We work closely with our long standing partners at Crown Chicken to ensure best practice across all farms. All Morrisons-label Fresh Chicken is 100% British, sourced from Crown’s network of farms in East Anglia.
Our partnership with Crown enables us to work closely with the full supply chain, giving our birds the best start to life with industry leading on farm hatching. From April 2025 our chickens now have more space to roam for higher welfare standards.
Crown have a unique fully integrated supply chain that means they have a consistent on farm approach and sharing of best practice. This allows security and consistency of supply as well as quality control. Crown have self sufficient supply of feed from two integrated feed mills using locally sourced wheat and 100% sustainable, zero deforestation soya. We continue to work to further reduce soya in the diet as well as exploring the use of other protein sources.
Crown farms are located close to their processing site to reduce the travel times for the birds, as well as minimising our carbon footprint.
On Farm Hatching
We are proud to be the only UK retailer using on-farm hatching for all of our fresh Chicken. All of our chicks are born from our revolutionary on-farm hatching system that significantly improves the level of health and welfare of our birds through the birds having immediate access to food and water and avoiding unnecessary transport. Chicks are given a more natural start in life which reduces stress. With immediate access to food and water, gut health is improved and the need for antibiotics is reduced. This improves bird welfare, health and sustainability.
This is a step change from common UK hatching systems where, typically, hatched chicks have no access to food or water for 1-2 days, are handled more and transported further.
More space leading to happier and healthier birds
We have been working closely with Crown Chicken to give our birds more space throughout their life, promoting more active, playful and natural behaviour. We have reduced the maximum weight of our birds per m² from 38Kg to 30Kg. This amounts to approximately 20% fewer birds per shed, and chicks per m² has reduced from 19.4 to 15.
This change, in partnership with Crown Chicken and our trusted farmers, will allow us to provide our customers with improved welfare chicken, with the same great value.
Sustainability
As well as Red Tractor, we have introduced additional measures for the full range of poultry coming into our fresh chicken, turkey and duck supply including increased health and welfare monitoring, checking of stock and training of staff. Working closely with our suppliers, we monitor and manage key welfare indicators including pododermatitis, hock marks, leg culls, mortality and stocking densities.
We monitor antibiotic use in our chicken supply chain every month, ensuring that we achieve our Morrisons’ targets, which thanks to the hard work of our farmers and suppliers, are now set as more challenging than the RUMA industry targets for the sector.