Trader Joe’s Shoppers Hear About Dirty Birds

SAN FRANCISCO (02-22) – Trader Joe’s the popular national grocery store chain located in 40 states has among its offerings so-called “organic and free-range” chicken raised by Perdue Farms subsidiary, Petaluma Poultry, and marketed under the “Rocky the Free Range Chicken” and “Rosie the Original Organic Chicken” labels that are both misleading and inaccurate according to the international the grassroots animal rights activists from Direct Action Everywhere (DXE). The group has been demanding Trader Joe’s discontinue selling the products due to documented animal cruelty, health and food safety concerns and false advertising. For its part, Trader Joe’s has not complied to the demands of the activists and continues to offer the products at its stores.

Perdue Farms is one of the nation’s largest privately held poultry producers with sales through its various enterprises of $10.3 billion in 2024. On its Petaluma Poultry website, the company features a video of healthy chickens outdoors in fresh clean air and sunshine portraying a bucolic natural environment in which they are being raised. But DXE argues otherwise. Marketed as organic and free-range chicken, the labels imply a healthy natural choice for consumers in the market for fresh poultry while DXE claims that nothing could be further from the truth.

Buttressing their complaints is the Cornucopia Institute, an organization that “uncovers the truth behind organic food and advocates for an organic label you can trust.” According to their scorecard in which the Institute rated chickens from the Petaluma/Perdue Rocky and Rosie labels they disclosed that the poultry “…are raised in static barns …and… rarely, if ever, see the outdoors despite organic regulations requiring access to the outdoors, fresh air, and sunshine. These “organic” birds essentially live lives the same as conventional chickens—but with organic inputs (such as feed and not using traditional antibiotics).

According to activists, the massive windowless warehouse of the Petaluma Poultry industrial farming factory where chickens are raised is an inhumane and crowded facility in which as many as 200,000 birds dwell during their entire short lives in an enclosed and unsanitary facility. The captive birds are little more than helpless prisoners of a system that views them solely as a meat commodity and not as living feeling animals.

Chickens produced thusly are the product of genetically modified birds engineered to grow large plump breasts that excessively and disproportionately distributes their overburdened weight which in turn causes many of them to suffer from deformed legs and other health-related issues. Thus, the origin of the term “Franken Chicken” in denoting birds that are an unnaturally engineered as a meat product.

As most consumers are unaware of the processes and conditions in the production of the familiar refrigerated plastic wrapped chicken in stores, DEX demonstrated their concerns to inform and educate the public of why they should avoid purchasing the Perdue brand at Trader Joe’s.

In calling attention to their presence, they held a large banner at the stores entrance with a message reading “Chicken served here has high rates of pathogens,” and “USDA reports Perdue one of the worst” while reciting several chants.

“Trade Joes claims it’s all natural, its factory farmed let’s be factual. Its organic must be healthy, Petaluma poultry it’s all filthy. Stores say it’s fresh, you are eating diseased flesh. Trader Joe’s has a real big secret, all their chicken is covered in s*#t.”

Accompanied by an informational handout given to interested passersby, the group alerted the public that “Multiple investigations and studies have reported that Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry has significantly higher rates of pathogen contamination compared to industry averages, posing elevated risks to consumer health.”

According to the handout, studies conducted in 2022 by the USDA revealed that tests of Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry chicken products had a higher incident of campylobacter and salmonella levels that were many times higher than 60 other California processors.

All these findings are contrary to Traders Joe’s values as it espouses a confident philosophy that “To earn a spot on our shelves, each product is submitted to a rigorous tasting panel process in which every aspect of quality is investigated in context of the price we can offer. If a product is assessed as an outstanding value, it becomes an essential part of the Trader Joe's shopping adventure.”

According to the activists, as long as Trader Joe’s resists their call to discontinue selling Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry brand chicken, they will continue demonstrating at stores in helping consumers make informed and healthy purchasing decisions that include choosing to not be complicit in animal cruelty and for safe personal health.

The operative phrase as always, is that of Caveat emptor.
Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

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