The egg industry is one of the most misleading food industries in the world. On the supermarket shelf you’ll see Free Range, Open Range, Cage Free, Nest Laid, Barn Laid, and Free Run eggs - the list goes on. Despite all these wholesome sounding names, a ‘Free Range’ egg farm can have up to 10,000 chickens per hectare.

At Honest Eggs Co. we only have 30 chickens per hectare. Our method of regenerative farming is less wasteful, reduces stress on the land, and is a lot better for the chickens. But we needed a campaign to shake up public perception of the egg industry and show how free and healthy our chickens are.

Our key objective was to bring honesty to the egg industry. We set out to accomplish this by building conversation about our point of difference, increasing our customer base and increasing stockists of our product.

For the first time ever, we turned the humble egg into a revolutionary promotional item.

Now when consumers go shopping for eggs they can see how free and healthy the chickens are at Honest Eggs Co.

By using our product as ambient media we gave our customers the information they need at the point-of-purchase to make a more ethical choice. The greatest impact has been taking market share away from unethical farms, which ultimately changes the industry for the better.

This campaign has been in market for less than two months and has already seen 493% increase in online conversation. As well as +222% new stockist applications, +25% sales revenue in the first 3 weeks, and a 40% increase in purchase orders.

This promotional item consists of an egg carton with a dozen eggs. But there’s a crucial difference, every Honest Egg Co. egg features the daily step count of a chicken on our farms.

To bring this data to the supermarket, we created the world’s first step counter - custom made for a chicken. Each week the device is put on a small number of chickens to track their movements and provide an accurate understanding of how free our chickens are. Farming regulations require every egg on Australian shelves to feature a code for tracing. So to deliver our message we switched this code with the step counts of our chickens using our existing printing process.

Now every time customers pick up a carton to check their eggs they receive the information they need to make an educated purchase.

The ‘FitChix’ campaign had the unique challenge of working directly against the public perception of ‘Free Range’ eggs. As evidenced by the following research, consumers have a positive perception of ‘Free Range’ eggs when compared to cage eggs.

“Qualitative analysis of focus groups and interviews involving 73 participants revealed that free-range and cage-free eggs are perceived as being better quality, more nutritious, and safer, and having better sensory characteristics, than caged eggs.“

Article by Heather J. Bray & Rachel A. Ankeny - Published 16 May 2017.

This lesser of two evils situation has allowed the Australian Free Range egg industry to remain stagnate and capitalise on the status quo.

Until 'FitChix' came along…