Know your eggs

I am a farmer who owns a chicken (in Hypotheticalville, obviously). My chicken lays the same eggs in the same volume as my neighbour, also a chicken farmer. We sell the same product in the same way in the same volumes. So how do I add an edge to what is, essentially, the same product as my neighbours? How can I make more money from the same humble little egg than my neighbour, so that I may have a bigger farm and a bigger tractor and a bigger ego?

Its a quandary thats foxed many an egg marketeer (I feel vaguely psychopathic using the word 'foxed ' in an article about chicken farmers and egg producers.) I either have to sell more at the same price, or sell the same at a higher price, or a suitable combination of the two. But how can I add value to the same product? We see a plethora of 'interesting' eggs on the market - cheap eggs, battery eggs, free range eggs , free from eggs , freedom eggs, organic eggs, happy eggs, clever eggs, single breed eggs, white eggs, blue eggs , double yolk eggs, duck eggs, chocolate eggs - no, wait...

You get my point. How does the humble egg up its game? How does one create that false need, that urge to impulse buy what is a rather mundane product?

In what is already a saturated market place , it becomes increasingly difficult to charge more or shift more. But one thing the egg marketplace can leverage to great effect is the UKs current and seemingly insatiable baking craze.

We all seem to be trying to ape a Darling Buds existence - we have no money in our pockets, and so we hark back to another era when domestic creativity was one of the few ways to make you and your family feel good when your cash didn't stretch very far. We know how to sew a button, sow a bean and we also know how to whip up a batch of fairy cakes (or whatever guise your diminutive cake is taking, be it cupcake, muffin, fairy cake, whoopie pie, butterfly bun or otherwise). And fortunately for the egg marketeers, these creations are both delicious AND contain eggs!

The recent craze for channeling our inner Margot has had some of us buying our own chickens. Many a suburban garden has run the gamut of fox-proof coops, Eglus etc. Some early adopters have now come out the other side and after the remaining chicken has clucked its last, realised why subsistence poultry farming is all well and good when you either write about gardening or food or poultry-rearing, but for those of us who have to work a full time job away from the home, in order to pay down our sub-prime mortgages, it means working our fingers to the bone every spare second you have, either tilling the earth, collecting the eggs or tapping the keyboard. Still, Personal Chicken Ownership has to some degree further dented the egg market.

But what better way for egg marketeers to help themselves to a piece of the action than to jump on this nostalgic wagon train? To be a bona fide 1950s Stepford Wife (single-parent status notwithstanding), one must don a pinny and one must bake! And to bake, we need eggs.

But those egg marketers still want you eating your poached egg on toast, they don't want you simply using your eggs for your Victoria sponge and having a bowl of Special K instead. No - they want you buying eggs for all eventualities. For every circumstance. In short, you need eggs to dine on, but you also need a new fangled creation, eggs to bake with!

Enter Ella Valentine Baking Eggs.

Baking eggs - yes, you heard it right. The pretty pink boxes have been finding their way on to the shelves of your local supermarket and they have raised questions, not least from my friend who first asked me 'what are baking eggs, then, baking bird?' the other night, and who prompted this article. I found this super piece on Popsop.com the other day that talks further about the genius of egg marketing. By all accounts, Ella Valentines Baking Eggs have been specially developed by the manufacturers (manufacturers? Chickens?) to enable you to whip up the lightest of sponges, the most ethereal meringues. Or have they?

The short answer is, dear readers, no. And therein lies the genius!

Baking Eggs are, it would seem, an ad-mans creation. Baking eggs are no different to what you would find inside a standard pack of eggs. They are free range, they are good quality, and, perhaps oddly, they are slightly cheaper than their undesignated counterparts. They are no more or less bake-worthy than any other egg you might pluck from the supermarket shelves (yes, supermarkets, where people in the real, recession-teetering world are forced to shop due to favourable and aggressive pricing policies and a lack of alternative in our local communities). They do, however, come in a simply gorgeous little pink box complete with ginghamified label. The website is an ode to Cath Kidston, all pastels and vintage printed table frippery that I like to imagine I might use to dress my very own table when I invite the (non-existent) vicar round for high tea with my (non-existent) hubby and our brood of shiny-faced, wholegrain children (for 'children', read 'cynical, singular teen daughter'). The tabs on the website refer to their 'collections' and 'style tips'. You can even upload your very own cake creations for everyone at Ella's site to see and coo over - rather beautiful they all are too.

Put simply, this is the most chic, stylish, bang-on-trend and value-for-money egg-centric marketing ploy there ever was. If you can drag yourself away from your baby blue Clarence Court Cotswold Legbars or saffron-yolked Burford Browns (I'd honestly struggle, I love them so much) you could save a bob or two, but even if you only snuck an extra pack of Ella's into your basket for the pure pinkicity of the packaging, it would be a wise move.

 I love the ingenuity behind this brand. I love how it's taken a mundane and already fairly over-marketed commodity and managed to put an entirely fresh, new spin on it by taking flight on the current bakeratti zeitgeist. When I do my big shop on Friday evening, I'll be making sure I have my baking eggs on the list along side my Cotswold Legbars. And I will probably use them to bake with, specifically. Whereas my Cotswold Legbars will be cracked into a chili-spiked tomato sauce, poached until just set, and then served on a slice of charred sourdough that has then received a scrubbing of fresh garlic. I'll scatter them liberally with coriander, a crumbling of Maldon salt and cracked black pepper, and finally I'll season with a liberal sprinkling of sherry vinegar and a libation of olive oil. Then I will sit a while, and ponder upon why we have to invent such creative marketing campaigns for a product so delicious that, by rights, it should sell itself.

Round of applause, please, for getting through a whole egg article without a single, cringeworthy egg pun. Eggstraordinary.