O'Hayer: Roughly half of US laying hens are now cage-free
Matt O'Hayer · Vital Farms: Matt O’Hayer. How a serial entrepreneur re-branded the egg · Mar 23, 2026 · at 1:02:52
Matt O'Hayer, founder of Vital Farms, discusses how consumer demand and pasture-raised farming have shifted broader US egg production away from battery cages.
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“I think the factory farming method, the, you know, the battery cages are still there, right? But instead of being 95, 97 or eight percent, whatever it is, it's around 50 or so today. I don't have the exact numbers, but somewhere in the half. So we've had a pretty big impact and it's 300 and thirty million laying hens and 151 hundred sixty million of those are now no longer in cages.”
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