How FAI works with clients to operationalise welfare

Many businesses have policies and public commitments in place, but translating those commitments into consistent practice across species, sourcing regions and supplier systems remains difficult.

FAI has worked with food companies around the globe for over 25 years, providing strategic, scientific and practical support to drive meaningful improvements in animal-based supply chains. We help companies move from high-level direction to practical implementation.

Our 5-step approach combines strategic consultancy, structured supply chain assessment, welfare outcome measurement and capability building, so businesses can prioritise action, work more effectively with suppliers, and track progress over time.

FAI’s 5-step strategic framework

1. Groundwork: Establish the baseline

The first step is to establish a clear baseline. This means understanding current commitments, standards, sourcing models and supplier expectations across brands, products, species and geographies.

It also means identifying where the greatest welfare risks, commercial exposures and improvement opportunities sit. Without this baseline, animal welfare can remain a fragmented agenda, disconnected from procurement decisions, supplier management and broader business priorities.

2. Cultivate: Build supply chain visibility

For many businesses, one of the biggest barriers to progress is limited visibility into how different production systems and supply chain relationships operate in practice. Production models, purchasing arrangements, farm conditions and slaughter systems may vary significantly across sourcing regions, making risk difficult to compare and manage consistently.

Supplier surveys and supply chain mapping can help companies identify the main risk areas, such as low transparency, long transport distances, inconsistent farming practices or weak welfare legislation, practice or oversight. Just as importantly, they can reveal where suppliers are already demonstrating stronger practices that could be recognised, supported and scaled.

3. Sow: Prioritise and plan action

Insight only creates value if it leads to action. The next step is to convert what the business has learned into a practical roadmap with clear priorities, responsibilities and milestones.

The biggest obstacle to progress is usually not a lack of intent, but the practical difficulty of managing animal welfare across fragmented supply chains, inconsistent production systems, variable supplier capability and limited comparable data. To support meaningful and coordinated action, we help businesses turn supply chain insight into a shared vision and a manageable plan for implementation.

This framework helps companies assess welfare through four practical areas – nutrition, environment, health and behavioural interactions – and explicitly links these to the animal’s mental state. This makes it a robust and commercially useful model for setting policy, prioritising action and tracking progress.

The Five Domains provides a practical, science-based framework for prioritising action, aligning stakeholders and translating animal welfare goals into sourcing practices, supplier expectations and improvement plans. It also helps shift the conversation beyond avoiding harm alone, towards understanding what animals need for better welfare and how progress can be demonstrated in practice.

An effective roadmap embeds animal welfare policy into commercial decisions, supplier engagement and contractual expectations, enabling businesses to communicate more clearly and act more consistently across their supply chains.

Implementation is most effective when it is built on genuine partnership with suppliers and other stakeholders, supported by clear expectations, capability building and a shared commitment to improvement.

4. Grow: Build capacity, measure & improve outcomes

Policies and standards can define expectations, but outcome measurement shows what animals are experiencing. This is critical for identifying priority risks, targeting intervention and demonstrating whether conditions are improving over time.

FAI helps clients collect and interpret welfare outcome data in ways that are practical for commercial supply chains, whether on farm, in transport or at processing. Structured data collection enables businesses to compare performance more consistently, focus attention where it matters most and support more credible reporting.

Animal welfare outcomes can be collected throughout the animal’s lifetime, from birth farm to the abattoir. Many common outcome measures, like those collected at the abattoir, are physical (e.g. presence of hock burn in chickens), but some companies are using AI-enabled camera, sound, sensor and wearable technologies to collect behavioural outcomes.

Data alone does not change practice. Improvement depends on whether internal teams and suppliers have the skills, understanding, incentives and motivation to act on what the data shows. This is why training and capability building are essential parts of an effective welfare programme, especially across multiple geographies and production systems.

5. Harvest: Report progress

Communicating expectations and reporting progress on animal welfare priorities to suppliers and stakeholders is critical to maintain momentum, credibly demonstrate improvement and strengthen accountability and trust. The most useful reporting combines policy and commitments, input and practice changes, and major welfare indicators and outcomes. This gives stakeholders a more balanced view of where systems are improving, where risk remains and where further action is required.

From commitments to measurable progress

FAI works with food businesses to turn animal welfare commitments into practical, measurable progress across global supply chains. Our support spans supply chain mapping, risk assessment, policy and standards development, welfare outcome measurement, data interpretation and training for teams and suppliers. By combining science-led consultancy with structured assessment and practical implementation support, we help companies build more credible, comparable and scalable animal welfare programmes.