Queensland-based egg producer Sunny Queen was forward-thinking in its approach to free range. And now, with the help of a significant new processing plant, it is breaking new ground in the ready-to-heat category.
John O’Hara’s heard every egg pun there is.
Despite 15 years at the top of Sunny Queen, one of Australia’s most exciting companies in both egg production and ready-to-eat meal solutions, the managing director and chief executive officer is humble about his role.
“I’m a lay-man,” he suggests. “Pardon the pun.”
With a background in sales and marketing in a variety of agribusinesses, O’Hara was deeply involved in the dairy industry, where he learned valuable lessons about the importance of value added products.
“I spent a lot of time in the dairy game, and I saw milk particularly as being an ingredient for other value-added products,” he says.
“When I moved over to eggs, they became for me the last frontier. Not a lot of value-adding has been done for eggs, and yet a lot of people, whether they be home cooks or chefs, use eggs in a whole variety of cooking outside of the straight shell egg. I thought there has to be an opportunity here.”
While there were a couple of products on the market, such as pre-boiled eggs and a scrambled egg mix, the offering was incredibly limited.
“What we had to ask ourselves was whether we’re going to be an egg company, or whether we’re going to be a food company?” O’Hara recalls. “Quite clearly, we saw the opportunity of being a food company through the value-adding of eggs.”
So, the Queensland-based company leased a 200 square-metre kitchen space on the Gold Coast, and began experimenting.
“We started from the ground up. When I started we were just basically selling shell eggs in Queensland, and we’ve just won an interstate contract with a retailer,” said O’Hara.
“When we started producing 120gm omelettes, we literally didn’t have a customer. We thought that we’d better get onto this.”
In the 10 years since, Sunny Queen rapidly began to carve out a niche for itself, particularly in the food service, aged care, airline and hospital segments.
“We had a few learnings along the way, but over time we started to focus in our our customer base that we believed would be most beneficial to our product range, hence we’ve focused a lot of our time and effort on the food service market,” he explains.
“They accept it overseas. But over here, it was a whole new ballgame because I think a lot of people didn’t realise you could freeze eggs and then do what you do with every other product: you put it in the freezer, you bring it back to life, and it tastes fine because the technology in freezing these days is just nothing short of sensational.”
Ready or not?
That resistance to ready-made eggs was definitely a stumbling block to the new product lines.
“The thing that struck me most back then was that a lot of the food service people couldn’t get their head around the fact we were selling a frozen egg product. They said people wouldn’t like a frozen egg product,” says O’Hara.
“We said, well, it’s only frozen to get it through the very large supply change challenge we have in Australia. When you regenerate the product, put it out on the table, it is an omelette. It is a frittata. It is a poached egg or whatever. That was to me, one of the biggest learnings: we needed to educate people about egg products.”
But, thankfully for Sunny Queen, the company has had some cut-through.
Not only is the company expanding its offering overseas, it recently moved into a new 2600 square-metre facility in Ipswich, which it built from the ground up at an estimated cost of $40 million.
“We have everything in the one location including our distribution of both eggs and meal solutions,” says O’Hara.
“We just knew that the volume was going to be out there in terms of the domestic market, and then with the possibility of international expansion. We’re probably doing about a thousand tonne a year, and we’ve got the ability to double that. When you build a facility, you build it with room to grow into, and that’s what we’re currently doing.”
Planting the seeds
O’Hara won’t disclose the specifics of what manufacturing equipment Sunny Queen installed in the Carole Park facility, as there’s proprietary innovation in its processes that would be of interest to competitors. “There are a number of pieces of equipment that make up the IP,” he explains.
“We had a leading European egg manufacturer come to Australia, very keen to understand how we make our poached egg because they couldn’t do it over there, and they’re an extremely large international company.”
He did reveal, however, that given the concerns over food health and safety around, the plant uses a sophisticated cold-chain.
“Our factory is divided into a couple of areas – the high-risk area and the low-risk area,” he says. “Inside the plant we have a positive airflow and we have HEPA filters, and we keep the place relatively free of bacteria. Depending on what area you’re in the temperature varies anything from 12 degrees down to 4 degrees. We have in-lane freezer tunnels that take the product down to minus-18 and then some.”
The growth of Sunny Queen, and its move into international markets, is proving a boon for the local economy.
“When I first joined the company, we had 19 employees, and now we have over 130. This specific factory, overall, we’re now creating over 120 new jobs.
“We’re certainly doing our bit to stimulate the economy in the best way we can.”
A front-runner
Apart from the lead the Sunny Queen brand has taken with value-added ready-to-heat products, it’s also been something of a pioneer when it comes to free-range options.
With the official definition of ‘free-range’ mandating a stocking density of 10,000 hens per square metre, Sunny Queen made the decision that its free-range offering would be well below that.
“Our consumer research, over many years, showed that consumers didn’t really think about density at all.
They cared whether the birds are allowed to go outside and forage, and then be back at night in a safe haven, and that was pretty-much the extent of it.
“But we took a decision to have 1500 birds per hectare, or one bird per six square metres, because we thought that was a general direction the market would take over time.”
Eggs take flight
While Sunny Queen products are now available in every state in Australia, the company’s next target is overseas.
It’s already broken into markets such as Hong Kong, Macau and the Middle East, and is exporting shell eggs to Taiwan – an Australian first.
O’Hara believes that while Australian food products can’t compete on price, it’s their premium identification that is proving to be their biggest strength in Asia.
“I’ve just come back from Macao, and it’s reiterated every time I go over: the food sourcing out of Australia has a reputation, and people are prepared to pay extra money for that security and peace-of-mind” he says.
“In Australia, we have full traceability back to source. Being a farmer-owned organisation, at the end of the day the base product is literally from us, from the farm right through to the factory to the plate.”
New horizons
Back in Australia, the company is still focusing on its core clientele in the food service industry. But, it’s considering stretching its wings, as it were.
“We’ve focused on food service and export, because whilst they’re harder to get to, in terms of servicing physically, the cost of entry there and the risk to investment is a lot lower than in retail,” says O’Hara.
“But we are looking at the retail space. We’ve got a number of concepts we’re reviewing. It’s still early days, but we’d like to think that once the review has taken place, we can do some market research, and look at presenting some of these ideas to retailers for inclusion in their offering.
“At the moment, if you look at what’s being made, probably the main areas are quiches and frittatas.
"That’s an area we’re certainly going to look at, but there are a couple of areas we want to explore. We see some great opportunities.”
