Sunny Queen Farms will celebrate 50 years in business this November, with managing director John O’Hara speaking to Food & Drink Business about how the company has diversified with meal solutions for the retail sector, and its ongoing contribution to the $7.4 billion out-of-breakfast market.
Based in Carole Park, Queensland, the Sunny Queens Farms brand is present in supermarkets around the country with its shell eggs and meal solution products.
O’Hara told F&DB it was the company’s approach to value-adding eggs that was a game changer for the business and offers a number of opportunities for the future.
“I’ll have been with Sunny Queen for 18 years now coming up into April and probably what’s helped us over the long-term success is the ability to diversify into a number of channels in sales and markets,” he said.
“When I joined, we were only Queensland-centric, with only a little bit of business out of the state, but now we’re national in all channels of sale. I think, as well, our brand has played an important role – our smiley Sunny the Egg character has more around 280,000 followers, so there’s a consistency of brand approach that people see value in.”
In addition to consumer products, Sunny Queen Farms also supplies its shell eggs to the retail sector, as well as meal solutions in the foodservice market, which now represents around 20 per cent of the business.
Sunny Queen Farms moved into its $40 million production facility and warehouse, where the company was “building a state-of-the-art facility for today and into the future,” said O’Hara. Here, the production of omelettes, fritters, patties, poached eggs, and egg bakes contribute to the ever-growing out-of-home breakfast market, which now equates to $7.4 billion.
In June 2019, the company installed a new custom-designed $800,000 robotics line for omelette production. The engineering has enabled accurate picking and placing of the product, streamlining efficiency.
“We’ve been creating omelettes since around 2005 and we found there was a lot of repetitive strain on our staff to move the omelettes from one line to another, which was a workplace health and safety issue we were trying to see if it could be solved through robotics,” O’Hara told F&DB.
“But it’s taken us around two to three years to get something we believe is workable as when you cook an omelette, it’s quite fragile, so it was important to get the picking and placing right.”
Convenience, portability and snackability were among the key trends in the out-of-home breakfast market O’Hara highlighted, as Sunny Queen Farms “sees an opportunity for eggs to play a greater role than it does in the marketplace so people can consume them on the run”.
Sunny Queen Farms launched its snap-frozen French Toast earlier this year, with further product launches planned for 2020.
“We believe on focusing eggs as being a great source of protein,” said O’Hara. “We’re in the midst of a three-year product pipeline for a range of products people haven’t seen before, so it’s a great opportunity for us show consumers what’s to come.”
Fifty years on, Sunny Queen Farms today turns over $350 million and employs 140 people.
The company was listed as #60 in the F&DB Top 100 in 2018.
