Voluntary and mandatory welfare reporting by food companies helps consumers track progress, creates corporate accountability, and identifies where improvement is most needed.
Transparent welfare reporting by food companies transforms welfare from an invisible supply chain characteristic to a trackable, improvable metric that creates accountability to consumers, investors, and advocacy organisations. Companies that know their welfare performance will be published and compared to competitors have stronger incentives to improve than those whose practices are entirely hidden. The Business Benchmark on Farm Animal Welfare has demonstrated that benchmark-based accountability drives measurable improvement in company welfare commitments and programmes. Consumer access to comparative welfare data at the point of purchase — currently limited by the absence of mandatory labelling — would further enhance this accountability mechanism.