How (and why) VFC tracks the number of chickens saved
On our VFC (Vegan Fried Chick*n) website, we have a ‘chickens saved’ counter. When we launched on 20 December 2020, the counter looked like this:
As of 15 February 2021, the counter looks like this:
By the time you read this article, the number will be slightly higher as the counter is set to increase by one chicken every 20 minutes.
How are we working out the figures?
The target slaughter weight for a broiler chicken in the UK is 2–2.5kg, with 1–1.5kg of each bird’s carcass being edible. For the purposes of our calculator, one chicken’s life saved is equivalent to every 1.5kg of vegan fried chick*n we sell.
When our company launched we were making 800kg of VFC per week, which equates to 533 chickens spared. Here’s the maths:
800kg divided by 1.5kg = 533 chickens spared.
1 week = 10,080 minutes divided by 533 chickens = one chicken spared every 18.9 minutes. (We rounded up to one bird spared every 20 minutes.)
To help us meet current demand, we have recently added a night shift at our factory to increase production to 1.2 tonnes of VFC per week. As yet, this change in volume has not been factored into the ‘chickens saved’ counter. As the business grows, we’ve decided to recalibrate the calculator based on what we’ve sold over the previous three months and what we anticipate sales will be like over the next three months.
Why are we tracking chicken lives spared?
Because we care about chickens. Sparing their suffering is the main reason we set up the company. Their lives are our most important metric and our biggest motivation for scaling our business.
In the UK alone there are over 1 billion chickens slaughtered for food every year. A further 60 million chickens die on factory farms in England and Wales — these are the birds who never even make it to the slaughterhouse. In 2018, there were 68.79 billion chickens slaughtered globally, making them the most exploited land animals on the planet.
The scale of suffering in the poultry industry is difficult to comprehend and most people are simply unaware. As an activist brand we highlight these problems AND provide the (tasty) solution.
Are we actually saving lives?
‘Sparing lives’ is probably a better term to use. The chickens in factory farms today are not going to be saved by VFC, or any other company or campaign tackling this issue. What we are trying to do is provide people with an alternative to chicken, so that we help reduce the demand and spare chickens in the future from the misery of factory farming.
We accept that right now the majority of our customers are vegans and vegetarians who are not eating chickens anyway. But, as vegans, every time we choose to eat a vegan meal, we are sparing animals and that positive decision should be recognised. Every person who chooses to eat VFC instead of fried chicken is making a difference for animals.
It’s also worth noting that the 4,321 chickens we’ve spared to date is equivalent to around 20% of a single factory farm shed. There are around 1,500 intensive poultry farms in the UK (with at least 125,000 broiler chickens in each) and they all have multiple sheds. We’ve spared the equivalent of 0.0004% of all chickens slaughtered in the UK.
We’re at the beginning of our mission. As we build our company, we hope more people will switch from eating chicken to VFC and that will save entire flocks, sheds and farms of birds.
We have some very exciting opportunities to expand into supermarkets, food service and overseas markets. Our current business plan predicts we’ll spare the following numbers of chickens over the coming years:
2021 — 186,725
2022 — 1,226,276
2023 — 2,134,677
This is a conservative growth estimate and ultimately we will be working towards a stretched plan where the numbers of chickens spared is much larger. We’re also delighted to see so many other exciting chicken alternatives coming on to the market, and hope that together we can make a meaningful impact.
We accept that our ‘chickens saved’ counter is imperfect, but it is the best method we have and a vital tool to keep track of our impact. And, as we develop as a company, we may well be tracking our impact for pigs, cows and fish, too.
