Activists pressure Target to set new goal after missing its cage-free eggs deadline

Target acknowledged last year the company wouldn’t meet its goal to sell only cage-free eggs by 2025.

The retailer still hasn’t set a new finish line to meet its decade-old pledge.

Activists on Tuesday delivered nearly 200,000 signatures to Target headquarters in downtown Minneapolis demanding the company catch up with Costco, Amazon and other retailers and restaurants in going cage-free.

“McDonald’s found a way to meet this goal early,” said Kent Stein, corporate policy specialist at Humane World for Animals. “There’s no excuse for Target to be trailing behind.”

The group, formerly known as Humane Society of the United States, also wants Target to fulfill an older pledge to only source pork from farms that don’t use confining gestation crates for sows.

Target last year pointed to bird flu wiping out flocks that supply its Good & Gather brand of eggs as well as consumers not accepting higher prices. Walmart had a similar explanation for missing its own cage-free pledge.

“Target is committed to practices that support the welfare of animals sourced for food and non-food products, and we’ve made great progress toward our goals for cage-free eggs and reducing gestation crates,” a Target spokesperson said Tuesday.

Nearly half of all egg-laying hens raised in the U.S. are now cage-free, which is largely the result of state laws banning caged-egg sales. Many companies made voluntary pledges in response to consumer demand for cage-free eggs while also needing to comply with state mandates.

Meanwhile, some states don’t allow federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food-assistance dollars to be used on cage-free eggs.

The Trump administration has sued California over its cage-free law, claiming the state imposes “costly requirements on farmers that have the effect of raising egg prices for American consumers by prohibiting farmers across the country from using commonly accepted agricultural methods that helped keep eggs affordable,” the Department of Justice said in a news release earlier this month.

Animal welfare groups say caging hens for egg production amounts to animal cruelty.

As of last week, conventional eggs were averaging $2.67 per dozen and cage-free were priced about a dollar more, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.