Viking Line’s buffet restaurants will begin serving responsibly raised chicken from the family-owned company Bjärefågel, based in southern Sweden. The birds are given plant-based feed and have twice as much room to move around in compared to the Swedish standard. The company is also Sweden’s only producer of climate-certified chicken.

Starting in April, the buffet restaurants on board Viking Line’s vessels will serve responsibly raised chicken from the Swedish family-owned company Bjärefågel, which is certified according to standards set by the Swedish Seal of Quality and the Swedish Bird Association. Breeding is governed by ethical principles with a focus on the animals’ wellbeing, and birds have twice the amount of space compared to the Swedish industry standard. They are given plant-based feed without any genetically modified ingredients, antibiotics or antibiotic-like compounds.

Bjärefågel’s production is also climate-certified. The company has managed to reduce its climate impact by 20–25 per cent and has started installing solar panels to enable its own generation of clean energy.

“Viking Line is known for its quality restaurants, and we want to offer our passengers the best food on the Baltic Sea. We believe that good food tastes even better when our customers know that we invest in responsibly produced quality ingredients,” says Janne Lindholm, Manager, Viking Line Restaurants.

Viking Line’s buffet restaurants serve over one million passengers annually. In recent years, the company has developed its restaurant operations in many ways in order to be even more responsible, for example, by choosing locally sourced ingredients and working with great determination to reduce food waste. Chicken is served in the buffet in a number of different forms.

Viking Line has decided to switch to solely ECC-certified chicken by 2028. ECC (European Chicken Commitment) is an international standard that sets stringent requirements for the wellbeing of animals and for responsible production.

Responsibly produced food in Viking Line’s restaurants

• Over 70% of the ingredients in the vessels’ restaurants come from the Baltic Sea region (Finland, Sweden and Estonia).
• Many of the high volume ingredients used in the restaurants, such as cream, butter, yoghurt and traditional fermented milk, are purchased from Finnish producers and farmers.
• In February, the vessels switched to sustainably produced Slow Forest coffee from Laos, which reduces climate emissions and improves living conditions for local coffee farmers. Coffee grounds are collected and recycled as raw material for garden soil.
• From April 2025, Bjärefågel will become the main supplier of chicken to our buffet restaurants.
• By 2028, all chicken served in our restaurants will be ECC-certified.
• All eggs served on board the vessels have come from free-range chickens since 2022.
• Viking Line works with great focus to reduce food waste on board the vessels.