Which Came First – Josh Balk

  Consumers, Restaurants, Supermarkets and Farmers are finding common ground on animal production and marketing animal products. Here it can be argued that \"the egg came first.\" Josh Balk leads the Humane Society of the United States’ work in shifting the egg industry from predominantly cage production to cage-free housing instead. He’s successfully worked with virtually every major food company—including McDonald’s, IHOP, Denny’s, Kroger, Nestle, etc.—to enact a policy to switch to exclusively using cage-free eggs. He’s also waged successful ballot measures and legislative campaigns passing numerous state laws to ban the confinement of laying hens in cages and ensuring that all eggs sold in the state would be cage-free. When this work began, less than 5% of laying hens were cage-free. Now it’s up to ~30% cage-free representing nearly 90 million hens. Lessons being learned about this shift have implications for the future, up and down the food chain. @joshbalk www.humanesociety.org