Can Chickens Eat Hummus? A Lick Won’t Hurt, but Plain Chickpeas Beat It

Yes, a grown hen can have a lick of plain hummus. It won’t poison her. It just isn’t the healthy protein snack it looks like from our side of the fence. By weight, store hummus is more than half water, and most of its calories come from fat. It carries a fair bit of salt, too. Plain cooked chickpeas, the beans hummus is made from, make a better treat.

I rewrote this page from 13 sources, and you’ll find every one listed at the bottom. The food numbers come from USDA’s FoodData Central. The feeding advice comes from Alabama, Colorado State, Maine and UC Davis extension, plus the Merck Veterinary Manual. Feedipedia, a database of animal feeds, covers chickpeas and sesame as feed. Two studies cover garlic and hot peppers. Where something is my own math or my own call, I’ll say so.

The short version.

• One level tablespoon of plain hummus is about a hen’s whole treat allowance for the day. It won’t hurt a grown hen.
• Gram for gram, store hummus has under half the protein of layer feed. It has about 7 times the fat of plain cooked chickpeas, and about 60 times the sodium.
• A tablespoon of store hummus adds roughly a third more sodium on top of her day’s feed. Keep it away from young chicks.
• Chickpeas and sesame are both real poultry feeds. Cooked chickpeas are the better treat. Raw or dried ones aren’t.
• No source I found names garlic as a problem for chickens at this amount. Skip onion flavors and anything with chocolate in it.

One Tablespoon Is Her Whole Treat for the Day

Start with how much a hen eats. Alabama Extension says “A laying hen will consume between 100 and 150 grams of feed per day or roughly 0.25 pounds.” Colorado State says “Treats should make up no more than 10% of their daily diet.”

Ten percent of 100 to 150 grams is 10 to 15 grams. USDA weighs a tablespoon of hummus at 15 grams. So one level tablespoon is the whole treat allowance for one hen, for the whole day. That’s my math, but it isn’t hard math.

That’s less than most folks would guess. A spoon licked clean is about right for one bird. Scraping the rest of the tub into the run for a few hens is a lot more than that.

Alabama Extension explains why the cap matters with what they call the ice cream analogy. Kids offered ice cream at every meal “will eat it with gusto,” and they still won’t get what they need to grow. Hens work the same way. Fill them up on treats and they won’t eat enough of the complete feed to keep laying. If you want to know how much layer feed a hen goes through, our Rhode Island Red feeding guide has the numbers.

Hummus Isn’t the Protein Treat It Looks Like

Chickpeas sound like protein, so hummus sounds like a protein treat. The numbers don’t back that up.

USDA’s FoodData Central lists store hummus at 7.8 grams of protein per 100 grams. Alabama Extension wants a layer diet at “Protein 16% or more.” That’s 16 grams or more per 100. So gram for gram, hummus has under half the protein of the feed she already has in front of her. Homemade hummus in USDA’s data is lower still, at 4.9 grams.

Most of the calories in hummus come from fat. Store hummus has 17.8 grams of fat per 100 grams, which by my math is about two-thirds of its 237 calories. Plain chickpeas, boiled without salt, have 2.6 grams. So the dip has almost seven times the fat of the beans it’s made from.

The old version of this page said the olive oil in hummus gives hens omega-3s. That was wrong. USDA has olive oil at 73 percent monounsaturated fat, with less than 1 percent of the omega-3 kind.

Fat is the part the poultry vets warn about. UC Davis puts it plainly: “Chickens don’t require high amounts of fat, so avoid fatty foods.” They add that hens that overeat can grow fatty liver lobes “which can rupture and kill chickens.” Merck says fat scraps “promote the development of fatty liver and acute death from liver rupture.” One tablespoon won’t do that. Fatty scraps every day are a different story.

The Salt Adds Up

Salt is the part of hummus most of us forget about. Hens do need some. Maine Extension says sodium goes into chicken feed “at the rate of about 0.15% sodium in the feed mix.” They also say “Most chickens need between 0.12% to 0.2% sodium in the diet.”

Here’s how a spoonful stacks up, from USDA’s numbers and my math:

• A hen’s day of feed, 100 to 150 grams at 0.15 percent, holds about 150 to 225 milligrams of sodium.
• One tablespoon of store hummus adds 64 mg. That’s 28 to 43 percent more on top of her feed.
• A tablespoon of homemade hummus adds about 36 mg.
• Fifteen grams of chickpeas boiled without salt add about 1 mg.

Add one tablespoon of store hummus to 100 grams of feed and her whole day comes out near 0.19 percent sodium. That’s still inside Maine’s range. Two tablespoons puts a small eater near 0.21 percent, just over the top of it.

None of that is poison. Merck recommends “The addition of 0.5% salt (NaCl) to the ration of chickens and turkeys,” and says “amounts > 2% are usually considered dangerous.” A lick of hummus is nowhere near that line. It’s just salt she doesn’t need. If a hen gets into a lot of something salty, Merck says “Watery droppings and wet litter are also observed.” You’ll see it in the bedding before you see much else.

Young chicks are another matter. Merck says “Birds under 21 days old have increased susceptibility to the toxic effects of sodium.” Chicks that young don’t need treats anyway, so I’d give them no hummus at all. That’s my call, not Merck’s. Cheese sits in the same salty, fatty corner, and our cheese page goes through it.

Chickpeas Are Real Chicken Feed, Once They’re Cooked

Here’s the good news for the chickpea. It isn’t some odd people food. It’s a real feed ingredient. Feedipedia says “It can be recommended to use chickpeas at up to 20% in layer diets provided that the diet is well balanced (notably for methionine).” Methionine is one of the amino acids a layer ration gets balanced for.

The catch is cooking. Raw chickpeas carry trypsin inhibitors, which get in the way of digesting protein. Feedipedia says “Heat treatments, such as cooking or extrusion, reduce” them. Raw chickpeas have also “been reported to increase pancreas weight in growth trials, which may indicate some toxicity.” Colorado State says to “avoid under cooked or dried beans,” and UC Davis puts raw beans on its list of foods to avoid.

So a hard, dry chickpea out of the bag goes back in the pantry. Cooked all the way through, they’re fine. Our can chickens eat it checker files them with beans, and it says the same thing. So do our pages on dried peas and lentils and black-eyed peas.

The salt carries over to cans. USDA lists canned chickpeas at 246 mg of sodium per 100 grams, drained. Drained and rinsed, they still came in at 212. Chickpeas you boil yourself without salt have 7.

Sesame Is Feed Too, in Small Amounts

Tahini is ground sesame, and sesame is a feed as well. Feedipedia has laying-hen trials on it. In one, “the optimal level of soaked sesame seeds in the diet was 3%, which gave an improved laying rate with unchanged feed intake.” With more than 6 percent sesame, egg production and egg weight went down. Sesame oil meal above 4 percent of the diet also hurt laying.

Three percent of a 100 to 150 gram day is 3 to 4.5 grams of sesame. That’s my math, and it’s a small amount.

Two things about sesame are worth knowing. Feedipedia says the seeds are about 5 percent phytic acid, and “phytic acid reduces calcium availability.” Alabama wants 3 to 4 percent calcium in a layer diet, and a hen needs it for her shells. The other thing is fat. USDA lists tahini at 53.8 grams of fat per 100 grams, more than half its weight. A spoon of straight tahini is a bigger fat treat than the hummus is. I’d leave that jar in the fridge.

The Garlic and the Lemon

Most hummus has garlic in it, and garlic is where people get nervous. Here’s what I found.

Merck’s page on garlic and onion poisoning says it shows up “after ingesting large amounts of plant material.” Cats are the most sensitive. Merck says it has been reported in production animals fed onions, and that garlic is 3 to 5 times more toxic than onion. Chickens aren’t named anywhere on the page.

Then there’s a 2002 study in Poultry Science. Researchers fed laying hens diets with up to 10 percent sun-dried garlic paste for six weeks. They found no differences in egg weight, egg mass, feed intake, feed efficiency or body weight gain. Yolk cholesterol went down.

So the garlic in a spoon of hummus isn’t something I’d lose sleep over. I wouldn’t read that study as a reason to feed garlic on purpose, either. The old version of this page called garlic a natural antibiotic that helps hens lay. The study I found showed no change in egg mass.

Onions are a different call. Colorado State lists onions with the foods to avoid. If the tub is a caramelized onion flavor, skip it.

The lemon is a smaller deal. Colorado State does say to make sure scraps “are not salty or have citrus or are moldy.” I don’t think a squeeze of lemon spread through a whole tub turns hummus into a citrus scrap. But it’s one more reason to keep it to a lick.

Spicy Hummus Won’t Burn Her, but Skip the Dessert Kind

The old page said hens have sensitive palates and spicy hummus would bother them. The research says the opposite. A 2002 paper in the journal Cell by Sven-Eric Jordt and David Julius found that “Birds are indifferent to the pain-producing effects of capsaicin.” Capsaicin is what makes a chili hot. The chicken’s version of the heat sensor is “normally insensitive” to it, though it still reacts to real heat.

So a red pepper hummus won’t burn her mouth. The salt and fat are about the same as plain, so the same tablespoon rule holds.

The flavor I’d keep out of the run is dessert hummus. If the tub says chocolate or cocoa, it goes in the trash. Merck says “Chocolate poisoning occurs most commonly in dogs, although many species are susceptible.” UC Davis lists chocolate with the foods to avoid for chickens. Our page on what not to feed chickens has the longer list.

What I’d Give Instead, and How

These steps are my own, put together from the sources above.

1. Boil dry chickpeas until they’re soft all the way through, with no salt in the water. Let them cool.
2. Count about a tablespoon per hen, 10 to 15 grams. That’s Colorado State’s 10 percent rule, worked out.
3. Scatter them where every hen can get some, not just the boss of the run. Colorado State says not to feed more than they’ll eat in 5 to 10 minutes, so you don’t draw rats or a raccoon. Pick up what’s left.
4. Keep the layer feed out the whole time. The treat goes on top of the feed store bag, not in place of it.
5. If a hen gets into a whole tub of store hummus, make sure she has plenty of fresh water. Watch the droppings for a day. If she seems off, call a vet who sees poultry.

That’s the whole trick. The chickpeas give her the part of hummus that’s actually feed, and leave the oil and salt in the tub.

Sources

• U.S. Department of Agriculture, FoodData Central (SR Legacy, April 2019): Hummus, commercial (FDC ID 174289); Hummus, home prepared (172454); Chickpeas, mature seeds, cooked, boiled, without salt (173757); Chickpeas, mature seeds, canned, drained solids (173800); Chickpeas, mature seeds, canned, drained, rinsed in tap water (173801); Seeds, sesame butter, tahini, from roasted and toasted kernels (170189); Oil, olive, salad or cooking (171413).
• Wilmer Pacheco, Joseph Gulizia and Kevin Downs, Alabama Cooperative Extension System: Backyard Small Poultry Flock Management Series: Feeding the Laying Hen (ANR-2913, September 2022).
• Howard Enos, Colorado State University Extension: Raising Poultry the Organic Way – Disease Control and Feeding (published December 2019, reviewed August 2025).
• University of Maine Cooperative Extension: Salt is an Important Nutrient for Poultry.
• Maurice Pitesky and Nancy Reimers, UC Davis / UC Agriculture and Natural Resources: Feeding your Flock.
• Carmen Jerry, Merck Veterinary Manual: Poisonings in Poultry (updated September 2024).
• Yuko Sato, Merck Veterinary Manual: Management of Backyard Poultry (reviewed November 2024).
• Heuzé, Tran, Boudon, Bastianelli and Lebas, Feedipedia: Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) (2015).
• Heuzé, Tran, Bastianelli and Lebas, Feedipedia: Sesame (Sesamum indicum) seeds and oil meal (2021).
• Cristine Hayes, Merck Veterinary Manual: Garlic and Onion (Allium spp) Toxicosis in Animals (updated September 2024).
• Chowdhury, Chowdhury and Smith, Poultry Science: Effects of dietary garlic on cholesterol metabolism in laying hens (2002).
• Jordt and Julius, Cell: Molecular basis for species-specific sensitivity to “hot” chili peppers (2002).
• Cristine Hayes, Merck Veterinary Manual: Chocolate Toxicosis in Animals (updated February 2026).

Sources checked October 27, 2026. The per-tablespoon numbers, the sodium and fat comparisons, the treat allowance and the sesame grams are my math from these sources. The advice on chicks and the steps at the end are my own. We aren’t vets. If a hen eats a lot of something salty or seems sick, call a vet who sees poultry.

Related read: How to Raise Chickens for Eggs — Instant PDF download. Secure checkout by Stripe