The Five Freedoms Ignored:
Panera Bread
Cruelty exposed
This photo is representative of the standard industrial farming practices permitted in the company’s supply chain.Photo: Stefano Belacchi / Animal Welfare Observatory / We Animals
Paul Carbone is the CEO of Panera Bread, one of the most influential names in the global food industry. With that power comes responsibility — not just to shareholders, but to the living beings who suffer every single day to keep Panera Bread’s supply chain running.
And Paul Carbone knows.
Knows that animals in Panera Bread’s supply chain are trapped in tiny cages, mutilated without pain relief, or left to die slowly and in agony — all so the company can shave a few cents off the cost of a meal. Knows that the same cruel systems deemed unacceptable in many parts of the world are still being used where oversight is weakest and voices are easiest to ignore. Knows that many competitors have moved forward, leaving Panera Bread behind, clinging to practices the public no longer tolerates.
While Panera Bread claims to care about animal welfare, its silence and inaction tell a different story. The Five Freedoms—the basic standards that every animal should be guaranteed—are still denied to millions of animals in Panera Bread’s supply chain.
What Paul Carbone decides matters.
A single executive decision could end some of the worst suffering in industrial farming — suffering that’s been documented, condemned, and condemned again. But instead of action, we get empty statements. Instead of change, we get delay. Instead of leadership, we get complicity.
This isn’t about perfection.
It’s about decency.
And decency is a choice.
It’s time for Paul Carbone to make the right one.
Pigs in the supply chain of Panera Bread can endure unimaginable torment. Mother pigs are allowed to be confined for nearly their entire lives in tiny gestation crates, unable to turn around or even lie down comfortably.
These intelligent, social animals are reduced to living in cold metal cages, standing on hard, slatted floors covered in their own waste.
Their bodies become sore and bruised from the relentless confinement, with nothing to ease their physical agony or mental anguish.
On pig farms that supply Panera Bread, tail docking and teeth clipping may also be routinely performed without anesthesia, leaving pigs writhing in pain as their bodies are mutilated.
The emotional toll is just as severe. Pigs are highly social and intelligent, capable of forming bonds and experiencing emotions.
Pigs in Panera Bread’s supply chain can be denied everything that makes life worth living, just so the company can save a few pennies.
Hooked to milking machines day after day, dairy cows in Panera Bread’s supply chain can be pushed to the limit with an intensity of production that can result in agonizing infections like mastitis, where their swollen udders become inflamed from overmilking.
Panera Bread allows dairy cows in its supply chain to be subjected to tail docking and dehorning, brutal procedures often performed without any anesthesia.
Cows can also be tied by the neck in one spot all day, preventing them from turning, walking around, or exhibiting other natural behaviors.
Panera Bread has no policy to prevent this despicable practice in its supply chain.
On many farms, shortly after birth male babies are torn away from their mothers and crammed into veal crates or chained by the neck in veal pens until the day they are killed.
Perhaps the most heartbreaking cruelty is the treatment of baby calves.
Fish and crustaceans in Panera Bread’s supply chain can face a brutal existence.
At factory farm seafood facilities allowed in the company’s supply chain, animals can be packed into overcrowded, filthy waters where fish’s bodies can become riddled with deformities and open sores from sea lice and other irritants.
Disease is allowed to run rampant, with a large percentage of animals suffering to death from disease before even making it to slaughter.
The slaughter process is no less horrific. Panera Bread allows its seafood suppliers to kill animals in the most brutal ways possible, including cutting them open while alive and fully conscious, cooking them while alive and fully conscious, slowly asphyxiating them, or beating them to death.
Panera Bread allows its seafood suppliers to cut animals open while alive and fully conscious, cook them alive, and beat them to death.
Wild-caught fish in Panera Bread’s supply chain face similar cruelty. Methods such as trawling and longlining can kill large numbers of bycatch animals, damage local ecosystems, and lead to painful and prolonged suffering as animals linger for days jammed in nets or dangling on hooks.
Panera Bread has no public policy prohibiting cruel and devastating capture methods from being used.
Panera Bread and Paul Carbone have the power and responsibility to stop permitting these extreme cruelties in Panera’s supply chain. The public expects better, and animals deserve to live free from this egregious and unnecessary suffering.
It’s time for Panera Bread to do what many other leading food companies have already done and put policies in place that ensure the Five Freedoms for animals in its supply chain.
