Whole Foods recently announced that it wants all of its suppliers, even those raising large numbers of broilers indoors, to shift over to slower-growing breeds of chickens.

The shift will take eight years. Whole Foods and the Global Animal Partnership, an organization that Whole Foods set up to create welfare standards for its suppliers, say that this will apply to 277 million birds annually. That represents about 3 percent of the country’s broilers.

The slow-growing bird “is a much better, healthier chicken, and at the same time it’s a much [more] flavorful chicken as well,” Weening says.