Challenging USDA for Approving Deceptive Chicken and Turkey Product Labeling

On February 18, 2025, the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), along with two of its individual members, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to challenge its pattern and practice of approving chicken and turkey products without reviewing the imagery on the labels to ensure that it is not misleading to consumers despite the agency’s legal obligation to do so.  

The lawsuit specifically identifies the USDA’s approval of Perdue Farms’ Fresh Line labels, among others, which portray chickens and turkeys grazing outdoors in green grass under a bright sun. In reality, birds used in these products spend their entire lives confined in warehouses on factory farms. The agency is legally required to review labels of products containing turkey or chickens to ensure they are accurate. Yet it turned a blind eye toward the misleading imagery and approved Perdue Farms’ false pastoral labels. ALDF’s complaint identifies several other chicken and turkey product labels with imagery of animals in the verdant outdoors, and alleges that the USDA has similarly not reviewed these label images for accuracy.    

Consumer concerns over the treatment of animals in animal agriculture have steadily increased over time. A Technomic survey found 77 percent of consumers are concerned about the welfare of animals used for food. More than two-thirds of consumers pay some or a lot of attention to food labeling claims regarding how the animal is raised.   

“The USDA is responsible for reviewing food product labels so consumers can make informed decisions about the purchases they choose to make,” says ALDF Managing Attorney Daniel Waltz. “Regulations explicitly prohibit animal-product sellers from employing misleading marketing campaigns to sell products and ALDF will continue to pressure the federal government to protect the public from this harmful practice.” 

The USDA’s decision to approve the labeling of Perdue Farms’ Fresh Line products is one example that reveals the agency’s failure to consider graphics when reviewing and approving labels on poultry products. By approving Perdue Farms’ Fresh Line labels without the review statutorily required by the Poultry Products Inspection Act, the USDA not only ignores the law it is charged with enforcing, but allows Perdue Farms and similar companies to mislead consumers about the nature of the products they are buying, hiding the inhumane conditions the birds endure.  

A similar lawsuit was filed by ALDF against the FSIS in 2021 for approving misleading labels on products sold by Perdue Farms. 

Who is being sued, why, and under what law?  The USDA is being sued under the Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) and the Administrative Procedure Act for a pattern of approving chicken and turkey products without reviewing the imagery on the labels to ensure that it is not misleading to consumers, despite the agency’s legal obligation to do so under the PPIA. 

What court is the lawsuit filed in? The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 

Why this action is important: This lawsuit challenges the USDA’s policy of letting false and misleading food labels depicting animal-raising conditions on chicken and turkey products enter the market because it is not reviewing label imagery. Through this action, ALDF asks the government to do its job of ensuring that the animal-raising claims big brands make are not false and misleading to consumers. Additionally, because state consumer-protection challenges to federally regulated food labels are preempted, ALDF’s challenge over the government’s failure to ensure that imagery on labels is accurate is one of the few ways to directly challenge humane-washing. 

Humane-washing occurs when companies make deceptive claims aboutthe treatment of animals used in their products, or the conditions in which they are born, raised, or killed. Humane-washing efforts can range from using claims such as “natural” or “responsibly raised” on labels or in marketing, to the imagery on product labels or in video advertisements showing animals in picturesque green pastures when they are actually warehoused in crowded sheds. Companies may engage in humane-washing through multimillion-dollar, multiplatform marketing campaigns misrepresenting products from animals raised on large factory farms as “local” food coming from “family farms.”