How chicken conquered the world

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Is the chicken takeover unstoppable?Author of the article:Demand for chicken is rising in rich countries as well as emerging markets, helped by the bird's unusual ability to fit almost any cuisine, religion or price point. Photo by KARRASTOCK/Getty ImagesIt is served in paper buckets in American suburbs, rice bowls in Chinese malls, shawarma shops in the Gulf, peri-peri restaurants in Britain, biryanis in India and supermarket sandwiches around the world. It can be fried, roasted, grilled, shredded, stewed, minced, nuggeted or reconstituted into something only distantly recognisable as a bird.THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLYSubscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman, and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLESSubscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Exclusive articles from Barbara Shecter, Joe O'Connor, Gabriel Friedman and others.Daily content from Financial Times, the world's leading global business publication.Unlimited online access to read articles from Financial Post, National Post and 15 news sites across Canada with one account.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles, including the New York Times Crossword.REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLESCreate an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountFew foods travel as smoothly through the modern economy as chicken.A meat that for much of the 20th century was an expensive minority choice has in the 21st become its favourite protein — and the rise of the chicken is speeding up. Global growth in chicken production has accelerated in the past three to four years, says Nan-Dirk Mulder, global poultry specialist at Rabobank, who says he struggles to find any market where consumption is falling. Chickens produced worldwide rose from 48.3 billion in 2006 to 76.2 billion in 2023.Get the latest headlines, breaking news and columns.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Top Stories will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againThat rise has reshaped farming landscapes and high streets. More chicken means more sheds, hatcheries, feed mills, slaughter lines and refrigerated lorries, but also wider access to cheap protein for consumers who once ate little meat. From London to Lagos and Riyadh to Manila, fried-chicken shops and poultry-heavy fast-food menus have become part of the everyday food economy.As far as demand is concerned, the chicken’s rise has much further to go, observers say. “We’re a long way off peak chicken,” says Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University who runs the Meat Demand Monitor.Yet the same industrial farms that cater for the public’s vast appetite for chicken are rapidly gaining a reputation as centres of pollution and disease. Avian flu has disrupted production and trade, while planning battles and community opposition make it harder to build the farms and processing plants needed to keep expanding.“There is an incompatibility between what people say and reject as citizens and what they want to eat as consumers,” says Jean-Yves Guérot, a poultry farmer from Mayenne in France. “We live with that contradiction every day.”The rise of chickenFor much of the last century, chicken was not the obvious candidate to become the world’s favourite meat. Beef had status and pork had scale, particularly in China and Europe. Before chicken became the world’s most widely consumed meat, it was not really a meat business at all: farmers kept chickens chiefly for eggs. There is “no question that in the food business, the egg came first”, says Roger Horowitz, a historian of the US food industry.The birds eaten for meat were spent hens or young males sold in spring — the origin of the phrase “spring chicken”. In 19th-century America, Horowitz says, chicken could be more expensive than beef.This advertisement has not loaded yet.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.But with the 20th century, its transformation began, fuelled by refrigeration, railways and urban demand. Horowitz says Jewish consumers in cities such as New York, who arrived in large numbers from eastern Europe and Russia from the end of the 19th century, sustained a separate live-poultry trade because religious rules required poultry to be slaughtered, washed and salted according to kosher practice close to where people lived.“You have to include Jews as part of the story,” he says. It was “not possible in the early 20th century to get chicken or beef from the Midwest to the East Coast within three days”, so millions of birds were shipped live from the south and west into New York to be killed in small local plants.From about 1930, supermarkets turned that business into a mass market, meeting their own need for a standardized, chilled, portioned and cheap product. Poultry companies began building slaughter and processing plants closer to production regions.By the 1950s, companies in states such as Delaware and Arkansas were killing, processing and selling birds into a new national market.This was all enabled by changes to the bird itself. The industry shifted from chickens bred for eggs towards birds suited to meat. Sponsored by supermarket and industry interests, postwar “Chicken of Tomorrow” contests pushed farmers to produce birds with more meat, quicker growth and better feed efficiency — a chicken designed for the age of mass retail.The economics changed quickly. Breeding improved growth rates and body shape. Feed conversion improved. Antibiotics were added to feed not only to control disease but to make birds gain weight more efficiently. Production cycles shortened. The price of chicken fell.In general, said Horowitz, “food consumption patterns are very sticky”, yet between the 1930s and 1960s chicken moved from the margins of the American diet towards its centre.Now, Richard Griffiths, president of the International Poultry Council, describes poultry as “a truly global industry”, with similar breeding, growing and processing methods used from Brazil to Germany to Australia.The United States pioneered the industrial chicken model, but no longer dominates it. Brazil, the world’s largest exporter, shipped about 4.9 million tons of chicken meat in 2024, according to UN Food and Agriculture Organization data analyzed by the FT — up from about 910,000 tonnes in 2000. U.S. exports, by contrast, have slipped in recent years.In 2022, according to the UN FAO, chicken surpassed pork as the most produced meat.Chicken lends itself to that global model because it can be broken apart and sold wherever each piece is worth most. Feet, for example — often of little value in western supermarkets — become valuable exports to China, where chicken paws are eaten in dim sum, food-service dishes and ready-to-eat snacks.Demand is rising in rich countries as well as emerging markets, helped by high beef prices, protein-heavy diets, fast-food expansion and the bird’s unusual ability to fit almost any cuisine, religion or price point. Chicken is even gaining market share in Japan, for example, despite its shrinking population and weak economic growth.High beef prices have helped in the short term, but chicken’s longer-term advantages are structural: the bird is cheap, feed-efficient, quick to produce and faces fewer cultural or religious restrictions than pork or beef. It is gaining share from rival meats in mature markets such as Japan, Canada and parts of Europe, while across large swaths of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America it is already the preferred protein.Globally, production has been growing at about two to 2.5 per cent annually in the past two decades, but has in the past three to four years accelerated to more than three per cent, says Mulder.The shift is visible in the companies that once built their businesses around other foods. McDonald’s, long defined by beef burgers, said in its latest annual report that chicken was a global category roughly twice the size of beef and growing faster. It has expanded McCrispy, its fried chicken sandwich, to nearly all its major markets.In the U.S., arguably the world’s most mature market, even if domestic consumption levelled off, production could keep rising if exports grew, says Tonsor. “I’m not willing to say we’re at peak.”But the next phase is not simply more frozen chicken moving from the largest exporters to the rest of the world. Mulder says local supply chains are now growing faster than international trade, a shift he describes as moving “from global to local”.The logic is partly political. “Food security, resource security has been a top priority” in many growth markets, he says. Governments want chicken production locally “because of food security reasons, but also because of employment reasons”.That is encouraging countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa to invest in farms, feed mills, hatcheries and processing plants. Saudi Arabia, he says, has sharply increased homegrown poultry production despite the challenge of producing in the desert.“We see China at the moment really ramping up its domestic production. It wants to become an exporter,” says Griffiths. At the same time, domestic demand is still being pulled higher by restaurant expansion. Yum China opened 457 net new KFC stores in the first quarter of 2026, taking the chain to 13,454 Chinese outlets by the end of March.But poultry food security is colliding with environmental and political risks. Compared with beef, poultry is efficient and less emissions-intensive. But as production rises, so do total emissions, manure, litter and pressure on feed systems. Animal rights campaigners have cut through into the public consciousness with gruesome images of “frankenchickens” and dark, overcrowded intensive farms.In the United Kingdom, those concerns have already moved from campaign slogans into planning and the courts. River Action, a campaign group, won a High Court ruling in 2025 that chicken manure from industrial poultry farms could be classified as waste — rather than an agricultural byproduct — and later helped overturn approval for a large intensive poultry unit in the River Severn catchment.The constraint on chicken’s next phase may therefore be less about demand than permission to expand.In Europe, Mulder said poultry companies were struggling to secure approval for new farms and processing capacity. A mega-project by Ukrainian poultry group MHP was abandoned in Croatia this year after an outbreak of demonstrations, and a local government in Mallorca last year denied permission for a chicken-breeding and processing plant after a flood of objections.Ultimately, such opposition may become the factor that limits the spread of chicken: populations hungry for cheap meat are less keen on how the chicken is made. “If we’re serious about our food security and domestic production, we need more farm space and infrastructure… The bottom line is we’re not getting it,” says Griffiths.© 2026 The Financial Times LtdWe apologize, but this video has failed to load.Notice for the Postmedia NetworkThis website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.