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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.
Cameron Whitehead:
They were weeks, if not months away from losing everything. Right? Losing the whole farm, losing their home, and they just gambled on organic. It pretty much caught fire from then, but it was a gamble.
Greg Schönefeld:
When it comes to organic free-range and pasture-raised eggs, only a few producers compete in the big leagues.
Cameron Whitehead:
My name's Cameron Whitehead and I'm the Chief operating Officer here at Pete and Jerry's.
Greg Schönefeld:
Pete and Jerry's is unquestionably one of the pioneers in the organic egg space. Starting as a small family farm in Monroe, New Hampshire, they made a bold move in the 1990s to go organic at a time when it was almost unheard of. Jesse Laflamme, the original owner's son, played a key role in this transformation. With a fresh perspective and a consumer-focused approach, Jesse helped elevate Pete and Jerry's to a leader in premium organic eggs. And that risk paid off.
Cameron Whitehead:
We were the first to jump into this space and really do it best, and take animal welfare up to the next step.
Greg Schönefeld:
But the journey has not been without its challenges. From battling aggressive competitors to navigating the complexities of scaling up while staying true to their core values, Pete and Jerry's has faced its share of obstacles. Through it all they've set the standard for quality and integrity in the egg industry. Today they've diversified and expanded, thriving in a niche market while pushing the boundaries of what consumers can expect from their eggs, from free-range to pasture-raised, all with a focus on animal welfare and sustainable farming practices. All right, Cameron, really happy to have you on.
Cameron Whitehead:
Thank you very much.
Greg Schönefeld:
I'm wondering if you could just start us off with some background, and Pete and Jerry's has a really cool story. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Cameron Whitehead:
So before it was called Pete and Jerry's, there was a family here called the Ward family, and Les Ward was actually a dive bomber pilot in the Pacific, World War II. He went out and joined the Air Force, flew in the Pacific off of aircraft carriers, and when he came back his brothers had taken over the dairies, which were the family assets, family businesses. So he said, "I got to do something. My brothers are running the dairies. I want to be in AG. I don't want to go work in a factory." So he started with chickens, and that kind of handed down through a couple generations of family to a cousin and a married in Jerry.
Jerry was... Carol Laflamme, was actually the daughter, married Jerry and Peter's cousin. But it just came through generations, and what happened in the 90s was there was a large egg producer called Jack DaCosta of DaCosta Egg Farms up in Maine, an unsavory character, if I say so. That's when they made the [inaudible 00:02:42] They said, "We're going to get crushed out. We got to do something different. We got to make one last throw of the dice." That throw of the dice was organic.
Greg Schönefeld:
That move, going organic, helped them differentiate from competitors and stay in local markets. And when Jesse LaFlamme joined the company, he took things even further, focusing on what consumers were moving toward and building a premium brand. Going organic became their saving grace. But it was a close call.
Cameron Whitehead:
It was a Hail Mary, is what it was. They were weeks if not months away from losing everything. Right? Losing the whole farm, losing their home, and they just gambled on organic, made it work. It had its ebbs and flows, but it pretty much caught fire from then. But it was a gamble.
Greg Schönefeld:
Do you know at that time was organic, could you get a slight premium for that? It was maybe a very small market, but did the premium exist?
Cameron Whitehead:
The premium existed, for sure. The premium existed, but it was more premium around local and organic combined. So they're really playing in their regional markets more than anything else. And the market was so, so small. The consumer portion might have been, two to 3% of consumers actually cared about organic at that time. Obviously it's blossomed since then, but when you're as small as they were, two to 3% of the overall consumer market [inaudible 00:04:04] was just funny.
Greg Schönefeld:
Well, I wonder, on that note, could you give us a quick rundown of just the different types of eggs on the market, the four big ones?
Cameron Whitehead:
Yeah, so you have obviously cage eggs, cage eggs are what you imagine. They're chickens in a cage. That is the majority of the market, and has been for decades now. The next step up from that is cage free. Cage free has evolved and adapted over, I would say, the last 10 to 20 years. When cage free started really poking up was more in the 2010s is when you really started to see cage free start to light fire. And cage free, at that time, was more about two-dimensional barns. It was truly no internal equipment in a lot of these barns, or very minimal equipment. And then through the 2010 period, as it started to grow, people realized there was a premium in this cage free space.
There was a set requirement to make something cage free. "How can we do this while getting as close to commodity as we can just due to economics of scale?" That's how commodity AG works. And so this cage free systems went from what I would call a two-dimensional, flat barn, family farm focus to essentially a wing of commodity, in a way. They're better for the hens, for sure, animal welfare wise, but they're not what consumers perceive as cage free anymore. But all things being told, drastically better than a commodity caged egg by miles. The next step is that free-range, and that's really where these family farms move to after cage free, is they move to these two-dimensional flat barns or you're going to have absolutely no metal in the building as far as cage structure at all.
The only structure inside the building is really going to be nest boxes, feed, water, et cetera, egg [inaudible 00:05:39] That's about all there really is in there. Other than that, it's a flat two-dimensional barn. Maybe you're looking at something like 10 to 20,000 hens in a site, in a barn, a family farm, and the animals all have outdoor access. So with something like HVAC certified free-range, which is what we do, all the birds go outside, they have mandatory outdoor access and they spend their times inside, outside, depending on wherever the hen so chooses. And then you move up from there, and you really move on to the pastured side of the business, which pastured is 108 square feet, outdoors.
Greg Schönefeld:
And to be clear, when Cameron mentions 108 square feet, he means 108 square feet per hen.
Cameron Whitehead:
It is the highest level of animal welfare. Again, similar setup though to this two-dimensional, no tall structures, no mechanical equipment inside, family farm raised and pastured actually defends that family farm style just because of the requirements around it at door entries and fence distances. When you think pasture raised, think family farm with a lot of birds outside. I think there's one two more, Greg. It's kind of organic, right?
Greg Schönefeld:
Sure.
Cameron Whitehead:
There's varying ways people interpret organic. So if you're a consumer, you can think of organic as organic mandating, outdoor access, hens on grass. That's what you think about with organic, and that's what we should think about. But the reality is organic, at this time, doesn't require outdoor access. Now with OLPS and a grandfather clause, in three to five years, you'll be seeing all of organic go outside. It'll be mandated. But really organic is a variation on cage-free at its base minimum right now. It's basically cage-free with hens getting organic grains, and then you step it up to free-range of pasture from there.
Greg Schönefeld:
Okay, so before those standards, to meet those requirements, it's really about the feed is the big difference from organic to non-organic. And I do want to get into the OLPS maybe a little bit later too. You used the term two-dimensional couple times. Can you describe that a little bit?
Cameron Whitehead:
Yeah, yeah. So you'll hear like 2D barn or a flat barn, and that just means a barn that doesn't have these vertical either cage-free or cage structures stacked on top of each other. So if you walk into a, what we think of as a family farm, one of our family farms, you're going to be seeing birds on a floor with scratch, and you're going to see hay and shavings on the floor, and then they'll hop up onto the nest box area. But you're not going to be seeing a lot of equipment going vertical and utilizing that vertical space in a lot of our barns. So when you think 2D, I think that's kind of... You'll see in some of the regulations too defined as a partially slatted house.
Greg Schönefeld:
Yeah, one level is the picture I'm getting. Okay. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. And one more follow up on the pasture raised versus free-range, is the square footage, is that the big difference?
Cameron Whitehead:
It is. It is the big difference. So you have a outdoor access requirement for HVAC free-range of two square feet outdoors, and then with pasture it takes a huge step up to this 108 square feet outdoors, which if you think about it, just to contextualize the size and the scope we're talking about for pasture here is a standard family farm is between 10 and 20,000 hens on a family farm. And at 20,000 hens, you do the rough math, that's a 50 acre plot of land that is dedicated just to the chickens to go out and explore. I like to phrase it as it's more space than your average inner city labrador gets.
Greg Schönefeld:
And so Pete and Jerry's really occupies this free-range and pasture raised, and offering organic and non-organic within those spaces?
Cameron Whitehead:
Yep, that's absolutely right.
Greg Schönefeld:
Okay.
Cameron Whitehead:
Yep. So Nellie's is our conventional fed free-range brand. So same standards as Pete and Jerry's organics free-range, it's just the feed that varies. So it's really for the consumer who's looking for something that's better, it's a step up, it's going to be a better quality egg. They're going to have a guarantee on animal welfare. But they're not going to quite make that reach to pasture organic yet. So it's the value offering for someone who cares a lot about animal welfare.
Greg Schönefeld:
One thing I noticed too is you're B Corp certified since 2013.
Cameron Whitehead:
Yep.
Greg Schönefeld:
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Cameron Whitehead:
So I joined in 2014 and we had just became B Corp at that time. We were the first animal AG company to go B Corp. It was a huge deal. But really at that time we were, we really are the pioneering egg company.
Greg Schönefeld:
Becoming a B Corp means a company meets the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. It's a certification that shows a commitment to balancing profit with purpose, ensuring that business practices positively impact workers, communities, and the environment. For Pete and Jerry's going B Corp in 2013 was a way to solidify their dedication to sustainable and ethical farming practices.
Cameron Whitehead:
We went B Corp first. We went to free-range. We were with HVAC really early on. And we were the first to jump into this space and really do it best and take animal welfare up to the next step.
Greg Schönefeld:
And I guess with all these offerings, the free-range, the pasture raised, what does it take to make that happen? How do you actually make that happen operationally?
Cameron Whitehead:
So we have a whole bunch of ways, but I'll tell you the number one way we get to the size supply chain we have is farmer word of mouth. That's the number one tool we have in the toolbox is if you treat farmers right, they're going to refer you to a friend or five. We have farm teams, we have service techs out there who are working with our family farmers, ensuring animal welfare, good productivity, et cetera. And they're out there constantly taking names and having meetings and going through barn plans with farmers, and walking land and surveying it. And can you put a pasture here? But man, the number one tool you have is if you tree farmers right, and they have a great experience with you, a great experience with the company, they have success, their family finds stability in AG, they're going to go to church, they're going to go to the grocery store and they're going to tell people about it, and they're going to hand out your phone number. And before you know it, you got a waiting list of people who want to join the team.
Greg Schönefeld:
Pete and Jerry's operates through a network of family farms where they own the birds but work with farming partners. This setup helps de-risk the process for farmers by taking on some of the financial burdens. In regions like Northern New England, which are traditionally dairy areas with few poultry farms, they needed to convince family farms to build poultry houses. To do this, Pete and Jerry's created a structure where farmers managed the daily animal care taking, including labor and egg collection, while the company purchases the feed and hens, easing the financial load and creating economies of scale. This approach provides stability for family farms and protects them from potential health challenges within the flock, while giving Pete and Jerry's quality care of their animals. As Cameron notes, the farmer is key to the operation.
Cameron Whitehead:
So our structure, just the geographical spread in the small family farms, it's the number one shield to a heavily impacted supply chain. So any one particular hit wall devastating to the family farm, because we own the birds and the feed, they can recover from it and we'll help get another flock in there. And also it doesn't impact the overall supply chain that badly. So as far as retailers are concerned, I think that our diversified model has served them incredibly well. They haven't had a total egg shortage due to Pete and Jerry's or when their local commodity producer gets hit by AI and they lose 3 million birds in a day, they could be out of eggs for a long time. And they could have to outsource from third parties and non-normal partners, and their prices go through the roof. Whereas because of our supply chain structure, that really isn't a concern for us. So we practice the highest levels of biosecurity every day on our farms. But we have some good structural insulation.
Greg Schönefeld:
I don't know if there's a magic number to help reduce risk of AI spread if you're a mile apart, does that reduce things or 10 miles? But I guess there's enough spread outness where maybe you're a little less at risk of having some kind of impact in the millions of birds.
Cameron Whitehead:
Yeah. And the biosecurity process that we put in place are pretty stringent. They definitely can be impactful on the farmer, as far as day-to-day effort, having to go in and putting on biosecurity suits, and the local collection driver has to put on booties and spray tires, et cetera. And it's difficult, but we're just protecting each other and the farms and the hens all in the same time. But that insulation from that supply chains is huge impact. I will say the vector for someone like us or any other supply chain like us, it's always going to be the processing facilities. That's the vector, is where eggs come in and materials go out. So it's actually here in the processing facilities where we're kind of next level on guard always. We take it seriously inside the plants.
Greg Schönefeld:
I have a couple just random chore questions. How does the egg collection work? Do the birds mostly naturally jump into the nest? I saw something online that y'all... I don't know if this is always or this is an old thing, but you have an AstroTurf area where eggs can actually roll down. What does the egg collection look like?
Cameron Whitehead:
Yeah, so it's in the nest boxes in the center of... They have... Every other nest box or every nest box has a curtain on it. And that curtain, just like most people when they go to the bathroom, they shut the door. When the hens go into the nest boxes, they want to be in a place where nobody can watch what they're doing. They want privacy to lay their egg. They go in there and they lay their egg, they get away from all the other hens in the barn. They have their time to themselves. They go in there usually after morning feed, they go in and there's AstroTurf that's at a slight angle, and it's just this row of AstroTurf inside of there. It's a very, very slight angle. And the hen lays her egg and she goes back out, she goes outside, forages, gets out some sun, stretches her wings, and meanwhile that egg just slowly works its way through hen activity down this ramp onto a central egg conveyor.
That central egg conveyor, usually once or twice a day, depending on farm practices, the flock age, et cetera, it will just get... The button gets pushed at the front of the barn and all the eggs start coming to usually the family who is in the back here in front, and they individually pack each egg onto a blue transport flat from there. So we have to replace that AstroTurf every once in a while. You start get a bunch of cracked eggs from a particular barn, you go through and see maybe that AstroTurf is beat up, it's not as soft as it used to be to catch the eggs.
Greg Schönefeld:
And then I guess from there, like you said, your processing maybe is you're picking up from the different farms and then taking them to process. I actually heard you say in one of your interviews that the truck driving is really important.
Cameron Whitehead:
It is. Those guys are as skilled as F1 drivers, it feels like at times. Their gap between my driving and an F1 driver, it's the same distance for one of our egg collection trucks. So these guys are going into rural family farms on dirt roads, and they're going during mud season, they're going during the summer, they're going during when the road works are going on. They have a 53 foot refrigerated trailer behind them, and they're backing up in these narrow driveways every single week to collect eggs from every family farm. And then they got, on their way out, they have to drive. As you can imagine, it's an egg. There's not a lot of brake hitting that you can do or rough acceleration.
You are driving like you're carrying an infant in the back. So these guys are super talented. And we have had that process before where we have a driver who comes in. He seems a great guy, a good driving record, but he is a dock to dock driver. He has been delivering, I don't know, almonds from California to Virginia for the last two years on beautiful four lane highway roads across the nation. And then you say to them, "Can you go to a small farm in Arkansas on a dirt road and pick up these eggs for us?" And then it's just like, I think then that's when the light goes on. There's levels to this game. So yeah, the truck drivers are crucial.
Greg Schönefeld:
That's something I never would have thought of. A lot of pieces you have to put together in your operations, it sounds like.
Cameron Whitehead:
Yeah, for sure. A lot of talented people.
Greg Schönefeld:
Yeah. No, in every phase. No, that's interesting. And I'd like to talk to you a little bit about just consumer trends and back to the organic livestock and poultry standards that you brought up earlier. What does that do, and what does it mean for Pete and Jerry's?
Cameron Whitehead:
So the number one thing that OLPS brings about is going to be this change on outdoor access for organic.
Greg Schönefeld:
The Organic Livestock and Poultry Standards, or OLPS, are a set of guidelines issued by the USDA. These standards cover various aspects such as living conditions, outdoor access, and healthcare practices, aiming to promote animal welfare, encourage consistent livestock production practices, and to make it clearer to the consumer what organic means.
Cameron Whitehead:
So there's a bunch of little pieces around things like perching and pull-up movements, but very much smaller adaptations, the ongoing organic standards. The largest piece of it is outdoor access. So for years now, we, at Pete and Jerry's, have been pushing that organic needs to meet, it needs to be outdoor access, it needs to be birds outside in the sunshine, stretching their wings. That's what the consumer expects. It's what we expect. It's what our family farmers expect organic means to them. But that's not the rule. The rule is that you can have concrete floors with chicken wire on the outside, and that can count as your outdoor access.
I don't think you or I would think that's organic. I don't think the consumers think that's organic. And that's the big change, is there's a grandfathering now of those systems are going to be gone. I think it's January 1st, 2027 is the last time those systems are allowed to be qualified as organic. And then after that, every system is going to look more like what you'd expect out of a Pete and Jerry's free-range family farmer, which is going to be birds outside, organic feed in the bins, stretching their wings, no covered porches. So that's the biggest change, and we're looking forward to it. It's been a long road,
Greg Schönefeld:
So it helps ensure that the birds are really truly outside is part of it. So does something like cage free organic automatically go away with this?
Cameron Whitehead:
It pretty much does. I would say the vast majority of it's going to be gone in the next few years. It's going to move towards this free-range standard, because if you're pushing birds outside anyways, you're probably going to be able to find the space to get them to go to two square feet outdoors, and then you're going to be able to make that free-range standard. So it's a big win, I think, for the consumer. It's a big win for the hens. So it's going to level the playing field for family farms too, which is a big deal also.
Greg Schönefeld:
Pete and Jerry's puts a strong emphasis on educating consumers, believing that transparency is key, especially for the newer generation of food conscious buyers. They aim to provide all the details, both the good and the challenging, about what goes into their products. The idea is that once consumers are informed about the benefits of options like free-range or pasture raised eggs, they tend to stick with them. It's a long-term investment in education, ensuring consumers understand and value the quality they're getting.
Cameron Whitehead:
I truly think it's a generational thing that's happening, that we're seeing right now with consumers and a need for this transparency, a need for this supply chain that they can trust. I can give a lot of credit for these kind of programs, really going back to people that were outside of the AG space. If you look at someone like Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard, when they started their programs with the one thread, et cetera, they quickly realized this is what consumers want. When they're purchasing for a premium, they're putting out their hard-earned money here, there's a little bit of an expectation that you have to build a story for them and make them understand why they're paying this premium. And most of that's just going to be done through honesty and transparency in the supply chain. When you think about premium, how many shoppers want to go for just one level up from what the base offering is and any kind of retailer, one, the base offering is going to be this base cage free. The next level up is going to be a premium AG.
Greg Schönefeld:
This move to cage free, Cameron thinks it helps the free-range space as well.
Cameron Whitehead:
It creates this base minimum where people's expectations are now here and price points are now here. And that's a closer gap obviously to Nellies than a caged AG is. And overall we're just happy to see the category move away from caged eggs. So yeah, there's some intrinsic benefit to us and the brands, but at the heart of who we are is animal welfare. So if we can just move away from caged eggs through legislation or through branding, whatever it is, consumer movements, we're willing to take it.
Greg Schönefeld:
The overall hen population in the US is just over 300 million birds, with only around 21 million being organic hens. When you combine free-range, pasture raised and organic hens, they still make up less than one fifth of the entire market. This shows how niche these categories still remain in the broader egg industry. I want your take on the connection between people and food these days. Is there something that... We also talked about COVID, that maybe people got a little more appreciation for food being on their shelves. Is that something you hope to see, maybe more connection between the consumer and farming practices and farmers?
Cameron Whitehead:
I hope so. I think we've been seeing it lately. I think the reversal of the trends that we've been seeing, the prior 50, 60 years was a make it more, make it cheaper. Whether you're talking about wheat and grains or moving on to beef cattle and dairy and into eggs, obviously. I think overall just people are moving away. I think they're realizing the damage that can be done to, not only animal welfare but their local environment, when you have these high density operations. People are just becoming more educated into the risks of over farming, of industrial AG, et cetera.
So I think you're going to see it across all spaces. If you look at some of these awesome brands that are poking up all over the place and you look at their supply chain, almost all of these really cool food brands, they're built around unique small-scale supply chains that are producing a premium product. They have higher animal welfare that have a higher food quality content in them, and they're finding a lot of success. So if the consumer's seeing value in it and these brands are seeing growth, I can't see why the trend wouldn't continue.
Greg Schönefeld:
Can you talk a little bit about consumer fatigue and the halo effect?
Cameron Whitehead:
So consumer fatigue is definitely setting in a lot of spaces of animal welfare. So animal welfare and also food quality content, so all natural, and you see organic and you see cage-free, free-range, pastured, better for you, high in Omega, et cetera. They're being blasted with all these claims nonstop, and it's becoming exhausting, right? You're seeing some successful packaging now punching through with just clean minimal label claims. And I think that's a huge indicator of just consumers are getting fatigued by the amount of label claims they're seeing on package. And then as far as just the halo effect, I think that you see organic and pastured really play in those spaces in eggs. So organic is this halo effect for better for me. "If I get something that's organic, I've solved the meat question, right? I've solved what's better for me." And then with pasture raised, it's "I've solved what's better for the hen, I'm happy with my purchase as a conscious consumer." I think pasture gives that halo effect. It covers your bases.
Greg Schönefeld:
It's interesting you said that maybe there'll be less labels on the packaging, and something that crossed my mind is maybe education's a part of that because it's like the more the consumer knows, maybe the less you have to say.
Cameron Whitehead:
Yeah.
Greg Schönefeld:
Right?
Cameron Whitehead:
Yeah, it is, absolutely. So education can be a small fact sheet on a website somewhere, which can work for some, and also can be on store razors that are on a retail shelf, and through social media content. So we're just trying to make it accessible to the consumer in bite-sized chunks that are easily understandable, and we're not trying to swamp them with too much. It's why we lean into education so hard. You want education to be brought to you to help you make the decision very cleanly and very quickly, and that's where we're pushing.
Greg Schönefeld:
For most of its existence, Pete and Jerry's was a small family egg farm in New Hampshire. On the brink of extinction, they took a pivot into producing organic and free-range eggs, well ahead of the curve. But in hindsight, with perfect timing. Now a network of small family farms, they have developed a diversified model and geographical spread that act as a buffer against supply chain disruptions, offering stability to farmers and retailers alike. But Pete and Jerry's isn't just getting by, they're thriving. They've pushed the envelope on what consumers can expect from high-end eggs, from their bold leap to organic in the 90s to one of the most recognized egg brands in the country.
They're taking a leadership role in the premium egg space, educating consumers along the way. I'd like to thank Cameron for helping educate us today, sharing the Pete and Jerry's story and helping provide some label clarity. Please check back in for more episodes of Eggheads coming this fall. And if you're liking the show, please follow Eggheads on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, Instagram and LinkedIn. And hey, if you're a true egghead, show us some love by dropping a five star rating on your preferred podcast app. We appreciate all your support. Until next time, I'm Greg Schönefeld. I'm curious, Cameron, how do you like your eggs prepared?
Cameron Whitehead:
Oh, I'm fried egg guy for sure. Over easy all day long. I fight the kids over it all day. My wife just throws it up into the air. "How do you want your eggs, guys?" And they're just, who can yell quicker? Because the kids love scrambled unfried eggs through and through.
Greg Schönefeld:
Just keep it simple.
Cameron Whitehead:
Keep it simple. A little salt pepper, and we're good to go.
Greg Schönefeld:
Yeah, I like that.
Cameron Whitehead:
If I can get a double yolker, it's going to be a good day.
Greg Schönefeld:
I've actually never gotten that.
Cameron Whitehead:
Oh no?
Greg Schönefeld:
No, never. And I eat eggs daily.
Cameron Whitehead:
Oh, you got to get the jumbos. We actually just had a viral social media post where someone bought a dozen Pete and Jerry's jumbos and they went 12 for 12 on double yolkers.
Greg Schönefeld:
Oh man, I was just about to joke, when is Pete and Jerry's offering the premium double the extra ultra premium double yolk eggs?
Cameron Whitehead:
It was just like one double yolk or two double yolkers. Three minutes later they're cracking the final one. They're like, "What if it happens?" And 12 double yolkers in a row. So those people are going to have a good month.
Greg Schönefeld:
That's unreal.