitment that within eight years, by 2024, all of the chicken sold in its U.S. stores, amounting to hundreds of millions of birds a year, would move away from the genetically modified Cornish Cross breeds used by 99 percent of the industry, toward birds bred to be less prone to the lameness, joint failure, and heart and respiratory collapse built into modern fast-growing genetics.

It’s worth being clear about what that commitment was, and wasn’t. Slower-growing hybrids are a real welfare improvement over the standard Cornish Cross but they’re still commercial hybrids, still selected primarily for yield, and still a long way from the heritage breeds that can reproduce naturally, thrive outdoors, and avoid the health collapse that defines industrial chicken. Whole Foods didn’t commit to heritage birds. It committed to a modest step, one that was achievable in the timeframe.

Beginning in 2016 Whole Foods has enjoyed a decade of positive media coverage and plaudits from animal advocates, including Farm Forward. It was the first time in decades that a company committed to improving the genetic welfare of chickens. In June, it became clear that Whole Foods has abandoned that pledge, quietly, in a way almost no consumer will notice.

What Whole Foods Committed To

To understand what’s been abandoned, recall what was promised. In 2016, Whole Foods announced it would phase out the genetically modified fast-growing birds standard across the industry. The company’s then-Global Meat Buyer, Theo Weening, told reporters that slower-growing breeds produce “much better, healthier chicken, and at the same time it’s a much more flavorful chicken.”1 He acknowledged the change would cost more. Slower-growing breeds eat more feed and take longer to raise to the same weight. Whole Foods accepted that tradeoff and made the commitment anyway, tying it to the standards of Global Animal Partnership (GAP), the tiered welfare certification program it co-founded.

Here’s the paper trail. GAP’s 2016 pledge set a deadline of January 1, 2024, for every certification tier—Step 1 through Step 5+—to move to higher-welfare genetics.2 That deadline passed with no such requirement in place. It wasn’t until Version 4.0 of the GAP standard, issued June 1, 2025, a year and a half late, that GAP actually wrote it into the standard, requiring GAP-approved slow-growth breeds at every certification level.3

That requirement lasted about a year. Version 4.1, issued June 1, 2026, rewrote the breed section of the standard.4 It now lists Cobb 500, Ross 308, and Ross 708, the conventional fast-growing breeds Whole Foods committed to phase out and the breeds GAP had just banned, as “Permitted Breeds.” The slow-growth requirement survives only for Steps 4, 5, and 5+. For Steps 1 through 3, which cover more than 95% of Whole Foods’ chicken by the company’s own account, there is no breed requirement at all.

The commitment Whole Foods was praised for in 2016 has been erased from the GAP standards Whole Foods helped create.

GAP doesn’t deny the reversal. Its own announcement blames “rising costs and changing market conditions, along with challenging research around sustainability and climate impacts” that led “many companies” to delay or abandon plans to source slow-growth breeds. But look at who creates those market conditions. Slow-growth breeds do cost more to raise, they eat more feed over a longer life, and that’s a real cost. Whether that cost reaches shoppers as a higher price is a choice retailers make, not a law of nature. Whole Foods already charges a 70 percent premium for chicken that is genetically identical to what’s sold at Walmart and other conventional retailers. The “market conditions” GAP points to aren’t some external force Whole Foods was powerless against. They are the predictable result of a retailer pocketing that premium instead of passing it through to the farmers who’d need to raise different birds. Whole Foods could have kept its shelf price exactly where it is and paid its suppliers more, out of its already high profit margin, to actually raise slower-growing chicken. It chose not to, and is now pointing to a market it helped shape as the reason it couldn’t follow through.

That’s not a defense. Whole Foods spent a decade marketing its breed commitment directly to shoppers, helped found and govern GAP, and had every tool available, including its own pricing power, to hold its supply chain to the 2025 standard. Again, it chose not to.

We reached out to Whole Foods for comment on this reversal and did not receive a response.

We Saw This Coming

Farm Forward resigned from the GAP board of directors in April 2020, years before this latest rollback, after three staff members and more than a thousand pro bono hours spent trying to make GAP a credible vehicle for reform. By then it was clear GAP had been captured by the profit motives of Whole Foods and the meat companies selling to it. In our resignation letter, we wrote: “GAP is no longer a tool for change, but is increasingly a marketing scheme functioning to benefit massive corporations.”5 

We warned then that weakening the breed standard specifically would have “spectacular global consequence for billions of animals.” Our concerns were well founded. Whole Foods leveraged GAP, and the credibility of animal protection groups like Farm Forward, to humanewash its chicken for a decade.

What Fast-Growing Genetics Actually Do to Animals

The reason breed and genetic welfare matters, the reason Farm Forward has made it a centerpiece of our advocacy for almost twenty years, is that selection for fast growth is the single most significant driver of suffering in modern poultry production, and the cornerstone of the industrial poultry system.

In a landmark study of nearly 5 million broilers across 176 commercial flocks, researchers found that at a typical slaughter age of 40 days, more than 27 percent of birds showed impaired locomotion, and 3.3 percent were almost unable to walk. The single biggest risk factor was the birds’ genotype and growth rate, the faster a flock was bred to grow, the worse its leg health.6  These birds are selectively bred to reach slaughter weight in roughly six weeks, a pace their skeletal and cardiovascular systems cannot reliably support. The result is birds who struggle to walk, who spend much of their short lives lying in their own waste because standing is painful, and who suffer from joint deterioration, heart failure, and respiratory distress at rates that have no parallel in heritage breeds. Peer-reviewed research commissioned by GAP and Whole Foods confirmed these findings.7 

Genetics Is the Only Real Fix

Today’s fast-growing chickens are not naturally occurring. They are genetically modified through decades of aggressive selective breeding.

Any label that markets “Animal Welfare Certified” chicken without prohibiting conventional fast-growing breeds is humanewashing. In a 2021 survey Farm Forward commissioned from YouGov, we found a major gap between what people expect and what is true about animal welfare certifications. We found that 38 percent of Americans thought the GAP label means animals were not genetically modified to grow unnaturally quickly; 55 percent said it should mean that.8

GAP’s updated standards preserve some welfare improvements, for example modestly more space, better lighting, restrictions on certain painful body modifications. Those help, but only at the margins. The core of the suffering comes from the genetics themselves. A genetically modified Cobb 500 raised in an enriched barn with slightly lower stocking density is still a Cobb 500. You cannot meaningfully improve the welfare of a Cobb 500 with better housing any more than you can improve the health of a pug by giving it a bigger yard. The suffering is written into the genetics.

The breed transition was always the real test. Changing breeds has real costs, logistical challenges, and commercial inconvenience. That’s precisely why it mattered. A commitment that costs nothing is a marketing claim. A commitment that requires restructuring your supply chain is leadership. Leadership is what consumers expect when they pay more for meat at Whole Foods. Instead they’re getting low quality products at sky high prices.

The Bottom Line for Shoppers

If you are buying chicken at Whole Foods, the high likelihood is that you are buying genetically modified chicken raised from the same conventional fast-growing breeds sold in every discount supermarket in America. Unless you buy the “pasture raised” GAP Step 4 or 5 chicken, which most consumers do not, you’re paying a premium for Whole Foods’ reputation rather than a meaningfully better product.

The label at Whole Foods says “Animal Welfare Certified” and is intended to give consumers the impression that their chickens come from healthy animals raised in humane conditions. The standards now permit the same birds every conventional producer uses, but the price is 70 percent higher.

The cost for animals is tremendous. Because of Whole Foods’ reversal, hundreds of millions of animals who could have spent their lives in less chronic pain will now live and die exactly as they would have if Whole Foods had never made the promise at all.

That is not a welfare commitment, it’s a marketing strategy. Conscientious consumers deserve to know the difference.