It is one of the UK’s largest dairy companies, supplying milk to leading supermarkets and producing household favourites including Anchor butter, Lurpak and Castello cheese. But Arla Foods is now facing major questions after an undercover investigation revealed a catalogue of alleged animal welfare breaches in its supply chain.
It is the latest in a string of scandals for a company that has so far escaped serious public scrutiny.
Campaign group Animal Justice Project this week published shocking footage from more than a dozen farms supplying the company: cows being kicked and struck with metal bars; being dragged along the ground by farm machinery and forced to walk in shackles; and being forced to live in filthy conditions, sleeping on straw caked with excrement.
These farms form part of the supply chains that serve us every day: some supply Tesco, Morrisons and Starbucks. An independent expert identified as many as 360 breaches of welfare legislation and other farm assurance standards.
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Claire Palmer, executive director at the Animal Justice Project, said the findings could not be written off as isolated incidents. “Across 15 Arla farms, we documented the same problems again and again: cows struggling to walk, calves dragged and forced to feed, mothers calling for their newborns, and animals subjected to rough handling and violence,” she said.
Arla responded with an immediate statement saying “animal welfare is of the utmost importance to us, and we take all reports and concerns seriously.” It said it has launched an urgent investigation.
A Morrisons spokesperson described the footage as “deeply concerning” and said the supermarket would take the necessary action once Arla had completed its investigation. A Starbucks spokesperson said the behaviour “falls far short of the high standards of animal welfare we expect to be upheld across our supply chain” and it supported Arla’s investigation.
Tesco told us the farms in its supply chain farms have been suspended while it conducts its own investigation.
An image taken from an Arla-supplying farm of a cow's limbs in shackles
Animal Justice Project
… and another of cattle being dragged off the ground by machinery
Rise of the megadairy
Arla – whose UK operations form part of a Denmark-headquartered network owned by more than 11,000 farmers – is becoming increasingly accustomed to bad PR.
Just last year, another undercover probe led to a farmer being suspended from its supply chain after filming showed cows apparently being kicked, beaten and struck with electric goads at a dairy unit in Yorkshire.
(Arla said at the time that the people in the video were “no longer employed at the farm” and their actions were “completely unacceptable”.)
But Arla’s controversies are part of a much wider issue. The British dairy sector as a whole is facing new scrutiny over its shift towards a large-scale industrial farming model. Earlier this year we revealed how the number of industrial dairy farms – where some or all animals are kept permanently indoors – had more than doubled in the past decade. Within this, there had also been a doubling in the number of so-called “megadairies”, which hold as many as 2,600 cows.
This proliferation of these sprawling megafarms has attracted criticism from campaigners concerned about welfare and pollution. It has also divided the industry itself, with some farmers concerned about the trend while others argue that scaling up production is necessary amid tight margins and low prices.
Arla was one of the companies we found to be sourcing from megadairies, including one in Cornwall that we’d previously linked to serious pollution incidents involving leaking slurry. (The company told us its farms were assessed regularly and pointed to immediate action taken by suppliers after the incidents had occurred.)
Global issues
The move towards factory-style dairy production reflects a wider pattern across the UK’s livestock sector. In 2017, we revealed the arrival of hundreds of poultry and pig “megafarms” across the country. A year later, we reported that US-style intensive beef “feedlots” had landed on UK soil, prompting calls for tighter regulations.
Concerns over cattle megafarms have chiefly focused on the pollution risks from the vast volumes of waste they generate. Recent Environment Agency figures recorded more than triple the numbers of pollution incidents connected to dairy and beef farms than for poultry and pig farms. And our analysis shows that nearly one in five of the largest intensive units had been linked to pollution in recent years.
And on a global scale, intensive dairy farming is helping to drive the felling of vital rainforests as cattle diets have shifted towards proteins like soya. Arla found itself at the centre of controversy over this very issue after we revealed in 2021 that some of the company’s farms were linked to a controversial grain firm accused of widespread deforestation in Brazil. The investigation uncovered, for the first time, the complex supply chains that link British dairy to environmental devastation thousands of miles away in Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado regions.
An Arla spokesperson told us at the time that it was “taking steps to manage our use of soya responsibly” but admitted that it did not “monitor the suppliers chosen by our farmer owners for their businesses”.
And the issue goes well beyond Arla: the British dairy industry was found to be importing more than 100,000 tonnes of soya beans every year from Brazil’s Cerrado region alone.
This week’s controversy will prove uncomfortable for Arla, given its supposedly strict welfare standards. It will bring overdue attention to a firm that, unlike some other major food corporations in recent years, has managed to stay largely out of the spotlight. Anyone buying its products should welcome the scrutiny.
This story was updated on 4 November 2026 to include a comment from Starbucks that had been mistakenly omitted.
Reporter: Andrew Wasley
Impact producer: Grace Murray
Editor: Franz Wild
Production editor: Alex Hess
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