Supermarket sells cheap chicken

Last Modified: 06 Feb 2008
By: Channel 4 News

A month after celebrity chefs launched a campaign against factory-farmed chicken, Tesco has unveiled a £2 bird.

The special offer chicken has appeared just weeks after Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver ran a series of programmes exposing the conditions in factory farms.

Research out from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says that one-in-four intensively-produced birds has trouble walking.

Data from retailers sugggests the Channel 4 campaign has not put the nation off cheap chicken.

In the week after the show's debut, Tesco said their sales of standard chickens were up 7 per cent.

We asked Tesco and Asda, who sold a £2 chicken last year, to appear on our programme, as well as the National Farmers Union. But no one was available.

Tesco said in a statment they had doubled their orders of free range and organic chickens.

They said: "We are making it easier for customers, whatever their circumstances, to buy great value and fantastic quality chicken, safe in the knowledge that it would have been raised in the highest welfare environment."