Hormel to Stop Crate Usage

Fortune 500 meat producer Hormel Foods announced this week that it will be phasing out the use of gestation crates at all of its facilities by 2017.  Hormel is best known as the producer of SPAM, but also produces brand names such as Dinty Moore, Stagg, Jennie-O, and more, and has 54,000 breeding pigs in total. The announcement was made just six weeks after Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, made the same pledge, and just days after Humane Society of the United States released undercover video footage of pigs suffering in gestation crates at the facilities of Seaboard Foods, the nation’s third-largest pork producer.