I know economies of scale and battery farms and stuff but I can’t reasonably work out how you can hatch, raise, feed, kill prepare and ship a chicken and have it end up in a supermarket as a whole chicken for €4. Let alone the farmers and the supermarkets share. Someone please explain.
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They take a loss to get you in the store. This is at least the Costco way. They want you to walk all the way back of the store to the deli, while impulse shopping along the way. Come in for a 5$ chicken, go out with $300 worth of stuff. Source: ME! Costco deli employee for five years.
They’re cheap because they grow quickly and eat relatively cheaply. Chickens can be market-ready in ~~2-3 months~~ an average of 42 days in the EU, and 48 in the U.S. (to name two regional markets).
[edit] Edits thanks to u/fiendishrabbit for the clarification to my initial post.
The farms are mechanised and automated. The cost of a chicken for a large established institution is some electricity, 15-20 kg of feed and very little labor. The feed is mostly grain byproducts that aren’t good for much else.
Short answer, animal abuse. These chickens don’t live nice lives, need to get their beaks clipped because they are kept in too small cages so they attack each other. Their legs don’t hold their massive weight so they collapse and can’t even stand up. It’s industrial meat.
Subsidies on feed, cheap standardized processing, conmodification of a live individual, authorised cruelty
and most on sale in the UK are imported from thailand, which somehow explains it and yet makes it even more mind boggling.
Also, dont forget that the government pays out huge subsidies to meat industry to keep the price cheaper.
Can some farmer tell how much a live chicken costs?
In addition to what’s been mentioned, realize that that whole chicken isn’t actually a *whole* chicken. The organs have been removed and sold elsewhere. The feathers have been removed and sold elsewhere. The blood has been removed and sold elsewhere. The beak, neck, feet and whatever other assorted no-so-tasty bits have been removed and sold elsewhere. And the manure it produced during its life? Sold, hopefully elsewhere, if not used by the farmer as fertilizer. Point is there’s a lot more value in the complete bird than the stripped carcass you end up with, delicious as it may be.
Because there are extremely high subsidies in place and because factory farming reduces the capital cost massively at the expense of animal welfare.
The last number I’m aware of place the full capital cost of raising a single chicken in humane conditions at around 15-20 EUR (pre COVID pandemic).
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