Who owns Europe’s chicken?

Power in European poultry does not sit mainly with the people raising birds. It sits further up the chain with a handful of companies controlling the points through which birds become food: feed, hatcheries, contracts, slaughterhouses, processing plants, brands and trade routes.

Although ‘poultry’ can signify chicken, as well as turkeys, ducks and other fowl, chicken reared for its meat comprises the vast majority (87%) of the market.

Our investigation, combining Eurostat’s 2024 poultry-processing data with company turnover and interviews with farmers and workers, found that 15 companies control roughly half – 47.6% – of the EU’s €51.45 billion poultry-processing market. The largest, France’s LDC, holds about 9.3%; Germany’s PHW/Wiesenhof around 8%; and Plukon, headquartered in the Netherlands, around 6.6%.

No single company dominates the EU market as a whole, but concentration can be much greater within individual countries and regions.

A striking feature of the data is how little public scrutiny attaches to that control; 12 of the 15 largest processors are privately held, dynastically controlled or consortium-owned. Around ten private dynasties control an estimated €16.8-18.7 billion in poultry turnover – roughly a third of the entire EU market. Only one of the 15, the French cooperative Terrena/Galliance, is farmer-owned.

“When only one of the 15 largest processors is farmer-owned,” says Austrian MEP Thomas Waitz, who is also a member of the Member of AGRI – Agriculture and Rural Development committee, “we no longer have a farming sector but a corporate-controlled supply chain.”

Even these figures reveal only part of the picture. One in every five Euros cannot be attributed to a particular country because national figures may legally be suppressed where only one or two companies dominate. Paradoxically, some of the least visible parts of the market may also be among the most concentrated.

For farmers, this is not a continent-wide market of competing buyers. Live birds must reach a slaughterhouse within a viable distance, so a farmer’s real market may be only one or two processors. Mergers and acquisitions have tightened that control further: of around 44 transactions identified since 2016, only one primarily involved farm capacity. Companies instead bought processors, plants, hatcheries, brands and stakes in other companies – the bottlenecks around which farms must organise.

Nine of the 15 processors control networks containing an estimated 12,800-13,300 dependent farms. Comparable figures were not available for six companies; the figures indicate just how many apparently independent farms are sitting beneath a small number of corporate decision-makers.

A chicken may be raised in Poland, processed through a Dutch network, owned by French, German, British, Ukrainian or Thai capital and sold under a familiar national brand. Family farms still exist, but this is not where the power lies. What looks like a diverse collection of national businesses is increasingly organised around a small number of commercial bottlenecks.

This level of concentration is, according to Cristina Guarda MEP for the Greens/EFA: “because our competition rules don’t have a value chain approach,” something she acknowledges is also true in global value chains, especially in the upstream sector.

See the full data visualisations supporting this investigation:

Who really controls the EU chicken market?

How the chicken boom has moved East

Italy – the contract and policy trap

“In too many cases, competitiveness is a euphemism for externalisation,” says Waitz and reports from high-producing EU countries bear this out.

It is estimated that around 86% of Italian broiler farms operate under soccida agreements. Integrators supply birds and feed; farmers finance sheds, labour and energy and carry much of the operational risk.

Giacomo – not his real name – dreamed of becoming a farmer. Now 30, he runs two sheds holding more than 62,000 chickens per cycle under Italy’s soccida contract system. He ‘bought’ the sheds with money borrowed from relatives and banks, but he does not own chickens in them. When avian influenza closed the sheds for a year in 2021, his €3,000 monthly repayments continued. He drove tractors from 6am to 11pm and worked his own land at weekends to cover his debts. Even after production resumed, he kept the outside job while operating a 50-day chicken cycle, sometimes going to bed at 3am. His return: 20 cents for each kilogram of chicken.

One farmer we spoke to described it as less a farming business and more of an “animal franchise”: companies gain production capacity without owning it, while farmers have little control over prices, technology or production decisions.

Leaving is not an option. Farmers say they cannot independently find chicks or a slaughterhouse, while banks treat the contract as security for loans, binding them to the industrial system. “There is no possibility of being the master of your own house,” another farmer said.

Poland - The eastern pressure point

For more than a decade, the European chicken economy has been reorganising around scale, cost and concentrated processing capacity. Nowhere is that transformation clearer – or more consequential – than in Poland, now the EU's largest poultry producer.

Between 2010 and 2024, its poultry production more than doubled from 1.34 million to 2.89 million tonnes. Poland now produces roughly one in five EU chickens and accounts for nearly three-quarters of the growth in eastern European poultry production over that period.

That growth has not been spread evenly. Farms keeping between 1,000 and 10,000 birds make up 92.3% of Polish broiler farms but account for only 0.9% of the national flock. The remaining 7.7% hold 91.1% of the birds.

Investment followed production eastwards, as French, German, Dutch and Asian-owned groups – including LDC, PHW, Plukon, ForFarmers and CP Foods – acquired or established Polish poultry and feed businesses.

Agata Kosowska raises around 22–23,000 broilers per cycle on the central Polish farm established by her father in the 1990s. “The poultry market is now growing thanks solely to large-scale industrial farms; they have a completely different level of bargaining power,” she says. Smaller farmers have been reduced to “janitors on our own farms.”

Kosowska sells to a large processor; her contract required her to buy chicks and feed from the company. After repeated problems with the quality of the chicks, she bought them from another hatchery – and lost her status as a contract farmer. “By sourcing chicks from elsewhere, I’ve gained more independence, but also taken on greater risk and a lower price,” she says.

The eastward movement does not stop at Poland. Ukraine offers still lower production costs, largely because of cheaper feed: available comparisons put Ukrainian broiler costs at $0.75/kg live weight in 2023, around 60% of those on a typical surveyed EU farm.

The EU’s ambitions for “strategic autonomy” sit uneasily with a poultry system still dependent on imported feed. Yet discussion of, let alone action towards, market regulation remains “taboo,” says Guarda.

MHP, Ukraine’s largest poultry company, shows how that cost advantage is reshaping the European industry. It first expanded westwards through trade: by 2025, Ukraine supplied more than a fifth of the poultry entering the EU, with preferential access continuing under a permanent zero-duty quota. MHP has since moved inside the EU itself. A decade ago it had no production capacity there; today it produces in Slovenia, Croatia and Spain and has agreed to acquire Greece’s largest poultry producer. Its expansion, as the new EU investigation shows, has also received Western public finance, including EBRD funding for its Central European operations.

MHP disputes the idea that its size makes the supply chain more fragile. “We do not believe that company size or vertical integration should automatically be equated with greater vulnerability of the European food supply chain,” a representative from the company says. It points to its continued operations during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and argues that production across several countries gives it more ways to respond to disruption.

The risk, however, is not simply that Europe might import too much Ukrainian chicken, nor that foreign ownership is inherently undesirable. It is that production is becoming concentrated along a geopolitically exposed eastern axis. War, disease, feed shocks, border disruption or changing trade rules can travel quickly through a system organised around a few production centres and companies. At the same time, the distinction between “European” and “imported” chicken is dissolving: a bird may be raised in Ukraine and processed inside the EU, or raised in the EU by a Ukrainian-owned company and sold under a familiar national brand.

MHP says it “continuously assesses potential disruptions to production, logistics, borders, energy supply and trade” and plans how to keep operating. But the timing, scale and combined effects of such shocks cannot be reliably predicted. A company’s ability to adapt also tells us only part of the story about the resilience of the wider food system.

Inês Grenho Ajuda, Farm Animals Senior Programme Leader at Eurogroup for Animals, also warns that greater geographical concentration creates additional risks for animal welfare, disease control and food-system resilience. “The concern is the production model, wherever it operates, rather than any one country.”

Caught in the chicken trap

The chicken trap is difficult to leave and politically challenging to reform.

Companies retain control while risk is quietly dispersed among farmers, workers, communities, health systems, taxpayers and consumers. Cheap chicken looks ‘efficient’ because the cost of these systemic risks sits outside the price paid in the shops.

For farmers, the trap has multiple locks. Debt on specialist buildings may run for 20 years, while production contracts last only a few. The sheds cannot be moved and may not meet another company’s specifications. Live birds must reach a nearby slaughterhouse, sometimes leaving only one realistic buyer. The company owns the birds and controls the inputs and production rules; the farmer carries the costs of buildings, labour, energy, water and debt. Walking away is difficult, but staying may ruin them.

Morgan Ody, general coordinator for Via Campesina cautions against confusing responsibility on the farm with control over the system. “Farmers are also the victims of this system. They’re people who are trapped.” Yet they are left, she says, “carrying the guilt and bad feeling,” while actors extracting money and power further up the chain largely escape scrutiny.

In Poland, Zygmunt Stromski, who has watched his family business paradoxically grow in size but shrink in terms of control, agrees. “This pressure to grow was imposed on us by our agricultural policy back in the 1990s,” he says. “It rewarded higher production. If someone didn’t want to expand, they fell behind and weren’t competitive. Ultimately, they were forced out of the market.”

Workers are caught differently. Pressure from supermarkets and processors to keep chicken cheap travels down the chain as faster line speeds, insecure employment, low pay and greater risk of injury. Companies retain flexibility while workers absorb the physical and economic costs. Where a slaughterhouse dominates local employment, the freedom to walk away may be illusory.

The EU is trapped because this model has become entangled with policy aspirations for affordable food, rural employment, food security, trade and support for Ukraine. Transformation, therefore, is presented as threat to politically valuable goals. Paying to manage the consequences, while public policy, finance and trade rules reinforce the structure that creates them, is seen as a safer bet. But while vaccines, biosecurity, new genetics and automation may address individual harms, they can also preserve the scale and intensity that produced them.

For Eurogroup for Animals, the starting point is to stop treating output as evidence of success. “The number of animals, or tonnes of animal products, should not be the ultimate indicator of competitiveness and food security,” says Grenho Ajuda. Chicken production, she says, needs to be resilient “not just in the immediate future, but in the long run.”

This is how an industry becomes too big to fail: not because it is resilient, but because of power asymmetries that leave too many farmers, workers, governments and consumers are caught inside it. Each crisis brings more public money and technical intervention, preserving the system without changing who holds the power or carries the risk. The danger is not simply that an industry deemed too big to fail might eventually fail. It is that keeping it from failing requires everyone else to keep absorbing its costs.