If you think of it as a 'guilt tax' it makes a lot more sense, and also the direction these stores need to go to improve profits. It's never really been about the food itself: it's been about selling a positive self image. It's a reaction to the abundance of media showing modern chicken coops and mass migrant vegetable labour.
Once you understand that, you understand why the label is the single most important thing, and the less real details supplied the better. Any details you supply serves to break the facade that the organic label means you're doing good deeds - because ultimately, you're still killing that chicken. It's why "efforts to broaden beyond just an organic label" are doomed before they begin and will hurt sales more than they help.
That's not how many people see it today. A video of a chicken being killed and de-feathered by any means causes a very harsh reaction in a large percentage of the population.
The use of the organic label is to distance people from this imagery by constantly repeating the propaganda that everything is being done 'nicely'. However, actually showing any kind of killing, no matter how nice, destroys that propaganda. The key trick is to use the correct words to make sure people do not conflate what they are eating with anything negative, and the organic label is part of that.
When you go deeper and attempt to explain how the killing is better, you simply open the audience to the fact that there is still killing being done. This is the wrong approach for the target market. It's better to distance the brand from the actual realities as much as possible.
People are only shocked by death because we live in a creche society that attempts to insulate us from it. How many times do you think the average person has seen a dead human body? Beyond that, how many times has the average person witnessed the death of anything more substantial than an insect?
We fear our own deaths because we've forgotten our true nature, so we've attempted to banish the specter of death from society as a whole. I'm willing to bet people who have this reaction to the death of a chicken are being brought in contact with their own mortality, and that scares them. Given that we are all going to die, we should get comfortable with death rather than hide from it.
People prefer to be infatuated with immortality/longevity and I imagine working cryogenics would be an absolute market success with those insulated people.
When it's being de-feathered, the chicken is dead. Why should this either affect people's reactions? Or, given that people are irrational and will react to the 'suffering' of a chicken's dead body, why should it be shown to the public as a component of the process? It's not 'unkind' to the chicken.
Every egg needs to be marked in the EU, to indicate the method of production (organic vs. free-range vs. cage) and country of origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_marking
My mom, for the most part, won't eat anything my dad/brother hunts... she prefers the stuff already packaged at the store, that she doesn't have to think too much about. She'll eat freshly caught fish, but not with the head on, and won't watch it being prepped.
Me, I figure there's all sorts of tasty critters in the world and I'm willing to try every one.
I disagree that the animal welfare labels are doing some kind of lip service to animals, or paying a guilt tax. There is a big difference between a chicken from a factory slaughterhouse, and a grass-fed truly free-ranging (outside) one. When people come for a tour of my farm they get a better idea of what it's about and why it costs more. Over time more people will be informed about the origin of their food and why labels aren't just labels.
If you show most of your customers a factory slaughterhouse chicken being killed and packaged, or a grass-fed truly free-ranging chicken being taken inside and killed and packaged, they will actually have a worse reaction to the second one.
Most people cannot really identify with thousands of chickens in a cage being processed by a machine - but they can identify with a single chicken happily running around outside being taken and killed. So paradoxically, the second image would actually be something they see as even more cruel.
Informing people about this has to be done in a very clever way to ensure that people don't connect the packaged breast they buy with the actual chicken running around outside. One slip up, and your label becomes worse than the factory chickens.
While the people who choose to come for a farm tour likely know what to expect, the 'average' consumer would not react in the same way to being told that they're eating this happy, free ranging chicken. As with all marketing, it's important to come from a position of your customer's lifestyle than your own where you 'know' about death.
To put it in a completely different context - think about Target and their new bathroom policy. On the surface it seems great, and everyone supports it. The label is wonderful and everyone wants to be part of that movement. But when it actually comes time to go to a bathroom, many women freak out and refuse to actually enter that bathroom anymore. It's even costing Target customers, and now pulling back the policy would cost them even more. Marketing isn't easy and you need to fully understand what you're doing before you end up creating a marketing campaign that actually harms your business.
I wish that more meat products labelled the feed used... I find that influences flavor more than anything.. and other than when beef is "grass fed" often isn't to be found. In particular egg taste/flavor can vary so much it isn't funny.
Once you understand that, you understand why the label is the single most important thing, and the less real details supplied the better. Any details you supply serves to break the facade that the organic label means you're doing good deeds - because ultimately, you're still killing that chicken. It's why "efforts to broaden beyond just an organic label" are doomed before they begin and will hurt sales more than they help.