Future of Sri Lankan poultry will be won on trust

For most of the past four decades, our industry has competed on the same handful of variables. Who can produce a kilogram cheaper. Who can move faster to market. Who can undercut the shelf next to them by a few rupees. I understand why. Margins in poultry are thin, and price is the easiest lever any producer can pull.

But I have never believed price is where this industry’s future gets decided. I believe it gets decided on trust, and trust is a far harder thing to build than a lower price point. It cannot be discounted into existence. It has to be earned, one flock, one harvest, one honest label at a time. That conviction is the reason New Anthoney’s Farms exists in the form it does today, and it is the reason I think the rest of this industry, in Sri Lanka and across the region, needs to start competing on a different axis altogether.

A standard we chose when it cost us more to choose it

When this company was built in 1986, it started as a conventional poultry operation, competing the way most of this industry still competes today. The decision to remove antibiotics from our broiler production came later, and I want to be honest about what that decision actually involved. Antibiotics exist in conventional poultry farming for a reason: they make disease management easier and growth more predictable. Choosing to remove them from every stage of our broiler production meant accepting a harder operation, tighter biosecurity, more careful nutrition, and far less room for error, all while our competitors kept the easier path available to them.

We made that trade, and we have never reversed it. Today, New Anthoney’s Farms is Sri Lanka’s only poultry producer running a fully antibiotic free broiler operation at full commercial scale, rather than treating it as a smaller, niche line sitting alongside a conventional one, and I want to be direct about why that matters beyond our own balance sheet. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the defining public health challenges of this century, and food producers are not bystanders in that story. Every antibiotic used in animal agriculture that is not medically necessary is a small contribution to a problem the World Health Organisation has flagged as a genuine threat to modern medicine. We decided, long before this was a fashionable position to hold, that we did not want to be part of that problem. I would like more of our industry to make the same decision, not because it is good for headlines, but because it is the right call for public health.

Why the feed matters as much as the bird

I rarely see enough conversation in this industry about feed, and I think that is a mistake. You cannot claim a clean, antibiotic free bird if the feed behind it is an afterthought. Feed quality is where the entire promise either holds up or falls apart.

That is why Anthoney’s Feeds, our own milling operation, sits at the centre of how we think about differentiation. In 2023, we became the first company in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded rights to the Sustainable U.S. Soy logo, verified under the U.S. Soy Sustainability Assurance Protocol, at a time when the label was still held by only a small number of companies worldwide. Being first was never the point. I know a logo on packaging can sound like a modest thing to build a claim around, but I have never seen it that way. It represents a real, audited commitment to sourcing soy grown in ways that respect ecosystems, biodiversity and the communities around them, at the very base of our supply chain, because a health conscious consumer deserves confidence at every link, not just the one they can see on a supermarket shelf.

Recognition we did not chase, but earned

I want to be careful here, because I do not think a company should build its story around awards. Awards are a lagging indicator. They tell you something was done right months or years earlier, not what to do next. But I will admit that this year has been validating in a way that is hard to ignore.

In August, I stood on stage at Soy Connext in Chicago, where New Anthoney’s Farms was recognised by the US Soybean Export Council as a global sustainability leader, alongside honourees from the Americas, Greater China and Southeast Asia. It was a proud moment to see Sri Lanka represented on that stage. Earlier in the year, we were named Best Exporter in the Processed Food Category at the 26th Presidential Export Awards, and we finished as first runner up for Best Stall in the Food and Beverage category at ProFood ProPack. We also marked our 40th anniversary in 2026, a milestone that made every one of these moments feel less like isolated wins and more like a body of evidence for a strategy we have committed ourselves to fully in the years since.

I share these not to boast, but because I think they matter as proof of a point I want every competitor in this market to hear. Doing the harder thing does eventually get recognised. It just does not happen on your timeline. It happens on the market’s timeline, once trust has had enough time to compound.

Betting on ourselves, and on Sri Lanka’s smallholders

This year we also took the boldest step in our company’s recent history. We secured up to $ 10 million in investment, including support from the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program’s Private Sector Window, through the International Finance Corporation, to expand our production capacity by up to 70 percent. What stayed with me most from that process was not the financial case we put forward, it was how much weight an institution like the IFC now places on environmental and sustainability credentials when deciding who to back, and how closely our antibiotic free standards, our sourcing practices and our work with smallholders spoke to exactly that. I do not say this lightly. That is a significant bet, on our operations, on our people, and on the belief that demand for clean, traceable protein is only going to grow, both domestically and in export markets. If our experience becomes a reference point other producers in this region can look to when they think about what this kind of investment really rewards, that would be a welcome outcome, one more way this industry can move forward together.

But the part of that investment I care most about is not the capacity figure. It is what it means for the smallholder farmers who already make up around 40 percent of our production. Sri Lanka’s poultry sector is built on a foundation of small, independent farms, and I have long believed that any company serious about this industry’s future has a responsibility to bring those farmers into a formal, stable value chain rather than leaving them exposed to whatever a volatile season brings. This expansion will create hundreds of new jobs and extend contract farming opportunities to hundreds more smallholders, with real, deliberate attention to including women and low income households in that growth. I do not think you can call yourself an industry leader in Sri Lanka today if the smallholders around you are not growing alongside you.

Reading the consumer correctly, finally

I think the biggest shift in this industry over the past five years has nothing to do with feed costs, trade policy, or logistics. It is the consumer. Sri Lankan households, and consumers across this region, are asking sharper questions than they used to. Where did this come from. What was it fed. Was anything added to make it grow faster. Five years ago, those questions were a niche concern. Today they sit at the centre of a purchasing decision, particularly among younger, more informed households making decisions for their children.

That shift should terrify any producer whose entire value proposition is a lower price point, because price sensitive consumers are also, increasingly, quality sensitive consumers. They are not mutually exclusive anymore. A parent choosing chicken for their family wants both affordability and the confidence that what they are serving is genuinely safe. Producers who treat those as competing priorities, rather than solving for both, are the ones who will find themselves squeezed from every direction in the next decade.

A direct challenge to the rest of this industry

I will say something here that I suspect not everyone in this industry wants to hear. Sri Lanka’s poultry sector cannot build a credible, globally competitive future on shortcuts. We compete in a region, and increasingly a world, where buyers, regulators and consumers are asking harder questions about how food is produced, and companies that cannot answer those questions honestly will eventually find the door closed to them, whether that door is an export contract, a retail shelf, or simply a customer’s trust.

I am not interested in being the only company willing to make that case. I would genuinely prefer competition on this exact ground, clean sourcing, antibiotic free standards, traceable feed, honest labelling, because an industry that competes on trust rather than price is an industry that grows the entire market, not just one company’s share of it. If more of our competitors decide tomorrow that this is the standard worth building toward, Sri Lanka’s poultry sector as a whole becomes more credible on the global stage, and every producer in this country benefits from that credibility, including us.

What comes next

Forty years in, I do not think of New Anthoney’s Farms as a finished story. I think of it as a company that made one difficult decision, stuck with it longer than most people expected us to, and is now scaling that same conviction into a larger operation, a wider network of smallholder partners, and a bigger role on the international stage than I think anyone at this company imagined when it was first built.

The next decade of Sri Lankan poultry will not be won by whoever can shave the most off a price tag. It will be won by whoever consumers, regulators and international partners trust the most when the label says exactly what is inside. That is the race I intend to keep running, and I would welcome more company on the track.

(The author is the Chief Executive Officer of New Anthoney’s Farm)