Although it sounds like the same old story, another Mexican restaurant company - Sushi Itto, which has more than 130 units operating in Mexico, Central and South America - has decided to join the trend of being supplied with cage-free eggs.
Like all other companies, they make it as "part of its ongoing commitment to improving sustainability within the supply chain." They also say they feel proud to join this global trend, which reflects their "values as a socially responsible company." And here's where it gets tricky.
According to some research I carried out, corporate social responsibility is a "way of doing business in which companies manage their operations in a more sustainable and responsible way with respect to the economy, society and the environment." To do so, "the company must take into account that their activities affect, positively or negatively, the quality of life of employees and communities in which operations are conducted."
The Alliance for Corporate Social Responsibility in Mexico (AliaRSE) aims to "achieve that the company is, and is perceived as, a creator of value and welfare generation..." To do this, comprises several dimensions, such as external economics, which "involves the generation and distribution of useful and profitable goods and services;" the internal ecological dimension, which "implies full responsibility for the environmental impact of processes, products and byproducts and ... the damage caused or that could be caused" and the external ecological dimension, of "specific actions to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the common ecological heritage for the benefit of present and future humanity."
Is welfare really being generated?
Really? I take some keywords from the above paragraph: welfare generation, useful and profitable goods, and environmental impacts. I think that the production of cage-free eggs does not generate welfare (for the human being, of course) because they are more expensive; they are not a useful good, because they give no added value, and environmental impact has yet to be measured, because the animals need more space and more feed to be produced.
In short, I question the production of cage-free eggs and its relationship to social responsibility. Why don’t we accept, once and for all, that we will produce one more product for our portfolio, a niche product, and that’s it? What do you think?
