Since “Wegmans Cruelty” was released to the public in July 2005, Wegmans Food Markets has been on the defensive. In the company’s ideal world, its customers would never see how inhumane, overcrowded, and disgusting Wegmans Egg Farm is, but now that the footage is out there the company has had to do a lot of damage control.

The Wegmans Egg Farm Update webpage has always been an interesting mix of generalizations, contradictions, and attacks designed to satisfy Wegmans customers who care about the welfare of animals. But last week the webpage was updated, perhaps in response to the growing attention “Wegmans Cruelty” has received. The first thing that many people will ever learn about Wegmans is that it runs a needlessly cruel egg farm. Wegmans is trying to shake off that image.

Wegmans tells customers that the USDA carries out audits at its egg farm. This misleads concerned shoppers into believing that a federal agency has approved the animal welfare practices at Wegmans Egg Farm. This is, however, simply not the case. There exist no federal standards for the treatment of egg-laying hens. The USDA auditors are simply checking for the minimal standards set by United Egg Producers (UEP), a private organization. UEP's standards require that each egg-laying hen be given less than the space of a sheet of notebook paper in which to spend 18 months. In this small amount of space hens cannot even spread their wings.

Wegmans claims that phasing out battery cages at its egg farm and converting to a cage-free system would mean many of its customers could not afford eggs. But the best market research suggests that consumers would only have to pay just a few cents more each week if Wegmans went cage-free. As the only grocery store company in the country to run its own egg farm Wegmans is in a unique position to improve the lives of 750,000 animals and do it at minimal cost to its customers.

Here's a quote from Wegmans’ webpage that can be carefully analyzed:

There are definitely many inaccurate statements in the film, starting at the very beginning when it is said that ours was “the largest egg farm in the world” when it opened in 1967. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true today.

The line in “Wegmans Cruelty” that Wegmans raises issue with is actually a few minutes into the film, and it goes, "At the time [Wegmans Egg Farm] was built in 1967, it was considered the world's largest egg farm."

Compassionate Consumers spent months researching the history of Wegmans and its egg farm. We found a number of articles about Wegmans' egg facility while looking through the archives at the Wolcott Civic Free Library. Here is one of the sources for our claim that the facility was "considered" the largest in the world:

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Maybe the Vice President of Wegmans was exaggerating at the time, but the article made him sound pretty clear about it.

We understand that Wegmans could forget what its vice president said almost 40 years ago, but when the company makes these claims it needs to realize that most of the information in “Wegmans Cruelty” comes from the mouths of Wegmans spokespeople. Compassionate Consumers makes no absolute or exaggerated claims in its film, because the footage from Wegmans Egg Farm speaks for itself.