Why is supermarket chicken so expensive?

Math is fun!

What do concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) chickens eat?

Conventional CAFO chickens basically eat corn and soybean meal. (We hope. Sometimes they eat far worse things than that.)  Industry chickens gain a pound of carcass weight for every 1 4/5 pounds of feed.  So a 5 pound chicken in the chain supermarket ate around 9 pounds of feed.

How much does that feed cost?

Corn by the bushel is roughly 7 cents a pound on the open market and soybean meal is around 15 cents a pound.  (These prices fluctuate and I’m sure have changed since I first looked them up, but if anything, a major national chicken producer is going to have buying power and pay, if anything, less than the listed commodity prices.)

Soybean meal is about 45 percent protein and broiler chickens need around 20 percent protein in their feed mix (a bit more early on, a bit less when they are close to finished.)  So a 5 pound chicken will have eaten about 4 pounds of soybean meal and 5 pounds of corn.  The soybean meal provides 1 4/5 pounds of protein which is 20 percent of 9 pounds, and the rest of the feed is corn for added calories.

4 pounds of soybean meal X 15 cents a pound = 60 cents

5 pounds of corn X 7 cents a pound = 35 cents

A total of 95 cents.  That's total, not per pound.  95 cents to feed the chicken it's whole life.    

If you exclusively ate food costing less than 10 cents a pound, how healthy do you think you would be?

Let's be generous and triple that number for labor costs and depreciation of facilities and so on. Heck, let’s give all the workers a raise and say it’s a 4x multiple. That probably even covers trucking costs and shelf space at the supermarket, and you know what? You shouldn’t have to pay for that anyways. We all want truckers to be compensated for their service, but the fact that your chicken spent several days in shipping is of zero benefit to you, and you shouldn’t have to pay for it.

You're being ripped off

Why do they charge you $1.25 per pound for chicken in the supermarket?  That's $6.25 for a chicken that costs at most $3.80 to raise, process, and wrap it in plastic.  Well, they do it because they can.  They can get you to pay double their cost.

Why is that?  Does factory-farmed supermarket chicken have a robust and unique flavor that you find especially delicious?  Do you relish trips down the meat aisle in the supermarket, feeling the cold air from the display case as you check the sell by dates on the packages?  How old is that stuff, anyways? Do you enjoy thinking about groundwater contamination and algae blooms from tons (literally) of chicken manure runoff?  Have you ever thought, "Hey honey, let's take the kids out to see the factory chickens this weekend. Pack the breathing masks so we don’t inhale an unsafe amount of aerosolized chicken poop."   

Get what you pay for

Pasture-raised chickens cost a lot more to raise than factory-farmed poultry.  They eat a far more varied and healthy diet, but they also eat more - a lot more.  And managing chickens on pasture is a lot of work.  Many small farmers raising pastured poultry are lucky if we make minimum wage on our time and effort.  Even with a very small margin, good pasture-raised chicken does cost more.

But then, if you're buying factory-farmed chicken, you're not even getting what you pay for.