It was a chicken morsel best savored at the theatre of the absurd.
At the front of a room full of chicken farmers feeling the heat over low prices, the president of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Canada, Colin Moore, was intoning the corporate mantra that if farmers cut their prices, the business would grow and they would make more money.
Suddenly, at the back of the room stood an adult in a tattered chicken suit. His legs were bandaged, he leaned on a crutch to support a damaged leg and claimed to speak for all the voiceless chickens maimed by the industry.
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Welcome to a moment at the annual meeting of Chicken Farmers of Canada last week.
For the chicken industry leaders in the room, the animal-rights protester at the back was the easier issue to put behind them.
He was escorted from the room and spent the next few hours parading in front of the downtown hotel where the meeting was held.
Moore presents a longer term issue for the industry.
His company represents one of the largest fast food buyers of Canadian chicken, with $1.1 billion
in total food sales through restaurant chains KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
Yet he was holding out the promise of even more sales – the billion dollar opportunity, he called it – if only chicken farmers and their marketing boards would lower the price.
Moore’s math was simple.
Americans eat more chicken because there are more outlets and prices are lower.
If Canadian farmers lowered their prices, consumers would respond by eating as much as Americans. As well, an export market would grow.
“I urge you (to) change your thinking; lower prices a bit and sell more chicken,” said Moore. “I think people in this room have the chance to move down the price of a bird a little as a gateway to huge volume increases.”
He would not be pinned down on how much prices would have to fall, although he said they might not have to decline to American levels.
According to statistics presented to the meeting, American and Canadian beef prices are on a par but Canadian chicken prices, at $2.47 per kilogram, are 40 percent higher than in the U.S.
He said Canadian farmers and chicken marketing boards should try some “test prices” at lower levels to gauge consumer reaction.
Most in the room still were smarting from a 13 cents per kg cut in prices late last year.
“It seems like an over-simplification to say ‘reduce prices and make more money’, ” said John Maaskant of Ontario. “We have recently reduced the margin and we are not making more money. I guess we’ll have to see how much farther we can go.”
Moore said he knew the proposal would not win him a standing ovation from farmers, but he urged them to consider his advice. “The downside is minimal and the upside is a billion dollars.”
Some in the audience remained skeptical that lower returns to farmers would expand the market.
Ironically, the next day at the annual meeting of the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency, there was another tale of lower prices and market response.
In British Columbia earlier this year, some stores offered eggs at bargain prices and demand shot up.
But CEMA British Columbia director Garry Zaph said it did not represent increased demand. Consumers simply threw the market into confusion by stocking up early on their Easter egg supplies.
In the traditional high-sales weeks just before Easter, sales fell sharply compared to other years. The egg marketing board found stores cancelling earlier orders.
“All we did was take the Easter sales spike and move it to February,” he said. “We are not going to see an overall increase in sales.”
