Restaurant Brands International

RBI's antibiotics policy is available online as part of their 2016 Sustainability Report.

Their policy currently covers all poultry raw materials used in Burger King and Tim Hortons restaurants. It does not yet include Popeye's.

Only Burger King and Tim Hortons in the U.S. and Canada are covered by RBI's policy. It is unclear how the rest of the company's operations in international markets are being addressed, especially given RBI is focused on expanding its international footprint e.g. in the U.K., Netherlands, Taiwan and Brazil.

RBI's overarching commitment to antibiotics as stated in their 2016 Sustainability Report is "to reduce the use of antibiotics important for human medicine in order to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics in both veterinary and human medicine". However, the company's specific-brand commitments on poultry relate only to sourcing "from suppliers that raise birds without the use of any antibiotics deemed by the World Health Organization as critically important to human medicine by the end of 2018". We have therefore scored the company on their specific brand-commitments, which are focused only on critically important antibiotics to human medicine.

The company has time bound commitments to source all poultry raw materials used in Burger King and Tim Hortons restaurants in the U.S. and Canada without critically important antibiotics to human medicine by end of 2018. However, these are past commitments and RBI has yet to report on whether these commitments have been achieved.

No information provided and/ or available.

The only information found relating to auditing practices was for poultry raw materials and beef used in Burger King restaurants where all vendors worldwide are required to undertake and submit annual third-party welfare standards. However, it is not clear if this includes antibiotics use and no information was found in relation to their other brands, and international markets.

RBI responded to the investor letter providing some insights, but incomplete answers to the investor questions. The company has not met with the investor coalition. Their response is available here.