Food labelling claims about animal welfare — from free-range to farm-fresh — vary enormously in their meaning and regulatory backing, creating consumer confusion and sometimes misleading purchasing decisions.
The welfare labelling gap is a significant market failure: consumers who want to pay for higher-welfare products frequently cannot make informed choices because labels either mean nothing or mean things very different from consumer expectations. Greenwashing in animal welfare labelling harms consumer trust, undermines genuine high-welfare producers who invest in real improvements, and perpetuates welfare-poor systems by providing a misleading veneer of responsibility. Mandatory, standardised welfare labelling — following the successful egg labelling model — would allow consumers to make genuinely informed choices. The political barriers are significant because the livestock industry resists transparency that would disadvantage low-welfare operations, but consumer and retailer pressure can drive voluntary improvement ahead of regulation.