Animal Outlook catches world's biggest meat company selling foie gras in California (most likely illegally)

By Ben Williamson AO @ 2025-08-01T12:26 (+1)

This week, The Los Angeles Times broke the news of Animal Outlook's investigation into foie gras sales at all 11 Wild Fork Foods stores across southern California, in apparent violation of the state's ban. https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2025-08-01/fois-gras-was-banned-in-california-in-2023-why-is-it-being-sold-in-socal-stores

Wild Fork Foods is a subsidiary of JBS, the world's largest meat company, which has the capacity to slaughter around 14 million birds and more than 75 thousand heads of cattle per day and has faced numerous accusations, including contributing to Amazon deforestation by purchasing cattle raised on illegally cleared land and paying off meat inspectors and political corruption.

Animal Outlook's legal team sent over 20 memos to local law enforcement urging them to investigate the company for violations of California Health and Safety Code Section 25982. This law explicitly prohibits selling products resulting from force-feeding birds to enlarge their livers.

The foie gras was produced by La Belle Farm in upstate New York, a well-known defender of forced feeding. The foie gras is described as "humanely raised" on Wild fork's website, most likely due to La Belle's use of plastic force feeding tubes instead of metal ones. 

Neither Wild Fork Foods, nor JBS, has commented on the investigation. Although the foie gras has been pulled from the company's shelves and is no longer available for sale online to California zip codes.  A store employee told our investigator that the foie gras had been pulled because it had "gone bad".

In 2018, the LA District Attorney reached a $100k settlement with Amazon over alleged unlawful foie gras sales in California. 🚫