Today’s announcement from Burger King includes a commitment to source only gestation-crate-free pork in Latin America. Photo by iStockphoto

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Today, Burger King — via its parent company Restaurant Brands International — became the first major fast food chain to set a timeline for switching to 100 percent cage-free eggs and gestation crate-free pork in its entire supply chain in Latin America.

In 2012, our work with Burger King helped the company become the first major fast food chain to commit to sourcing 100 percent cage-free eggs in the United States — years before a recent avalanche of similar announcements from other companies. With today’s announcement, the company has raised the bar again.

Today’s announcement also includes a commitment to source only gestation-crate-free pork in Latin America, and follows over a year of discussions with Humane Society International.

Burger King is the latest in a rapidly growing list of massive food companies, including Compass Group, Sodexo, and three major Latin American restaurant companies – Alsea, CMR, and Grupo Toks – to shake up the region’s egg and meat industries this year. This policy will move millions of hens and sows out of cages where they can barely move, and it reinforces the trend towards cage-free and crate-free housing in Latin America and globally.

By the end of 2015, HSI had already worked with the three leading pork producers in Brazil – BRF, JBS, and Aurora Alimentos – to set a timeline for phasing out gestation crates. In 2014, Arcos Dorados, the largest McDonald’s franchisee in Latin America (and the world) worked with HSI to adopt a gestation-crate-free pork procurement policy. The recent spate of announcements from food companies in Latin America rings the death knell for battery cages as well.

We hope to see more multinational food companies follow the lead of Burger King, Sodexo, and Compass Group in extending their animal welfare policies to Latin America and globally. Compassion for animals is a universal value, and gestation crates and battery cages shouldn’t have a place anywhere in our global food system.