COVID-19 Update: We are committed to keeping our restaurants safe so you can continue to enjoy your favorite Noodles dish.
Noodles & Company was founded on and remains committed to providing customers with delicious freshly-cooked food made from the best ingredients. We recognize that humane animal farming practices are critical to ensuring sustained food safety and high quality, and are an important consideration for informed consumers who increasingly support brands that align with their values.
From our first day of business, we have expected our suppliers to meet or exceed all industry standards regarding farm animal welfare and safety. Since then, we have initiated a number of milestones to support the advancement of new technologies and methods for ensuring humane treatment of the animals in our supply chain.
We are pleased to announce that we are broadening and strengthening our company’s long-term commitment to practice as well as advance the important cause of higher welfare, sustainable animal farming. In partnership with the respected international animal welfare organization Compassion in World Farming, we have committed to improved conditions for our entire broiler chicken supply by the year 2024.
Over the years, Noodles has advanced the principles of sustainable, humane animal farming through several key initiatives:
We aim to continue expanding the plant-based options for our guests as we have with the 100% organic tofu we source for use in our restaurants. Our menu provides many vegetarian and vegan options, providing our guests with flexibility in eating in a way that matches their lifestyle.
Noodles has partnered with Compassion in World Farming and other independent experts to assist us in identifying, establishing and advocating support for the continued advancement of our sourcing practices. Among the practices to which Noodles is committing:
Broiler chickens: By 2024, the Company will align its supply chain with the Global Animal Partnership’s (GAP) Broiler Chicken Standards to achieve the following:
Dairy cows: We will continue to work with our dairy suppliers to ensure that in instances when disbudding is performed, effective pain management related to disbudding must be administered by a veterinary professional. We will also work to ensure that detailed written procedures, overseen by a veterinary professional, for management of injured and non-ambulatory animals as well as euthanasia are in place by our dairy suppliers.
Pigs: We will continue to work with our pork suppliers to eliminate the use of routine tail docking and teeth clipping. We will report progress against this goal in future updates.
Going forward, we will continue to address some of the most pressing cross-species welfare concerns. These include, but are not limited to:
As a relatively small purchaser of chicken, pork, beef and dairy, we will work with animal welfare experts, growers, suppliers, competitors and other market participants to identify cost-effective solutions for our industry.
As we transition our entire supply chain to support advanced farm animal welfare practices, we intend to guide our approach by the “Five Freedoms” first developed by the UK Farm Animal and Welfare Council. These rightly state that every farm animal should have:
We look forward to providing our guests and stakeholders annual updates on our progress against these goals.
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*With the exception of our Chopped Ham.