Tyson Foods Will Remove ‘No Antibiotics’ Label on Some Chicken Products

Packets of Tyson Chicken Nuggets, a brand owned by Tyson Foods, Inc., in a store in Manhattan, New York, on Nov. 15, 2021. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Tyson Foods announced it will drop its “no antibiotics ever” label on some of its chicken products after it decided to reintroduce certain drugs in its chickens.

This comes eight years after the Arkansas-based meat and poultry producer said it planned to remove antibiotics from its products, reported The Wall Street Journal.

The largest poultry seller in the United States said it would no longer use antibiotics not essential to human health, which will apply to its fresh, frozen, and ready-made chicken products by the end of the 2023 calendar year.

Tyson said its chicken decision to display a “no antibiotics important to human medicine” label and its transition back to antibiotics is in the best interest of both humans and animals.

Push Against Antibiotics in Chicken Production Sees a Reversal

Tyson’s reversal marked a departure from its stance in 2015 when it planned to remove antibiotics from its chickens.

The company said that its chicken breasts, wings, and nuggets sold at grocery stores would be raised without using antibiotics, including those only used for animals, by 2017.

“At Tyson Foods, we base our decisions on sound science and an evolving understanding of the best practices impacting our customers, consumers and the animals in our care,” a Tyson Foods spokesperson said.

Antibiotic use in the food supply has come under intense scrutiny in recent years due to the spread of drug-resistant bacteria that are increasingly resistant to treatments.

About half of American poultry farmers use some form of antibiotics to help keep their flocks free from disease, according to Tyson.

Tyson said it was concerned about the rise in drug-resistant bacterial infections in humans at the time and would help by reducing antibiotic use.

“We don’t have all the answers, but we want to make sure that antibiotics continue to work,” said Tyson’s then head of sustainable food production, Christine Daugherty, to CNN at the time.

Many chickens are raised in crowded and unsanitary conditions for mass breeding and are often prone to disease.

Diseases are difficult to control in crowed chicken coops, so poultry farmers treat their flocks with antibiotics.

The drugs are also used to promote poultry growth for items like large broiler chickens.

Perdue Farms, another large chicken processor, told the Wall Street Journal in 2016 that all of its chicken would be raised without antibiotics.

The company said birds that fell ill, typically less than 1 percent of its stock, were treated with antibiotics and sold without a no-antibiotics label.

Pilgrim’s Pride, the nation’s second-largest supplier, also told the Journal that at least 25 percent of its chicken was produced without antibiotics.

Antibiotics Use Blamed for Increasing Drug-Resistant Bacterial Strains

Chicken producers dropped antibiotics because industry executives believed that American consumers would pay a premium for meat produced without the drugs.

Tyson executives thought that the cost of antibiotics-free chicken would be no more than 20 percent of its regular product due to higher costs.

The company has said it would use probiotics, essential oils, and other plant-based products to keep its chickens healthy rather than antibiotics.

The Food and Drug Administration encourages limited antibiotic use in meat production, but an agency spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that it is more concerned about the misuse of antibiotics used for human health.

Meanwhile, the WHO’s recent study on antibiotics in food showed that there remained “clear evidence of adverse human health consequences due to resistant organisms resulting from non-human usage of antimicrobials.”

The health agency said that the types of drugs used to promote growth and health in animals are “frequently the same, or closely related to those used in human medicine.”

As concerns over misuse of antibiotics in livestock rose in recent decades, the WHO released guidelines in 2007 that aimed to prevent antibiotics commonly used on humans, from being used in animal production.

The WHO report said “an appropriate balance should be struck between animal health needs and human health considerations—human health being, however, paramount compared to animal health.”

Reintroducing certain antibiotics could save Tyson money, said executives, especially if consumers are showing less willingness to spend more on products raised without antibiotics while improving health in its flocks, according to industry analysts.

Even Pilgrim’s Pride, which uses some antibiotics, has eased its earlier efforts to reduce its use, while Perdue said it would stick to its policy to ban antibiotics in its chicken.

The Epoch Times reached out to Tyson for comment.