According to supermarket news, Butterball says the issue was "unexpected low weight gains", so it sounds like there was an issue with many of the batch of turkeys being raised for being slaughtered in mid-November.
"While we are continuing to evaluate all potential causes, we are working to remedy the issue and are currently seeing turkey weight gain improvements," Butterball said in an emailed statement.
Maybe they changed their diet to lo-carb :)
Looks like there will be a plethora of frozen birds for the year to come - they'll most likely shift many of these slow growing birds to frozen inventory....along with more smaller fresh birds on the shelf for this Thanksgiving.
Again, they've been doing this business for years. How can they have "unexpected low weight gains?"
Are the birds on hunger strikes, or are they feeding them a new diet? I can't believe they would make major changes to their whole business without first running tests on a small batch.