Having signed many a petition in support of dairy farmers in recent months to try to help them receive a fairer deal with the price they are paid for a pint of the white stuff I cannot overlook this worrying pattern that seems to be spreading into the poultry farming arena.
So I tried to reason how this could be possible and what treatment this chicken may have experienced before it became a household name across every Nisa trading region.
So let's just stop for a minute and consider the life of this product from the moment it used it's egg tooth to break out of the shell and peer into the world to it arriving on a chilled shelf coated in plastic.
By my fairly basic reckoning the following things have taken place; Chick hatches, fed on high protein chick crumb and kept warm, clean and dry for 6-8 weeks. Birds are generally slaughtered for the table between 42 - 56 days old, it needs plucking, gutting and tying ready for packaging. Then placed on the plastic dish and cling film wrapped, add a sticker and it is ready for the shelf. Of course in there will also be transport from the hatchery to the brooding shed and transport to the slaughter house and then to the supermarket.
So my next logical step was to try to break down these costs to see how a final price of £3 is possible to provide Nisa with their required profit. I will take a shot at this but would appreciate any of you having a go at correcting my sums if you think I have under or over spent in any area:
The figures in brackets are the costs for raising chicks yourself on a small-holding so I have assumed commercial farms can work at half this cost:
Cost of chick (£1.50) 75p [possibly as low as 36p if buying fertile eggs and using incubators]
Heating (25p) 12p
Transport to brood shed (12p) 6p
Feed for 6 weeks (assuming minimum lifetime used) (£2.20) £1.10
Care for 6 weeks (cleaning and supplying fresh water) (N/A*) 10p
Transport to slaughter house (12p) 6p
Slaughter (N/A*)
Plucking (N/A*)
Gutting (N/A*)
Tying (N/A*)
* All of these are provided by the smallholder at no cost other than time.
A chicken processing machine, carefully named a poultry dressing facility by providers, can do 10 000 chickens per day and it is not unknown for chickens to go in one end alive and appear out the other end having had their guts squeezed out under pressure rollers so the person gutting just grabs the guts and cuts the connecting tissue around the neck which of course saves even more money on not having to actually humanely kill the birds. So the cost of processing per bird is likely to be about 6p To include the per chicken cost of the knife wielder let's say another 10p.
Packaging 2p
Label 2p
Transport to supermarket 6p
Total for the smallholder is £4.29 assuming you give your time for care, slaughter, plucking gutting and packing free of charge to yourself as a smallholder which provides a free range quality product probably a little heavier than the small bird in the image above.
Total for commercial production £2.06
So at a price of £3, it would appear Nisa are making approx 94p per chicken, a profit margin of 45% which must be one of the lowest on the shelves of most supermarkets. Now my question remains why do they do this? Why mass produce poor quality chicken that cannot be treated with real care and attention at the speed and rates they have to work to provide a bird too small for a family and lacking in the flavour and nutrition of a free range quality one makes little or no positive contribution to the food supply in Bexley or any other area in which they have a store.
A little surf checking shows me the price of a similar sized whole chickens in other stores is very comparable ;
Nisa for 1.4kg chicken : £2.14/kg
Sainsburys £2.96/kg or 3 for £10
Waitrose £2.18/kg
Asda £2.07/kg
Tesco £2.29 /kg
Whereas the average price of a free range small chicken is £5.09/kg
Yet this chicken has the little red tractor sign so surely it is good quality, isn't it? Well this means it was produced to "Assured Food Standards" where a little read of their website will reassure you they work to standards of "safety, hygiene, animal welfare and the environment amongst other things." The foods are "Produced to independently inspected standards" and "Meets the standards you expect for you and your family" Well if my reckoning of the costs is in any way accurate it cannot meet my high standards of care for farm animals given how cheaply it has had to be produced. It is interesting how the Little Red Tractor website carefully avoids defining the standards, they are not high standards, not legal standards, not even good standards, just the standards. In addition the website does not provide any detail of these standards as they are applied by their inspectors. No mention of how many poor little chicks are crammed in a shed together, or whether they have access to daylight at all. Not a comment about acceptable methods of slaughter that can be used among many other concerns that this has raised in my mind as the farmer, processor and supermarket work to cut costs in order to raise their profit margin.!
So what have I concluded from this post, well firstly we shop in the most expensive local supermarket, so that can stop right now and it's back to the markets for provisions for us and secondly maybe it is time we had another stint on the pescatarian diet we have enjoyed in the past...so how do they slaughter prawns...?
Here's one chick that is never going to face the angst of the 'Poultry dressing facility"..!
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