Our Commitments to Animal Welfare

Sodexo remains firmly committed to advancing the welfare of laying hens across our US supply chain and to completing the transition toward cage‑free egg sourcing across shell, liquid, and processed egg categories. This commitment is embedded in our responsible sourcing strategy and supported by ongoing engagement with suppliers, industry partners, and stakeholders.

Throughout 2025, Sodexo delivered clear, year over year progress despite persistent structural constraints in the US egg market. At the start of the year, cage‑free sourcing stood at 64.05% for shell eggs, 89.92% for liquid eggs, and 77.94% for processed eggs. By year‑end, sustained sourcing adjustments, improved supplier availability, and focused engagement efforts translated into our strongest performance of the year, for example in higher‑volume shell and liquid egg categories that drive the majority of US egg volumes.

As of December 2025:

• Cage‑free shell egg sourcing increased to 82.66%, reflecting substantial year‑over‑year improvement
• Cage‑free liquid eggs reached 92.36%, maintaining consistently high performance
• Cage‑free processed eggs reached 72.03%, a category that remains more complex due to limited validated supply and processing capacity across the US market

On a full‑year basis, cage‑free sourcing averaged 73.86% for shell eggs, 89.41% for liquid eggs, and 73.76% for processed eggs, demonstrating sustained forward momentum across Sodexo’s US portfolio.

While Sodexo did not reach 100% cage‑free sourcing in the US by the end of 2025, our year‑over‑year progress and strong December performance clearly demonstrate that we are advancing toward completion of this transition. The ongoing avian influenza outbreak across North America has significantly reduced egg‑laying hen populations. These disruptions have constrained the availability of cage‑free eggs and slowed the final stages of conversion despite strong demand and continued supplier engagement.

The remaining stages, particularly for processed eggs, represent a recognized, industry‑wide challenge driven by capacity limitations rather than lack of demand or commitment.

Sodexo is actively driving transparency and continuous improvement working directly with suppliers and supporting market transition to accelerate closure of remaining gaps through proactive supplier engagement and market development, as we work toward completing the transition to cage‑free eggs across our US operations.

Sodexo remains vigilant in working with our supplier partners along with seeking information from multistakeholder working groups and allied industry partners to further review and support the welfare of broiler chickens. We will continue to work to achieve the Better Chicken Commitment (BCC) and the components of our roadmap to achieve the goals by 2028 can be seen below. 

Our roadmap for enhancing the welfare of broiler chickens has the following components:

• Meet or exceed BCC recommendation of 3” of friable litter by the end of 2024.
• Providing chickens with environments that contain physical enrichments by the end of 2025.
• Provide chickens with environments that comply with BCC lighting guidelines by the end of 2025.
• Have 3rd party auditing in place by the end of 2028.

Sodexo’s complete Broiler Chicken Welfare Aspirational Roadmap can be viewed here.

As announced in our January 2023 update, we are now working to add gestation crate-free products from Clemens Food Group to our supply chain as a component of our goal for 100% free-to-roam systems (which includes group-housed/reduced gestation crate and gestation crate-free) by the end of 2024, a full year earlier than previously committed. In March, we achieved 5.8% for crate-free and 62.9% for all free-to-roam pork. Similar to eggs, this aggregates with previous months and starts to impact our rolling 12-month metrics, which as of the end of March were 5.3% crate-free and 59.7% for free-to-roam.