As of October 1, four more states allow for the purchase of cage-free eggs through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). This takes the total number of states allowing for these higher welfare food choices to thirty, up from five when Compassion began working on this campaign back in 2020.

Arizona, Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma all recently updated their Approved Foods Lists to allow for the purchase of cage-free eggs, joining more than two dozen other state programs (including the country’s three largest in California, Texas, and Florida) as well as Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, bringing the total proportion of WIC participants who now have access to cage-free eggs to 70%.

State WIC agencies are responding to fast-approaching retailer deadlines to go 100% cage-free. CVS and Walgreens have already announced that they no longer sell eggs from caged hens. The majority of national retailers (including Target, Walmart, Albertsons, and H-E-B) have all committed to be completely cage-free by 2025 and we continue to track their progress towards their commitments through EggTrack.

The price difference between a carton of cage-free and conventional eggs has also come down in recent years as the size of the national-cage-free flock has grown and producers have taken advantage of economies of scale. The perception of cage-free eggs as a “specialty” product is diminishing as cage-free eggs increasingly become the norm. Nearly 40% of all US egg-laying hens now live cage-free, up from just 10% in 2016.