ALTON/EDWARDSVILLE - Do Good Chicken is expanding to local Target shelves, and the co-founder says his new brand can help save the planet while providing consumers with a great meal.
Do Good Chicken collaborates with grocery stores to repurpose surplus food and divert it from landfills. After donations are made to food banks or other human-focused causes, Do Good Chicken upcycles the food into animal feed. The chickens are fed this more nutritious diet, and then they are processed and sold under the Do Good Chicken brand at supermarkets. The company says not only does this improve the taste of the poultry, but it also benefits the environment in a major way.
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“We started this company to try to help finally bring sustainability to scale and make it affordable and accessible to every consumer to actually now be a part of the solution,” Justin Kamine, Do Good Chicken co-founder, said. “The solution is solving one of the biggest problems in the food system, which is that we waste 40% of all the food that we grow.”
Unused food is not only a waste of resources, Do Good Chicken argues, but it’s also bad for the environment because the food goes to landfills where it produces methane gas. According to Kamine, each chicken they sell saves three pounds of greenhouse gasses and four pounds of surplus grocery food.
Growing up on a farm, Kamine and his family often gave their leftovers to the chickens. He says this is the same idea, but with “massive infrastructure” across the U.S. as the brand grows. Do Good Chicken will now be available in Target stores in 14 additional states, including Illinois.
“It’s a real testament to the fact that consumers are wanting and raising their hands saying, ‘What can I do to help climate change?’” Kamine said of the brand’s expansion. “We recognize that we cannot ask consumers to change their habits or pay a lot more, but now they’re able to, if they do decide to buy chicken, actually help the planet.”
He added that chickens are omnivores, but are usually fed soy and corn. The animal feed that Do Good Chicken produces, which is made up of a variety of surplus grocery food, is a more natural diet for the chickens — and this makes the chicken taste better to human consumers, too.
“This is really about reverting nature back to the way it’s intended to operate in a closed-loop circular economy that’s beneficial to the animals and beneficial to the environment and ends up creating a great-tasting, delicious piece of chicken,” Kamine explained.
Any poultry producer who wants to be involved in this initiative can contact Do Good Chicken. Consumers can find the brand at the Alton and Edwardsville Target stores in the grocery section. For more information, check out Do Good Chicken’s official website.
“The best thing ever is that food waste is a solvable problem,” Kamine concluded. “We have this technology, we have the solutions and we know what to do to solve this problem…We need to all come together to collectively use our food system to solve our environmental problems.”
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