How's Hugh's chicken campaign going?

Last week Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Chicken Run and Jamie Oliver's Fowl Dinners nearly turned the remaining meat-eating SmartPlaneteers vegetarian. Although we were pretty sure the rest of the nation would continue eating chicken, we wondered whether Fearnley-Whittingstall's Chicken Out! campaign was having any success in getting people to pick free-range birds from the supermarket shelves rather than the intensively reared ones.

To find out, we called the major UK supermarkets and asked them whether they'd seen any change in their chicken sales in the past week. Had they sold more free-range chickens? The same amount as usual? Or less?

While we were almost ready for the Vegetarian Society, we were surprised to see that apparently most other British chicken-eaters were even keener on their winged Sunday roast than usual with the majority of the supermarkets reporting chicken sales -- both free-range and indoor-reared -- as on the up for the past week.

Tesco
The supermarket featured in Fearnley-Whittingstall's series -- told SmartPlanet: "Sales of Tesco standard chickens have not been affected by the C4 TV programmes. Last week, daily national sales of standard whole birds are running approximately 7 per cent above the November 2007 daily average -- we have taken November as a comparison, since December sales are strongly affected by Christmas. Free-range sales are also running slightly higher as a proportion of total chicken sales."

The Tesco spokesperson continued: "Interestingly, data from the Axminster store shows that during Hugh's campaign in the town last year, Willow Farm sales as a percentage of total chicken sales did spike for approximately two weeks and there was a slight dip in standard chicken sales. However, standard chicken sales were back to normal or even slightly higher three weeks after the campaign started."

Marks & Spencer
M&S on the other hand, doesn't concern itself with 'standard chicken' as featured in Fearnley-Whittingstall's campaign. Its standard fresh chicken, Oakham chickens, are produced according to the RSPCA's Freedom Food rules, which, for example, require 25 per cent more space per chicken per square metre in the sheds than industry standards. M&S told SmartPlanet that all its chicken sales have gone up, including the Oakham chickens, free-range and organic.

Waitrose
The supermarket rated top in the Green Grocers Report also wanted to draw attention to its 'high-welfare' poultry, saying: "We've never sold 'cheap' chickens and we welcome recent campaigns to improve chicken welfare across the board. Our standard chickens, Waitrose Select Farm, have the industry's lowest stocking density, consistent with RSPCA Freedom Food rules. Excluding Christmas, New Year and Easter -- we sold more poultry last week than in any other week of the year. We would attribute this to a heightened awareness of the importance of buying high-welfare food."

The Co-Op
The folk at The Co-Op reported similar tendencies: "Overall chicken sales for last week are up on the previous week, but within this there is a significant rise in sales of free-range and organic chickens."

Sainsbury's
A spokesperson for Jamie's supermarket said: "Our chicken sales have increased slightly at both the bottom and top end of the spectrum, if you like, as we've seen a slight increase in the sales of both basic chickens and free-range."

Asda
An Asda spokesperson confirmed our findings so far, saying: "If anything, it seems the series have just encouraged people to buy more chicken in general." She told us the sales of free-range chicken had gone up slightly, while sales of the indoor-reared chickens had remained the same.

Somerfield
The press office told us the supermarket doesn't sell organic chickens at all and its Freedom Food chickens and standard chickens have sold as usual. The good news for Fearnley-Whittingstall's campaign is that free-range chicken sales have been up by 12.5 per cent since the series started last week.

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