Capturing the meaning of “free range”: The contest between producers, supermarkets and consumers for the higher welfare egg label in Australia

Abstract

This paper shows how the Australian egg industry maintained its preferred definition of “free range” eggs in the face of a powerful consumer-oriented challenge to its labelling practices. We show how a consumer law initiative intended to enhance consumer confidence and address misleading labelling of industrial-scale egg production as “free range”, was reframed through the policy consultation process, so that the primary policy problem became one of assuring industry certainty in a volatile contest for control over the governance of “free range” labelling. Drawing on notions of contests for power in regulatory space, we show how a policy coalition of egg industry and government primary industries actors successfully advocated for “free range” to be legally defined in a new consumer law information standard in accordance with existing, industrial-scale free range production systems, rather than the smaller scale systems preferred by consumer and animal welfare advocates. While this decision reflects the traditional regulatory capture by agricultural industries of Australian food and animal welfare policy decision making, we suggest that it equally reflects the existing power structure in the retail egg market – namely the two major supermarkets' adoption of industrial free range as their own standard for higher welfare egg labelling.