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Share of egg production that is cage-free

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Animal Welfare

About this data

Share of egg production that is cage-free
Share of all eggs that are produced in cage-free housing systems. This includes barns, pasture and free-range (non-organic and organic) eggs.
Source
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom (2023); The Humane League based on the United States Department of Agriculture (2023) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
August 3, 2023
Date range
1996–2022
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom – UK egg statistics

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom (Defra) runs a quarterly survey of registered UK egg packing stations. It is a voluntary sample survey of 27 respondents that collects information on throughput by production type and prices of graded eggs and sales of ungraded eggs. The response rate is typically 100 per cent and the survey accounts for 75 per cent of eggs packed in the UK. The survey figures are raised up to give UK estimates using information on the number of commercial laying hens, average egg yields, average mortality rates, the proportion of UK eggs that go through packing stations. Throughput by egg type for packing stations not surveyed is calculated using data provided by packing stations responding to the survey.

Retrieved on
August 1, 2023
Retrieved from
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/egg-statistics
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Quarterly UK statistics on Egg Packing Station Throughput and Prices, by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom (Defra) runs a quarterly survey of registered UK egg packing stations. It is a voluntary sample survey of 27 respondents that collects information on throughput by production type and prices of graded eggs and sales of ungraded eggs. The response rate is typically 100 per cent and the survey accounts for 75 per cent of eggs packed in the UK. The survey figures are raised up to give UK estimates using information on the number of commercial laying hens, average egg yields, average mortality rates, the proportion of UK eggs that go through packing stations. Throughput by egg type for packing stations not surveyed is calculated using data provided by packing stations responding to the survey.

Retrieved on
August 1, 2023
Retrieved from
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/egg-statistics
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Quarterly UK statistics on Egg Packing Station Throughput and Prices, by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom.

The Humane League – US egg production

This project synthesizes data on the supply of cage-free eggs relative to all food eggs in the United States using United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) data from December 2007 to present. The associated report supplements the data with definitions and a taxonomy of egg products drawn from USDA and industry publications.

Retrieved on
August 3, 2023
Retrieved from
https://thehumaneleague.org/article/E008R01-us-egg-production-data
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The Humane League based on the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

This project synthesizes data on the supply of cage-free eggs relative to all food eggs in the United States using United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) data from December 2007 to present. The associated report supplements the data with definitions and a taxonomy of egg products drawn from USDA and industry publications.

Retrieved on
August 3, 2023
Retrieved from
https://thehumaneleague.org/article/E008R01-us-egg-production-data
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The Humane League based on the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

For the United States, we approximate the share of eggs by the share of hens (for which there is more data available); the difference is expected to be smaller than 10%.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of egg production that is cage-free”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “Animal Welfare”. Data adapted from Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom, The Humane League. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/eggs-cage-free.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom (2023); The Humane League based on the United States Department of Agriculture (2023) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom (2023); The Humane League based on the United States Department of Agriculture (2023) – processed by Our World in Data. “Share of egg production that is cage-free” [dataset]. Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs of the United Kingdom, “UK egg statistics”; The Humane League, “US egg production” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/eggs-cage-free.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data API

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Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eggs-cage-free.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eggs-cage-free.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eggs-cage-free.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eggs-cage-free.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eggs-cage-free.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eggs-cage-free.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eggs-cage-free.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/eggs-cage-free.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear