Press Release
Cracking Colours
Friday 24th June 2005
Beautifully coloured eggs and modern communication make great marketing partners, as a Cotswold producer has found. Tessa Gates reports. Harrods Food Hall attracts some sophisticated customers, but even busy city shoppers take time to stand and stare at live footage of Clarence Court free-range hens.The sight of the contented chickens, and the unusual coloured eggs they produce, has been a great marketing success.
“There has been a 500% increase in egg sales in the store and there are always 30 or so people watching the hens,” says delighted Phillip Lee-Woolf, an egg producer, who has taken his egg business in Broadway, Worcs, from small beginnings to sales of 20,000 dozen a week.
“Originally, Harrods wanted us to set up a webcam for their Fantasy Garden Week. That was over a year ago and it has been such a success it is still running,” he explains.
But it is the hens and the coloured eggs that lay, not the technology, that is key to success of this business, which has taken 15 years to build.
Philip has farming roots in the Cotswolds, but had been running a small factory making Windsor chairs in Coventry. “My wife and I decided we wanted to get back to the country and my idea was to keep free-range, rare-breed chickens and sell their eggs to big stores and wine shops in London,” he recalls.
Shops loved the dark brown eggs from his Marans and then Fortnum and Mason wanted him to provide blue eggs, so he built up a flock of several hundred Araucanas.
Neither breed was very productive and he realised he would have to cross-breed to produce a bird with better productivity, as the demand was for there coloured eggs. He started developing the Old Cotswold Legbar, crossing Araucanas with Cream Legbars, Plymouth Rocks and other breeds for two or three years.
Cotswold Connection: “There has been a Cotswold connection with blue eggs since the 1920’s, when botanist and explorer Clarence Elliott brought three hens from Patagonia back to Stow-on-the-Wold,” says Phillip. “He started out with a cockerel, too, but due to a linguistic mix-up on the boat back, a request for the cockerel to be fed resulted in it being cooked and served for dinner!”
The three surviving hens were used at Cambridge University in genetic studies in poultry. They were crossed with White Leghorns and Gold Legbars over several generations to produce the Cream Legbars, the first auto-sexing breed in this country.
Some direct descendants of these Cambridge birds are kept at Clarence Court Farm and have been used in development of the farm’s Cotswold Legbar.
Like its Patagonian ancestors, this bird is breed for its eggs rather than its looks and there is no standard colour for plumage. The eggs, too, vary in hue from delicate pastels of pale pink, peach, turquoise, eau-de-nil and blue to rich olive.
The hens still lay fewer eggs than most commercial breeds – 220-230 a year against the modern hybrid’s 300 – plus a year, but this has its advantages in producing a better egg.
“The eggs have thicker shells and this keeps the freshness and flavour better,” says Philip. “They also have thicker Albumen, which means they keep their shape well when they are cracked into a frying pan.”
Six years ago he decided to step up production and try to get the supermarkets interested. Waitrose put his eggs in 10-15 stores. “They went like wild fire,” he says. Today they are in every Waitrose, 600 Tesco and 200 Sainsbury’s stores.
He also sells Burford Browns, rich brown eggs produced from a secret cross of hens based on Marans and Rhode Island Reds and others that has its roots in the chickens his Grandmother kept at Manor Farm, near Burford, Glos. “She had a great strain of chickens and we have revived that, but I am keeping the breeding to myself,” Says Phillip.
The business has grown far past the point where Phillip could keep all the hens. They are reared by selected farmers on small flocks in Wales, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Wiltshire and the West Country.
“A lot of them are sheep farmers looking to diversify or dairy and other stock farmers wanting to go into something else – people who even if they haven’t kept chickens before, have a way with stock, and that doesn’t make a difference,” he says.