People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a class-action lawsuit against Vital Farms on Thursday, May 20, alleging that consumers were misled into buying eggs at a premium prices due to false claims about ethical and humane animal welfare by the pasture-raised egg producer.
“Vital Farms, Inc. sells very expensive eggs, and it sells a lot of them. Consumers pay these high prices for Vital’s eggs – a commodity product – because Vital markets itself as an ethical company that treats animals in an ethical, humane, and transparent manner. But Vital’s marketing is false and misleading, and its consumers have been tricked into paying an unjustifiably high premium,” PETA’s lawyers wrote in the filing submitted to the Texas federal court.
The filing also claimed that Vital Farms obtains hens from hatcheries that cull male chicks at birth, burns or cuts off the beaks of their hens and does not raise birds in true a true pasture-raised fashion.
PETA is represented by Richard L. Stone of Blackner Stone & Associates and Jesse Weiss of Edmundson Shelter Weiss PLLC. Matthew O'Hayer, founder and executive chair, Russel Canseco-Diez, CEO and Scott Marcus, chief marketing officer, all of Vital Farms, were named defendants in the lawsuit.
Earlier this year, California turkey producer Diestel Family Ranch defeated Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) in a court battle, after the animal rights group accused Diestel of falsely advertising its animal welfare initiatives.
Vital Farms responds
“We are committed to ethical food production and continuously raising the standards of the food system.
Our animal welfare practices are consistently and independently audited by Certified Humane and certain retailers. Our organic farms are audited by Oregon Tilth and Bioagricert according to USDA National Organic Program (NOP) standards.
We are transparent about what happens to male chicks as well as what happens once hens reach their post-laying life on our website here. As for the industry-standard practice of dulling the tips of hens’ beaks, that is not done to harm the birds, but to protect them. This process uses infrared technology to reduce the beak’s sharpness, so hens don’t hurt themselves or one another. See more information on beak trimming from Certified Humane, one of our auditors, here.
Vital Farms remains focused on doing right by our stakeholders, including animals and by those who love our pasture-raised eggs. For more information on our animal welfare practices, please visit our FAQs: https://vitalfarms.com/faqs/.
Finally, while some people believe that “vegan food is the only truly ethical choice,” millions of consumers enjoy eating eggs. We are pleased to offer products that value animals including by providing hens a meaningfully better life than the confinement they would face in the industrialized food system,” a spokesperson for Vital Farms said in an e-mailed statement to WATTPoultry.com.
Started on a single farm in Austin, Texas, in 2007, Vital Farms is now a national consumer brand that works with over 200 small family farms and is the leading U.S. brand of pasture-raised eggs and butter by retail dollar sales.
