• Competition in the chicken market leads to improper behavior that may harm your health

• The employees of Kenchic, which account for 75% of the market share, said that their processes are fair and honest

Whenever you go out to buy chicken in a supermarket or any store, please be as enthusiastic about the brand as the price.

Considering health issues, before you spend money on chicken, experts recommend considering the brands offered. This will help answer questions such as how to take care of the eggs, how to take care of the chicks, and the environment in which they are raised.

It also answers questions about the medical care and benefits given to the bird, how it was slaughtered, and how the meat will eventually be processed to the store shelf where you encountered it.

Many large broiler breeders are suspected of feeding them excessive hormone promoters to accelerate their growth.

The Star took a tour of the production process of Kenzik and found that unlike unbranded chicken sold in most stores (including on the street), the company invested a lot of money to ensure a healthy production environment and ensure that the welfare and rights of birds are protected . Observed.

Kenchic occupies approximately 70% to 75% of the country's chicken market.

Anton Scheeper, the plant manager of the company’s Thika plant, said that the company has signed contracts with farmers who are its breeders, who must comply with its standard operating procedures (SOP) during the breeding process.

The company has a program called "farm-to-table" through which the bird is tracked from the moment the egg is laid, tagged and tracked, and monitored the bird until it is slaughtered and shipped.

In addition, the company's system of monitoring the birth, rearing, and final landing of the chicks on the knife edge and packaging on the shelf is not flexible.

It prepares vaccine plans, feeding plans and any related instructions, and allows farmers to strictly follow them.

Scheeper said the company follows meticulous procedures, including audits of farmers to ensure they meet animal welfare, vaccine and treatment plans, and chick tracking system requirements.

He said that farmers who violated contracts and took shortcuts were excluded.

The Thika factory can process up to 30,000 chicks per week. The feeding area of ​​the factory received the carts of chicks. This is a room equipped with blue fluorescent light bulbs to calm the birds. Each truck has 3,400 chickens.

In a fully automated process, the poultry are then put into a rotating machine system, through which they are electrocuted to eliminate pain during the slaughter process, and then decapitated and feathered in boiling water.

Thousands of headless and featherless chickens now hanging upside down are then moved to the machine to extract the parts of the internal organs, and then they are moved to the place where the legs are cut.

The company makes customer-specific classifications of the final products and then marks them according to customer orders.

Leading retail brands, including supermarkets and other restaurants, will order specific sorting parts from them, and these parts will be dispatched at the end of the process according to the required time.

So will the company inject hormones and antiretroviral drugs into their chickens to speed up maturation and weight gain? Schoper denies this.

"I can tell you that I can eat every chicken harvested on all our farms without hesitation. Not only have our chicks been treated with the right medications, but they are also raised morally in a way that upholds their rights and welfare. They," he said.

Scheeper said that on the farm, the chickens are not kept in cages and they can roam freely so as not to put pressure on them. They also placed structures for the birds to mend and provide them with toys for pecking.

“Birds will not be crowded in a space, and the harvested birds will be slaughtered within 12 hours,” he said.

"We don't use any additives. There are no preventive antibiotics. Don't inject booster shots unless you need to treat the disease," Scheeper added.

The company's chief veterinarian, Watson Messo Odwako, confirmed this.

Scheeper said that the sanitary conditions of farms and processing plants have been strengthened, and explained that the company has a fully equipped modern laboratory in the industrial zone where it monitors continuous sample analysis for monitoring the bacterial load.

Pamela Kinya, the laboratory’s quality manager, said they took swabs from the surfaces of processing plants, samples of meat and eggs, and bread farms, and analyzed them to ensure health standards.

“We also collect swabs from poultry for analysis to ensure that our operating environment is not only healthy for the poultry, but also that the products we provide to our customers meet the standards,” she said.

The laboratory visited by the star has passed the certification of the South African Accreditation System (SANA). Kanyi stated that the facility will receive the final certification of the Kenyan system within one month.

Kanyi said in the laboratory that they investigated samples of every packaged product that was ready to be shipped to the market to determine antibiotic residues. She said the analysis is to ensure that there are no antibiotic residues in the meat.

The company also breeds laying hens for its egg and live chicken operations. It sells chickens to farmers who may want to raise them independently.

However, David Opepo, the company's hatchery manager, said it takes great care to ensure biosafety and provides them with training to ensure correct breeding practices.

He said that in this department, the company collects eggs from its farms, quarantining and marking them when they are placed in the incubator. He said that in order to ensure that the cold chain is interrupted, the temperature of the eggs is kept at 18 degrees Celsius. The eggs are incubated for 21 days, placed in the incubator for 18 days, and placed in the hatchery for 3 days.

The vaccination is started from the one-day-old chicks, during which time the chicks are also debeaked by exposing them to infrared light.

"The company has separated hatcheries from farms to ensure enhanced biosecurity," Opepo said.

These farms produce 1.3 million eggs every week, but 1 million eggs hatch into chicks every week.

Chief veterinarian Odwako said the company provides free laboratory and technical support services to farmers who purchase chickens from Kenchic.

"[The services we provide to our customers free of charge] include flock health checks, swabs collected from farms to ensure proper hygiene, telephone services, water quality testing and vaccination services, and other consulting services," he said.

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