My guest for today is Anne Hilhorst, CEO of Wakker Dier, a Dutch animal welfare organisation. She joined Wakker Dier when she left university 15 years ago and plans to be there for another 15 years!

Besides the impressive longevity of their staff, Wakker Dier is a really impressive and interesting organisation that I knew very little about. Thanks to them, no supermarket in the Netherlands has sold eggs from caged hens since 2006, no fast-growing breeds of chicken since 2021 and over 90% of the retail sector has a meat reduction goal. 

This is already an amazing list of accomplishments, and far from all of what they’ve achieved too. There seem to be a few things about them that helped, which I’ll unpack with Anne in this episode. Some key themes include that they spend over 90% of their effort & resources in getting companies in particular to stop supplying the cruelest products, spending around one third, yes that’s 33%, of their budget on advertising for campaigns and they even read books about the companies they are targeting, to learn what makes them tick.

Chapters:

• (00:00:00) - Cold intro: going big on advertising
• (00:05:24) - Recent rollbacks by retailers
• (00:10:51) - What Wakker Dier does
• (00:14:43)- How long it took Wakker Dier to end fast-growing chickens
• (00:21:52)- Pressure through spending millions on advertising
• (00:31:52) - The importance of praise
• (00:36:33) - Plofkip: the origin
• (00:47:23) -When to ask for full commitments vs immediate implementation
• (00:52:12) - Asking supermarkets for meat reduction - how is it going?
• (01:06:22) - Closing 3 questions

Resources:

• Wakker Dier's website
• Book: The lonely Quest of Unilever’s CEO Paul Polman 

Enjoy the episode! 

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

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