Pancakes and more is new Noble initiative

Noble Foods has launched two new initiatives to help boost consumer demand for eggs.

The company, which last year invested heavily in the launch of the Happy Egg Co, is opening its first fast food store under the name Pancakes and More. It has also opened the first of what is intended to be a string of university omelette bars. Both of the ventures are seen as ways of promoting greater consumption of eggs and increasing the growth potential for Noble’s Happy Egg brand.

The company’s technical director, Andrew Joret, said Noble had been actively looking at a number of ways of adding value to the egg market. "We are not just stopping with shell eggs," he told egg producers who attended a National Farmers Union poultry conference at Sleaford in Lincolnshire. He said one idea the company had tried was ready-peeled hard-boiled eggs. It had created interest without really taking off as a product. Noble was now pressing ahead with other ideas by investing in a series of food outlets.

"Next week we are opening our first fast food store called Pancakes and More in the Metro Centre in Gateshead," he said. "It will be serving pancakes, omelettes, frittatas and so on. Also coffees, and there will also be some desserts in there from our desserts business, Gu. We will see how that goes, but it could be something that rolls out quite widely," he said.

Andrew said that as well as opening its first fast food store the company was also aiming to have 10 omelette bars up and running in universities this year. The first one was already open at Keele University and Noble had picked out a number of other large universities.

"These bars will be selling to students in the cafeteria or refectory area, selling them pancakes, selling them omelettes.

Of course these are all youngsters you are targeting," he said. "You don’t necessarily want to make a fortune out of doing it. What you are doing is pushing the product into new customers and once they are with you they will hopefully be with you a long time. We think that is very important."

Andrew pointed to other possibilities for developing the Happy Egg brand - Happy Egg quiches and Happy Egg Scotch eggs, for example. Noble appears to have taken a bold new approach to the egg market – and it is one that has been adopted since the arrival of Peter Thornton as the company’s chief executive. He had huge success at Dairy Crest with the Cathedral City cheese brand. He is clearly hoping to replicate his success at Dairy Crest with new marketing initiatives at Noble.

Last year he oversaw the launch of Happy Egg. Andrew Joret told farmers at the meeting in Sleaford that the new brand had surpassed all expectations since it arrived on the market in February 2009. "I am very pleased to say that it is stocked in more than 4,000 stores, it already has seven per cent of the market by value and at retail it has an annualised turnover of about £48 million. That growth in Happy Egg was far better than our internal budget expectations. We really are very pleased with what it’s done."

He said that what was particularly impressive was that only 23 per cent of sales had been achieved through promotion. "If you can get a brand where you are selling only 23 per cent on promotion that’s quite good. Brand target figures I have been told about seem to be running at about 40 per cent on promotion."

Andrew said the importance of branding was that everyone in the chain made more money. He said the aim of Happy Egg was to sell at a 10 per cent premium over standard free range. Producers, packers and retailers all made more money through branding, yet only 15 per cent of eggs were currently branded compared to 80 per cent of butter and 40 per cent of cheese. Even branded water had been very successful.

He said that Happy Egg accounted for three quarters of the total growth in free range over the last two years. That was something Noble was very proud of, it was something that was good for egg producers and Andrew said that there was a lot more to come from the continued development of the Happy Egg brand.