Benchmarking welfare performance across farms and companies enables identification of best practice and drives industry-wide improvement.
Welfare benchmarking transforms welfare assessment from a compliance exercise to an improvement driver. When farms can compare their performance against sector benchmarks and best practice, improvement targets become concrete and achievable. When companies report benchmarked welfare data publicly, they face reputational pressure from the comparison. The significant variation in welfare performance within single production systems revealed by benchmarking demonstrates that higher welfare is achievable within existing economic constraints — the gap between average and best practice shows the room for improvement.