UFO Info Week-End

And his company is now one of the largest suppliers of ready-packed eggs to

And his company is now one of the largest suppliers of ready-packed eggs to the major supermarkets in the North-west, plus a high-street fast-food chain.”It was my wife Helen who sparked the idea of selling eggs. She bought 200 hens and began selling free-range eggs at the farmhouse kitchen door. The buyers could see the hens running about in our fields and that gave them confidence in the product,” he says.It’s a fair assumption the mere suggestion of the name Edwina Currie would be anathema to any British egg producer Not in this case. Brass says they began with eggs just before the then Health Minister made her comment in 1988 that most of Britain’s egg production was infected with the salmonella bacteria.

Yet because of that one statement, free-range eggs began to be perceived by the public as a healthier alternative to eggs from battery-caged hens. “By chance we had hit the right market at the right time,” he says.Next, Brass was approached by an egg-packing company in the North-east to farm an additional 1,500 free-range hens, and send the eggs to them. That contract grew rapidly to 9,000 hens, but the egg-packing operation was later sold to a company in Leeds, and the contract was lost.Brass was left high and dry again, so decided he would be less vulnerable if he sold his own eggs. He brought in a market research expert who said trying to retail eggs in Cumbria would be a waste of time: “a declining market with no mass of population” was the returned synopsis.

The Brass farm is well placed for the M6, so he bit the bullet and decided to go down the supermarket route.He successfully applied for EU grant funding to help build his own egg-packing factory in his own back yard. The plant would sort and put eggs in boxes for supermarket shelves. The first big supermarket order quickly came in for 500 cases a week (each case holds 30 dozen eggs), and other supermarkets gradually came on board. The business grew as other egg producers were brought under contract to match demand. The factory throughput today is 5,000 cases a week and it employs 40 staff.The contract Brass has with the producer is solely to provide a firm commitment to buy the eggs. The farmer provides the hens, the buildings, and all other capital expenditure.