Sales of standard, intensive supermarket chickens appear to have increased following the campaign led by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to get people to buy free range poultry instead, according to BBC Radio Four’s Farming Today.

Two weeks ago the chef aimed to persuade shoppers that intensively reared chicken meat damages animal welfare. Tesco says directly after the programmes on Channel 4 aired, sales of standard chickens increased by 7% and free range by 3%.

Sainsbury's free-range sales have gone up by 50% but sales of its "Sainsbury's basics" label chicken have also risen.

A spokesman for the British Poultry Council told the programme that chicken sales across the board had risen. He felt that consumers had ‘a pretty good idea’ of the quality and assurances supermarkets demanded of their producers.

“I think what we’ve seen is that the supermarkets themselves, for probably the first time, have actually been promoting through advertisements to the public and to their own shoppers the virtues and qualities of the chicken of all varieties”,he added.