The restaurant chain Earls is drawing heat from Canadian cattle producers thanks to a policy change. They wanted to buy beef that is “certified humane” and were going to America to do it. Canadian producers and consumers roundly condemned the program, leading to the chain to drop it, but why did it fail?
It’s a combination of paperwork and marketing that is the cause of this controversy. Earls wants to assure its customers that the cattle that have since become their steaks lead happy, healthy lives in some sort of cow utopia, with lots of food and space and whatever other things cattle enjoy – in my experience, stepping on my feet. In doing that, they’ve gone with a certification from an American non-profit – Humane Farm Animal Care – that has not to this point really been of interest to Canadian farms and ranches. The certification sets up assorted minimum standards and guarantees that farms with it have met them, and as a result customers can feel all happy about the cattle they are eating.
The problem for Canadian producers is not that they don’t meet the standards, it’s that they don’t have the paperwork that says they do. A ranch might be a cattle paradise here, but since the certification that the restaurant chain was using was from an American program and hasn’t really been relevant to Canadian producers until this point, nobody actually has it. It was simply not a thing here, and until now nobody has had incentive to care. There has always been incentive to treat the animals well, and most farmers do, but if you can avoid the expense and hassle of paperwork, one can spend more time farming, less time filling out forms.
In this particular case, it’s also not a Canadian program. There are Canadian programs, for example the BC SPCA certified program, but the restaurant chain in question decided to go with an American certification. That puts Canadian producers at a second disadvantage, because if you’re going to get a voluntary certification you’re going to go with the local option – it is something that’s more relevant to local consumers, plus it’s easier to get someone to actually do it since it’s a local office in your own country. Which is not to say that it’s impossible to get the Certified Humane label, just that given the choice you’re going to look to Canadian programs first to sell Canadian beef.
A second problem is that a big chain actually has fewer options to get on the humane bandwagon than a smaller operation. For a local restaurant, you don’t need to have a huge supply chain. A steakhouse in Saskatchewan could actually go out and meet their beef suppliers if they wanted to assure their customers that their beef was raised humanely, they only have to supply one restaurant and can do things at the individual level. This is part of the reason farm-to-table is a huge trend among smaller restaurants, people like eating local and it’s something that bigger restaurants just can’t do effectively. A chain restaurant has to consider their supply chain and can’t meet with individual suppliers on a one-to-one basis. Having a certification makes it easier for them to assure their customers of humane treatment, since they can’t be like the local restaurant that has actually met the cattle they’re serving. It’s less work for them to demand that people meet a certain certification standard, though it is more work for the farmer it can be argued it opens up markets.
The problem with Earls’ approach was the way they have handled it guaranteed that they were not going to get local beef, at least not initially, and possibly not in the long run either. In going for an American certification process they were going for a process that is biased towards American producers. Which is fine, if you want American beef, but if you’re serving Canadian consumers you want Canadian beef. It’s the other part of that farm-to-table trend, people prefer to have their food locally produced if possible. In selecting local beef, you support local businesses and local people who can now support other local businesses and local people. You have a lot less transit to worry about, so you don’t have the emissions created by long shipping distances. Earls had forgotten that people like their meat to come from nearby, and have been battered by the inevitable backlash, especially in regions which have a large amount of beef production which would serve a restaurant chain just fine.
It might be a competitive advantage to create a home-grown certification of humane treatment, and for a restaurant chain like Earls to adopt that instead of the American one. But the real lesson here is that when you’re trying to ride the coattails of trends in restaurants, you have to recognize the entire trend. Humane treatment and local production drive farm-to-table, and the second half is important to many people.
