One man supermarket supplier
BFREPA member Andrew Gabriel is set to become the smallest supermarket supplier in Britain. He has a flock of just 800 birds, has no welfare scheme membership, no Lion Code accreditation and no staff. But he does have a very good idea for selling eggs.
The West Country farmer packs three different colours of egg (white, blue and brown) in the same box. The novelty has already made Fenton Farm Free Range a thriving line in local retailers around the family farm at Holcombe Rogus on the Devon/Somerset border.
And now the three-colours-in-a-box eggs have not only made Andrew a winner in the Small Producers competition organised by Waitrose and the Times newspaper, he has also received recognition from the Taste of the West organisation and is attracting increasing amounts of media attention. The result is that Fenton Farm Free Range is heading for the supermarket shelves. Well shelf anyway.
If final negotiations are completed satisfactorily Andrew will be delivering around 30 dozen of his speciality eggs a week into just one store—the Waitrose branch at Sidmouth, Devon. The prospect represents the ultimate in a supermarket policy of using local suppliers and products.
The three-colours-in-a-box idea was developed after Andrew's solicitor wife, Sarah, saw blue-green eggs on sale in London. He bought a small number of Aracunas to lay blue-ish eggs but also added Speckledys to add deep brown shells and White Leghorns to produce white.
The enterprise had to be fitted in with work on the 150 acre beef and arable farm that Andrew runs with his father and which has a tradition of producing turkeys for the Christmas market.
But as sales have grown he has developed his own strain of blue egg layer, the Fenton Blue, in the hope of combining an eye-catching colour with increased production. His white eggs will in future soon be coming courtesy of a new flock of Hy-Line W36 pullets and he is still finalising a decision on whether a switch to a commercial hybrid brown layer will give him the colour as well as the egg numbers he needs.
"Obviously we are now at a critical stage of development," Andrew told the Ranger. "We need to step up to around three times the number of birds. But we still want to produce eggs with a decent colour. Some blue-green eggs simply turn out to be an odd muddy colour. We don't want that. And of course we want to be sure to maintain the quality of the product we have developed."
Finding relatively small numbers of coloured egg layers—even at £5 a bird—is just one of the difficulties facing a small scale, speciality producer. Another is that they tend to lay about 150-200 eggs a year.
Egg packs—the Fenton Farm colour is pink/purple—have had to be bought in a quantity that will last around three years and even then, with the cost of the label, packaging costs amount to around 20p a dozen.
The hens are housed in vintage sheds under orchard trees. It looks romantic but it also involves a great deal of time and work which includes carrying feed to each building. Eggs need to be collected twice a day, graded—and soon printed—and then sorted by colour into boxes. Deliveries, made by van, add more costs to a product which, even if it will be sold at over £2 a half dozen in the supermarket, will still not be making the newest supplier a millionaire overnight.
But Fenton Farm is not short of publicity. As well as being the subject of a major feature in the Waitrose magazine it has also featured on BBC Children's TV.
"We are now looking at the prospects of the London market," says Andrew, "but first we need to buy larger buildings."
That will mean re-siting the egg unit in a more accessible part of the farm. But if the first supermarket deal is a success this could be the move which means the smallest supermarket supplier is on his way to the big time.
