Whole Foods Market, one of the largest U.S. natural foods grocers, is ensuring it has no ties with the California chicken hatchery accused in a lawsuit this week of abusing baby chicks, a spokeswoman said Friday.
Whole Foods "had about five degrees of separation" from Cal-Cruz Hatcheries Inc., said Beth Krauss, spokeswoman for the Austin, Texas, based chain of more than 300 markets. She looked into Whole Foods' link to Cal-Cruz following a HuffPost email inquiry on Wednesday. A lawsuit was filed that day in Santa Cruz, Calif., by an animal rights group, asking a judge to halt abuse filmed by an undercover investigator that included hatchlings tossed into buckets of waste, piled into bins and left to die after being mangled by machinery.
"Moving forward, we will not be working with any ranches that receive chicks from Cal-Cruz," Krauss said.
Whole Foods buys chicken from distributors that rely on ranches to raise the birds from hatchlings. Krauss explained that the company's network of suppliers in some cases stretches back to Cal-Cruz, which sold chicks to Central Coast Fryer. Central Coast Fryer in turn sold chickens to Field to Family Natural Foods, which sold them to Whole Foods.
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