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Eggheads is the go-to podcast for egg industry professionals who are interested in leadership and innovation in the egg world. Host Greg Schonefeld explores the evolving world of modern egg farming, from the latest in cage-free innovations and organic certifications to navigating the economics of large-scale production. Whether you're an egg producer, supplier, or involved in poultry genetics, this show provides the insights and expert discussions you need to thrive in the industry. Crack open the science, strategies, and stories behind the egg industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities.
Jasen Urena:
We are a premium brand, but at the same time, we want to be an affordable premium brand. We want to get our products in the most hands that we possibly can.
Greg Schonefeld:
I'm Greg Schoenefeld and this is Eggheads. Being an innovator in any industry is not easy. As the first mover, you might get an edge over your competitors, but at the same time, you're also assuming a ton of risk. The company we're talking about today has shown that they're more than willing to stick their neck out.
Jasen Urena:
We wanted to really be on the forefront of animal welfare, so that's when we acquired NestFresh.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's Jason Urena, the Executive Vice President of NestFresh, a division of Hidden Villa Ranch. NestFresh is a national specialty egg brand that is known for their adherence to some of the highest animal welfare standards in the industry, and for their unwavering commitment to innovation in that realm.
Jasen Urena:
We saw the fact that specialty eggs were growing, cage-free eggs, free-range eggs, that type of production was starting to become a significant trend here. We always saw that we wanted to continue to push the bar on innovation.
Greg Schonefeld:
Part of the reason the company's remained so nimble is because despite their incredible growth, they've remained privately owned since their founder, Tim Luberski, started the company in college.
Jasen Urena:
We're still 100% owned by the Luberski family. He never took on any investment, which is incredible to me for how he grew this business from nothing to where it is today without taking on any investment.
Greg Schonefeld:
Today, we'll get into some of those benefits of being beholden only to yourselves and your customers, as well as NestFresh's ongoing commitment to innovation, including what it truly takes to be on the cutting edge.
And so then in those early 2000s, what was the first sort of moves at that time? Was it cage-free at that time?
Jasen Urena:
In the early 2000s, it was really cage-free. Cage-free was just starting to kind of take off and become a thing. We started doing cage-free and we then quickly started to move towards higher levels of animal welfare, like free-range and pasture-raised. We were one of the first groups to get into that type of production back in those days. One of our main pillars for our NestFresh brand is really how do we continue to give family farmers the ability to compete in this market? As we went through the early 2000s, and deeper, we started to see a lot of consolidation in the industry. These small farmers were unable to compete in some of the kind of bigger commodity segments, so we really wanted to give them something that they could differentiate themselves with, and that ended up being things like free-range, pasture-raised. Later on down the line, we introduced Non-GMO Project Verified and we were the first to do that. We started introducing things like regenerative organic and now we're doing things like Humanely Hatched products. Always pushing that level.
Greg Schonefeld:
Can you just give the listeners maybe a quick sense of what NestFresh looks today? How big is the operation? Where all are you located?
Jasen Urena:
Today, NestFresh is across the country. So now we have farms from Southern California all the way up through the northeast part of the country in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, the upper Midwest, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, and we have significant production and operations in Texas as well. We cover almost the entire country. We're up to over 300 independent family farms that are part of our production pool, along with a lot of the production that we own ourselves. In total, we're probably, on the NestFresh side for all of the specialty eggs that we produce, somewhere around three million birds.
Greg Schonefeld:
Well, speaking of that and some of the things you listed there like non-GMO verified, the pasture-raised, regenerative, now Humanely Hatched, you kind of have this pattern of being early or first. What drives that appetite for being first?
Jasen Urena:
We've just always had that innovative spirit, at NestFresh. It does stem from our group of family farms that, again, wanting to give them a market for their products, wanting to be able to give them an opportunity to compete in a bigger industry that has become very consolidated. In order to do that, we got to be able to differentiate. Our consumers ask us for things, and we've always been of the mentality that we want to be open-minded to what our consumers want, and they're constantly wanting us to improve practices and how we're going to get to the next level of whether it's animal welfare or environmental sustainability. We want to continue to do that, and deliver what the consumers want.
At the core, it feels like the right thing to do. If you can do things better, and there's a possibility that it's possible to implement it at a certain scale, we want to be able to do it. We're not just looking to continue to do the same thing over and over again for the next five to 10, 15 years just because it's profitable today. We want to make sure that we are pushing the bar, because if we push the bar and we make things better, other people will come along and we will actually make impacts in our communities, for our environment, for animal welfare that will be long-lasting, long after we're out of this business.
Greg Schonefeld:
You've mentioned more than once that NestFresh isn't the biggest player in this space. Do you think being smaller actually helps you stay nimble and innovative?
Jasen Urena:
For sure. I mean, we're definitely not the biggest brand out there, in the egg industry, but I think that we're a brand that is continuously pushing the industry forward. Our ownership structure and the fact that Tim owns 100% of the company, and he gives us a lot of leeway in the way that we do things, and it's just a family entrepreneurial culture here, that gives us an advantage. That gives us the ability to move quickly on things. That gives us the ability to act on things that we really believe in, because we don't have shareholders that we need to be beholden to. We don't have major VC corporations behind us telling us how to run our business. We get to make decisions that are good for the next generations. We can think 15 years, 20 years down the line because of the way that we run our business.
Greg Schonefeld:
Everything you're doing there traces back to the farmer.
Jasen Urena:
Absolutely.
Greg Schonefeld:
This is all kind of paving a way for these small family farms to have success. So that really sounds like the big driver behind this.
Jasen Urena:
We do feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to those family farms that are in our group, because we find these family farms, and we create these relationships with them, and they trust us to find markets for all of their eggs. They don't have to worry about where their eggs are going to go, whether their eggs are going to be picked up tomorrow, whether their eggs are going to have a home, because we give them that security. They can focus on taking care of the birds, making sure that the birds have a great life while they're laying, and we take care of the rest. It's amazing, because over the 20 years that I've been with NestFresh, we've had farmers that have transitioned generations and now we're dealing with the next generation of that individual farm. We have farmers that have brought on their children that now have their own farms that are part of the NestFresh family. So it's been really cool to see that. I mean, these are personal relationships at this point.
Greg Schonefeld:
It's clear that NestFresh really values the relationship they've built with those 300-some family farms. Given how devoted they are to seeing those farms succeed, I wondered how the company goes about deciding which farms would make good partners for the brand and what those partnerships actually look like.
Jasen Urena:
Well, it's always about getting to know the individual families, because every family is different, and really understanding is there a good fit here, in terms of just personalities, and how we think about the egg business. Fit in the fact of are they interested in innovation? Do they want the opportunities to go to the next step when their farms are able to go to the next step? Just the thought process behind long-term partnerships, because we don't like to be jumping around from farm to farm. When we sign a farmer, we always go in with the intention that this is going to be a very long-term thing and hopefully, God willing, a forever thing, because we're going to continue to do things the right way. We're going to continue to grow and we'll be able to hold onto those farmers and then continue to bring on new farmers into the future. So those are all things that we look at when we're looking at bringing new farmers into our group.
Greg Schonefeld:
In general, you're offering farmers, I understand, maybe five to 10 year contracts. Maybe that varies due to different factors, but ultimately you're agreeing to take every egg off their farm. In volatile egg markets, like we've seen, how important is that to the stability of those farmers?
Jasen Urena:
That's a huge importance to them. I mean, because at times like this, where maybe markets are at historic lows, the farmer can really find comfort in the fact that they don't have to worry about where their eggs are going. We're going to continue to take them. We understand the difference between a small farm that may have somewhere between 12 to 20,000 birds and ... What their cashflow situation can handle is vastly different than what we can handle, as a bigger company. We always will make sure we take those eggs off the farm and find a home for them, for those farmers. We're never going to leave that responsibility to them. In the same sense, in a long-term partnership, we know that those eggs are going to be there as we grow and that those farmers are going to be willing to grow with us as we grow. So it's definitely a two-way street.
Greg Schonefeld:
I guess you offer a number of different products. How does that work? Are some growers more dedicated to one type of egg than others, more or less?
Jasen Urena:
Yeah. We have farmers that are all throughout the spectrum of free-range and above, because our brand, NestFresh, is all free-range or above. What we try to do with farmers is when we bring them on, we try to guide them through that step ladder. Maybe they're starting at free-range and then they move to Non-GMO Project verified, and then from there they're able to move to organic. Then from there, maybe they move to pasture-raised or they move to regenerative organic. The higher attributes that they go to, there's more that we can share with them. It's not just a NestFresh growing and doing bigger and better things, it's bringing everybody along with us. It's bringing all the farmers along with us so they're not stuck doing the same thing for their entire lives. They can move up the chain with us as well.
Greg Schonefeld:
This kind of specialty approach where NestFresh provides eggs at all different levels of the organic and free-range spectrum, that's clearly working very well for them. But while these farming methods are pretty mainstream now, not all the initial reactions were positive.
Jasen Urena:
When you're first to market with things, sometimes things just come off as crazy ideas to people. We say, "Well, we want to open the doors and we want the birds to go outside and become free-range." They're like, "Why would we let them loose outside? That sounds like a terrible idea." So early on we did get some pushback from the farmers and a lot of odd questions and conversations, but over time, our farmer community has been amazing and we've kind of proven the fact that, hey, every time we come to the table and ask these questions and say, "Hey. We want to do something different than the rest of the industry is doing," we've kind of proven that it's worked, and it's worked out for the farmer.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. Are there some changes that require more than others? Some practices you probably have to have a whole different facility to run them, versus some maybe you're changing how you manage feed, or maybe you're changing things around the edges. Is that accurate?
Jasen Urena:
Yeah. For some production types like pasture-raised, you can't be pasture-raised unless you have a specific amount of land. You have to have that 108 square feet per chicken. It's a lot of acreage that a farmer has to have in order to qualify as pasture-raised. There's investments on the farmer side, and sometimes we help with those investments. On the organic side, it's mostly the feed. You have to supply organic feed, you have to treat the land around the barns without any pesticides, without any synthetic chemicals. That kind of adjusts the way you have to work with the birds in order to get them to produce. There are different things that the farmers have to do, and different methodologies that they have to implement for the different egg types, but at the end of the day, they know it's for their benefit and for the hens' benefit.
Greg Schonefeld:
It just seems like you've always been on the cutting edge. You're always doing something a little new. You're always differentiating. I guess different isn't always better, right? How do you know like, okay, this is something we should differentiate on?
Jasen Urena:
That's a great question, because there are so many just claims on products nowadays. It's not about just throwing another claim on a product just because it's new. We don't want another marketing term. What we really look at, and the lens that we put it through is, is this new innovation or is this advancement going to be impactful and not just another word to put on a carton? Because regardless then of whether it's successful right off the bat, or it's going to take 10 years to make it successful, we believe in it. We believe in the cause, we believe in the innovation, so we're still going to have the motivation and the buy-in from all of our team, all of our farmers to continue to push that innovation forward.
Greg Schonefeld:
What comes to mind when you say that is when you take that approach, it's like NestFresh itself has meaning, because like you said, if you're going to stack claim number nine, claim number 10, claim number 11, it's like, golly, who can read all that? When you're consistently doing the value-add, well now it's just like if people can recognize, "Hey, this is NestFresh and they're always doing ... I agree with their philosophy. I just trust that they're doing the cutting edge right things."
Jasen Urena:
Yeah. That's what we hope that the people at the grocery stores that are picking up our products are thinking. We can trust this brand. This brand is actually trying to do something and have an impact in the areas that we care about.
That folds in our pricing philosophy too. We are a premium product, we are a premium brand, but at the same time, we want to be an affordable premium brand. We want to get our products in the most hands that we possibly can. NestFresh is not a line of products just for the top 5% of people that can afford it, because then it's kind of circular. It goes back to our impact. If we overprice our products and we outprice most of the consumers in the egg category, then we're not going to make the impacts that we want. If we really believe in these things, if we really believe in regenerative agriculture, if we really believe in humanely hatching chicks and we want to make an impact in those places, outpricing our products isn't going to allow us to impact those things. We need to put our products at a price point where most people can afford them.
Greg Schonefeld:
In deciding when to differentiate and keeping that price in the right range, I mean, you've noted the importance of staying close to the consumer, listening to the consumer. Can you talk more what that looks like?
Jasen Urena:
With social media and things nowadays, it's easier than ever to hear the consumer. Sometimes it could be a little overwhelming in what you hear from the consumer. We feel like we have very good engagement with some of the people that buy our eggs, whether it's through social media channels, whether it's through direct emails that they send us, phone calls. We have a live phone line that our consumers can call into and leave messages. We try to interact with our consumer on a daily basis, and then take those recommendations that they're giving us, or suggestions that they're giving us, and kind of synthesize that down into like, okay, what is actionable? How can we act on these things? A lot of times it's not instant. You can't do something differently right the next day, but there are things that we continue to put on our list. There are things that we continue to say, "Hey, we need to think about this." And then how do we make these improvements going forward?
Greg Schonefeld:
NestFresh tries to be responsive to the customer in the changes they want to see, but not all their innovations are things that the consumers are necessarily calling for. For instance, NestFresh recently became the first company in the US to put an in-ovo sexed egg on a grocery store shelf. They're labeling them 'Humanely Hatched'. From all the conversations we've had on the show about in-ovo sexing, I know it couldn't have been an easy thing to pull off, so I asked Jason what inspired them to take that leap.
Jasen Urena:
It's like, why did you do it? What made you do it when nobody was asking for it? It goes back to that same funnel; will it help make an impact and is it the right thing to do? Yeah. The answer is just that simple. It felt like the right thing to do. 2022 is when we made a decision internally to say we want to do this, and we're going to make it happen here in the United States. Now our first in-ovo sex chicks hatched in December of 2024, so it took years for it to actually happen because there was a bunch of obstacles in the way. We made that decision in 2022 that it needs to happen here in the United States and we want to be able to be the first ones to do it, because it's the right thing to do.
Greg Schonefeld:
You mentioned you were hearing a lot of reasons why it wouldn't work in the US. What were some of those reasons and what gave you confidence to move forward anyway?
Jasen Urena:
Yeah. Back in 2022 when we really started asking the questions of the partners that we were going to need here in the US to make it happen, because obviously we can't do it ourselves. We're not a hatchery, we're not a genetics company, so we needed partners to come along with us and make this a reality. In-ovo sexing became a movement in Europe several years ago. Now there's countries like Germany, France, and Italy that have legislation that said all eggs in those countries have to go through an in-ovo sexing process. We knew that the technology was out there. It was new, and yes, there was some kinks that needed to be worked out, but the technology was there. We just had to get it over here.
One of the major issues, as we went to Europe, visited the major in-ovo sexing technology companies, was capacity and scale. Throughput was a big issue because their egg industry in Europe is significantly smaller than our egg industry here in the United States. The size of the machines and the efficiency of the machines that they had in Europe were going to cause bottlenecks here in our hatcheries that we have in the US. That was one of the major issues that had to be solved for.
Another issue was just the question of should we bring it up? Because it could potentially cause other questions to be asked by consumers. To me, that's never been a good reason not to do something. Why hold back progress just because we might have some moments of being uncomfortable, or having to field some potentially uncomfortable questions like we've done throughout our history when we decide, hey, we want to go free-range, we want to let the birds outside. Well, then we had questions about why do other birds have to stay inside? When we say we want to feed organic feed, then obviously you're going the have the question, "Well, why do some other birds not get organic feed?" You were able to have all those conversations and have those transparent conversations, and turn all of those things into positives, and this was going to be the same situation.
Greg Schonefeld:
Was there anything else that kind of stood in the way here? I mean, cost is a factor I feel like gets brought up a lot too.
Jasen Urena:
Cost was definitely one of the hurdles. Not only just the cost of the equipment, because the cost of the equipment is expensive, but the cost of the infrastructure to put the equipment in. The hatcheries here in the US didn't necessarily have a bunch of excess space. There was some space that needed to be built out, in order to make it possible to fit that equipment in there.
Q2 of 2024, we came to an agreement with Highline North America that said, "Hey. We want to do this. We believe in this as well. We want to do this with you." AAT, which is a technology company, their machine's called Cheggy. They said, "Hey. We want to be the first ones to come over to the United States and do this. We're going to make the tweaks that you guys need in order to make it happen." They were able to get a machine, at the highest amount of throughput out of all of their competitors.
Together between Highline North America, Cheggy and NestFresh, we said, "All right. We're going to do it." In December of 2024, Highline installed two Cheggy machines in two of their hatcheries, and we actually hatched our first batch of Humanely Hatched chicks in December of 2024.
It was a long process. It took a lot of help from a lot of people, including some of our other partners like Humane Farm Animal Care. Humane Farm Animal Care created a certification standard for us to be able to use at the hatcheries because this has never been done before. We're kind of helping create this part of the industry as we're going along. We never wanted our consumers to doubt anything that we're saying, so we always third-party certify everything. We needed Humane Farm Animal Care to come into the hatcheries and certify the fact that all of the chicks that we say are Humanely Hatched are actually being Humanely Hatched.
Then we also had partners helping us push on the consumer side or on the marketing side like ASPCA and Innovate Animal Ag that really helped kind of bring the groups together and say, "Consumers want this. This is the right thing to do. Let's make it happen."
Greg Schonefeld:
That's a really interesting background. I could probably record a whole episode with you, just on this topic. For today, I think that's just one really good example of NestFresh staying on the leading edge. Is that kind of what it takes, in general? When you were first stepping out on non-GMO, or if you're stepping out on organic, or if you're stepping out on regenerative, I mean, has it been a similar experience each of those ways where it requires, let's say, the partnership and understanding of the consumer, et cetera?
Jasen Urena:
Yeah. With our regenerative organic, it took us almost two years in order to go through the process of being one of the first regenerative organic brands in the country. Because when you're first, you kind of have to blaze that trail and knock out those boulders out of the way so you can get through. The hope is that we are first and we do get some of the recognition for it, and we do build that trust with our consumers, but on top of that, it's that we need other brands to come along with us and do these things so that we can really scale things like Humanely Hatched, we can scale things like regenerative organic and get it into the hands of more people. That's what's going to make the impact overall in the industry.
Greg Schonefeld:
Yeah. What I'm hearing too is you just have this belief that you're going to find the next thing. You're not worried about being copied on the last thing, you're going to find the next thing.
Jasen Urena:
Yeah, absolutely. It's entrenched into us at this point. That's what NestFresh is all about.
Greg Schonefeld:
That's interesting. So people could think like, "Oh, an egg is an egg. How much can you really differentiate an egg?" Do you see plenty of runway to keep differentiating and keep finding something new?
Jasen Urena:
I do. I have a strong belief in that there's always ways to improve anything. I didn't come from the egg industry. I started with NestFresh right out of college, and I had no idea that my life was going to be centered around eggs. I thought the same thing coming in as a college graduate and like, "Okay. How hard can eggs be? It's a simple, right? It's an egg. The chicken lays it, it goes to the grocery store." I mean it's a tremendously complex industry, and it has a consumer base that is also very diverse and very complex, and they have different needs and they have different asks. I believe while we might not see it today, what is the next thing, but that next thing will come. We just have to be ready and prepared to have an open mind, and take those comments, and take those suggestions seriously.
Greg Schonefeld:
I feel like that's a recurring theme with every business book I read, or business thing I listen to is as you're innovating, you've got to stay close to the customer.
Jasen Urena:
Yeah. Sometimes that's harder to do, because you get lost in the day-to-day of your business and the operations. You finally feel like you fine-tune something, something's working really well, or something's super efficient, and then comes this potential "wrench" of, oh, now you got to change something. Now you've got to move on to something else, and it kind of makes it difficult. It's hard to sometimes listen to the consumer, but it's just a practice. You constantly have to continue to try to be open-minded about those things. Then eventually you find the comfort and you find the excitement in change, and the excitement of being a little uncomfortable at times,
But that's where progress is made. That's how change actually happens.
Greg Schonefeld:
You're always on the cutting edge taking on something new, but you're still keeping some of the categories around that have been around. Are you shedding any of those categories or does the game change? Once more people come to a category, does the game change?
Jasen Urena:
Over time, things do change. For our brand, we made the decision several years ago that we were going to go to exclusively free-range or above. We kind of moved away from producing cage-free eggs, under our NestFresh brand or our basket of brands. We decided we're going to go free-range and above only. On our Humanely Hatched that hit shelves last July, we did at that point say that we're going to go 100% Humanely Hatched under NestFresh. All of our NestFresh retail products are going to be 100% Humanely Hatched and we're going to reach that goal by this July. By July of 2026, all NestFresh retail products will be Humanely Hatched.
Then from there, we're going to roll that over and start producing our New Barn Organics and our Country Hen Organic products as Humanely Hatched as well. So those brands are then going to go 100% Humanely Hatched over time.
It doesn't mean that free-range, or pasture-raised, or non-GMO or any of that is going to leave our brand. We're just adding this other layer and say, this is just table stakes for us. We have to be Humanely Hatched, because we feel like it's the right thing to do. Our whole brand portfolio is going to go in that direction.
Greg Schonefeld:
Man, it is really inspiring to hear about a company that's not just willing to be a pioneer, but they've pretty much built an entire brand on being a first mover. That's in an industry where it would be easy to see an egg as just an egg. All the different types of specialty eggs they produce, from free-range to pasture-raised to non-GMO certified, to now Humanely Hatched, it doesn't only satisfy the diverse needs and expectations of their customer base, it differentiates their producers in a crowded marketplace and helps ensure the success of these small family operations. The fact that they have 300 of these partner farms, who rely on NestFresh to keep demand for their products strong, speaks volumes about the amount of faith these farmers place in the company.
And now having covered all the different eggs that NestFresh produces and their unwavering commitment to innovation, just one burning question remains. I've got one last question for you, Jason. How do you prefer your eggs?
Jasen Urena:
I love eggs. I eat eggs in a bunch of different ways, but I mean, if I had to choose one, I love eggs sunny side up on a burger. Anytime I see eggs on a burger, on a menu, I'm ordering that. I don't care where I'm at.
Greg Schonefeld:
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a colleague or friend. Word of mouth really helps us to grow the show. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Until next time, I'm Greg Schoenefeld, and we'll talk to you soon.